As predicted, the morning dawned overcast and rainy, so we stayed on the barge studying and blogging. At noon, we heard the air raid sirens going off very loudly, and wondered what the hell was going on. And then we remembered our expereince in Damazan some years ago, when we were sitting in a cafe and the same thing happened, and the men at the next table explained that it was just the traditional way of telling workers to stop for lunch! So we stopped work and had some lunch.

In the early afternoon, the rain eased so we went for a walk around the old town (with brollies at the ready!). As we wandered we saw some signs for the "Time Museum", celebrating the history of watch-making in Besançon (being so close to Switzerland, this industrial activity is no great surprise). So we decided to go have a look.

The first thing I noticed when entering the large double doors of the Museum is that you don't enter the building itself; rather, you find yourself in a large cloistered courtyard. The beauty of this was appreciated better from an upper floor where the intricately tiled roof could be better seen.

The museum was filled with all sorts of displays about clocks, watches and time itself, much of which passed over our heads. But for a while we followed a couple of ladies who clearly had worked in one of the manufacturing facilities in the past (most of the assembly workers were female), and they were reminiscing about all sorts of things they saw in the displays.

The museum also had two floors dedicated to a history of Besançon itself, featurung various paintings and tapestries, including this large tagestry showing the Siege of Besançon, after which it finally became part of France. The French troops assembled at the bottom of the tapestry are across the river from the old City, where "new" Besançon is now located.

This section of the Museum also contained a scale model of old Besançon, which showed the Citadel at top-centre, the fortifications around the inside bend of the river, and the star-shaped fortifications on the other side of the river, which we had not fully appreciated before (but which are still there in sections, if you know where to look for them).

As we prepared to leave the Museum, we saw a narrow circular staircase, and so we decided to climb it to see where it led to. And we were glad we did, as it took us up into the tower projecting above the roofline, from which we could look downwards onto a Foucault Pendulum, which was just swinging back and forth. In the time we had available, nothing exciting seemed to be happening, but if we had stayed for a few hours (or days) we would have seen the pendulum ball change the path it was following, just as Foucault had demonstated when he installed the first Foucault pendulum in the Pantheon in Paris in 1851, as an experiment to demonstrate the Earth's rotation.

Eventually we left the Time Museum (having discovered that our tickets would get us into two other museums in Besanćon), and began to wander the streets again in the drizzling rain (which was actually a relief from the heat within the Time Museum). We stopped for a coffee, and remembered too late that Latte and Cappuccino mean very different things in France from what we are used to in Australia!

We wandered back to the boat through the "restaurant street" and just after getting there, the skies opened up with torrential rain. But half an hour later, the sunshine was out, enabling me to get a good sunset shot of the barge, moorings and Conservatorium, under the Citadel.