Cognac

Cognac was a bit of a strange town.  It had a great pedestrianized downtown but there were hardly any people around and almost no restaurants.

After our Martell tour we were hungry, since we had only eaten a small lunch before leaving La Rochelle.  There were lots of hair salons, and we stumbled upon a moving company using a ladder elevator to move someone's belongings out the window, but it took a while for us to find Place Francois Ier, where there were a couple brasseries.

Ladder elevator

Usually brasseries stay open between lunch and dinner and serve food all day.  But the brasserie we found stopped serving food at 4.  It was now 5:30.  :(

We were about to leave, then A had the brilliant idea to ask the waitress if it would be ok to get a take-out sandwich from next door and eat it while drinking beers at the brasserie... problem solved.

Our sandwich attracted the attention of a very persistent bee.

Following our snack and drinks we discovered that the few restaurants in Cognac don't even open until 7 or 7:30 pm.  So we wandered the town until 7:30 and were still the only people in the restaurant.  The restaurant, "Le Cellier" was delicious though.  We had a very yummy scallop casserole that came inside a "purse"

The next day, A decided to get her hair cut, since we had seen so many hair salons in town.  She had been growing her hair out for a year for the wedding and was now sick of it being so long.  So we tried several salons, but all were booked for the remaining 24 hours we had in Cognac.  

We found out from the tourist office that the Remy Martin distillery had a tour in English at 11:30 and that Hennessy had a tour in English at 1:30, so we signed up for both of those.  With some time to kill until our first distillery tour, we decided to try washing our clothes in the sink for the first time (we had been lucky in Airvault and the owner of our B&B let us use her washing machine).  We brought packets of Woolite for this purpose, but quickly learned that one packet did not go very far.  The water turned surprisingly dirty though so it seems we got our clothes at least somewhat cleaner.

We decided that for the rest of the trip, we should try to find laundromats whenever possible, and save handwashing for either single items or when we're desperate.

After the tours at Remy Martin and Hennessy (which we will describe in the next post), it was only mid-afternoon and A still really wanted to get her hair cut.  We tried one last salon, which seemed kind of like the SuperCuts of France, and "voila!" they did not take appointments.  So after a 30 min wait, A got her hair cut for only 20 Euros.

A's new haircut in front of the salon

With some time to kill before dinner we wandered around Cognac some more and discovered a nice little park.

A with a grotto

C with a tower

weird chickens with furry feet

A with a sculpture of glass bottles

 We then found a pleasantly busy wine bar for dinner after having waited until 8:30 to go out.