PART THE SECOND: Normandy

This part is also known as: The World is a Really, Really Small Place.

A few weeks ago I took a long weekend (not too hard to do, since I don’t have Friday classes) and went to northern France with two friends, Anne and Benjamin. We left Lyon late Thursday morning and went to Rouen, which is a nice city I wish I’d seen more of. When we got there we went and saw the Cathedral (which, for you art buffs, is in fact the cathedral Van Gogh painted so many times. Or maybe it was Monet. I don’t remember. But my art-history-major friend was really excited that we saw it), and then went to a little café that served the most incredible hot chocolate I’ve ever had. Mine had coconut in it and it was delicious, but Anne got caramel, and it was the consistency of pudding. I felt like I was getting diabetes just looking at it.

All we had time to do that night was find our hotel. We successfully spoke French to the person at the desk, but as soon as she heard us speaking English to each other she switched to English. Honestly, the sheer number of people who speak perfect English in France never fails to make me feel like my French is terrible. Then again, some of them go out of their way to make you feel like you speak terrible French, so there you go.

Friday morning we got up really, really early to get the train to Caen. Caen, just to be clear, is a city in northern France and is not to be confused with Cannes, which is where the film festival takes place. William the Conqueror used to live in Caen, and part of his château is still there, but alas, we only saw the outside of it. There is also the Memorial Museum, which is really what we went for. It’s pretty extensive and covers World War I through the Cold War, with an emphasis on WWII and D-Day, of course. While we were there we watched a movie about D-Day that had some pretty unbelievable footage from the landing itself- we could not figure out how someone had taken a video of the battle from the air while in a plane flying parallel to the beach, but someone did. It was good to see that right before we left, because our next stop was Bayeux, our jumping-off point for the D-Day beaches. When we got to Bayeux the sun was shining and it was a gorgeous day, which I was glad of. Benjamin pointed out, though, that maybe it would have been more appropriate for it to be a really grim, dark, cloudy day. He was right, but I was still glad it was sunny for going to the beaches.

We ended up having to take a taxi to Omaha Beach because the one and only bus there had left at noon that day. When we got there we headed down to where you could look out at the beach, and then we walked down onto the beach itself. Benjamin and I took off our shoes and walked around barefoot, and it was glorious.

Our first look at the ocean as we were getting there:

The beach itself:

After that we walked back up the hill to the American Cemetery. The slope is surprisingly steep, and we were kind of amazed (or at least I was) that anyone managed to fight up it. You really get a new respect for the soldiers who fought there when you see the place and realize just how insanely hard it must have been.

The cemetery itself is beautiful and heart wrenching. There’s a memorial at one end of it, and then just rows and rows of white crosses, each with a name, a company, and a date inscribed on it. We saw what seemed to be a large family gathered at one of the plots, and later we saw the flag being lowered and folded up, probably to be given to that family. One of the other students in Lyon went on behalf of a family friend whose uncle is buried there, and they gave her a flag to take home to his family, so that’s why we figured that’s what was happening.

The memorial:

Crosses:

After getting back to Bayeux, we caught the train to Pontorson, which is the closest town to Mont St. Michel, our next destination. While we were waiting for the train we met a group of American students who, like us, are in France for the semester. We started asking the requisite questions about what school they were from and what they were studying, and come to find out, they go to school with one of my best friends and one of them had been my friend’s little sister’s camp counselor. Who would have possibly thought that people from my friend’s little college in Arkansas would be on the same train as me in a little town in northern France? Not only that, but they were staying in the exact same hostel that we were. It’s a small, small world.

When we got to Pontorson, our ride to the hostel was waiting for us. His name was Steve and he was British, and he and his wife run the hostel. He picked us up in a Land Rover, and it was hilarious trying to fit eight people and their stuff in that thing. When we got there, the three of us were so exhausted that we went right to sleep.

Here’s a picture of our adorable hostel:

And the Land Rover:

Steve also gave us a ride to the Mont St. Michel the next morning. We stopped at a grocery store on the way and bought bread and cheese and other foodstuffs, because we didn’t want to have to buy the ridiculously expensive food inside the Mont.

To get to Mont St. Michel you have to cross a causeway that separates it from the mainland. Before they built it up and made it an actual road, pilgrims crossed the causeway to get to the Mont, and there was always the danger of being swept away by the tide or getting caught in quicksand. Now, though, the causeway is never covered, even at high tide, and the only quicksand is around the Mont itself.

As we were coming up to the city there were sheep in the road:

Look how gorgeous this place is:

We had a great time at Mont St. Michel. Somewhere in the course of the day we discovered that we all loved the Princess Bride and Narnia, so there were C.S. Lewis and Princess Bride references being thrown around left and right. I had also realized (and so had John, one of the other students) that in the Lord of the Rings movies, they modeled Minas Tirith after Mont St. Michel. So as I told my brother John, I basically went to Middle Earth that weekend. Amazing.

The lower parts of the city are full of shops and tourist traps, so we didn’t stay there long. The city itself is beautiful, and we ate our lunch outside in one of the gardens. Then we headed up to the chapel for the noon Mass, which was wonderful. I was surprised at how much I recognized, but maybe I shouldn’t have been, because I knew that Catholics and Anglicans use much of the same liturgy. We sang the psalms, which was a new experience for everyone, especially since they were in French.

After Mass, we split up- a few of the girls wanted to go to the museums, and Anne and Benjamin just wanted to explore, and I wanted to see the rest of the Abbey and the Chapel. So I did that, and it was gorgeous. There were a lot of people there, but they were mostly with tour groups so I was able to avoid them for the most part. There are some beautiful gardens in the Abbey and the view was amazing.

Alas, we had to leave eventually, but we were actually glad that we left when we did because it had started raining pretty hard. The Harding students were headed back to Reims that night, and Anne and Benjamin were going to Paris, but I was taking the night train back to Lyon. We parted with hugs and promised to friend each other on Facebook (oh, Facebook) and headed our separate ways.

The night train was… an experience. It left from Rennes (not Reims, which is the other direction), so I had to take one train to Rennes and then get on the night train. While I was waiting at the station, there was a huge group of seven- or eight-year-olds on the platform, and their parents were up above us waving goodbye. Some of them (the kids, not the parents) were crying, and they were clearly going on their first big trip without their parents. I found out later that they were going on a ski trip. They were pretty adorable.

So. The night train. Twelve hours to get from Rennes to Lyon. For comparison, it takes two hours to take the bullet train from Lyon to Paris, so I knew that this train must go really slow and/or make a lot of stops. It ended up being both.

Anyway. When I’d bought my tickets there had been two options for seating, and I hadn’t really been able to figure out the difference, so I had picked the one that was 20 euros cheaper. When I got on the train I discovered the difference: the more expensive ticket was in the sleeping cars and you had a bed. I was in the cars where you get a reclining seat. It wasn’t too horrible- I sleep in cars all the time when I travel. But usually in cars you can curl up or stretch out or do any number of things to find a comfortable position that you just can’t do on a train with other people. So I didn’t really sleep very well.

There was a girls’ soccer team on the same train as me, and when they got on you could tell they were on their way home from a tournament or something, because they had trophies and were wearing warm-ups. It didn’t take long to realize that they weren’t just a girls’ soccer team, though, they were a girls’ deaf soccer team. They talked almost the whole night, but it didn’t matter because nobody could hear them. Haha. No, seriously, I thought it was pretty cool.

After a long night in the train I finally got back into Lyon early Sunday morning. Usually I walk home from the train station but I was so incredibly tired that I took the metro. When I came up from the metro I found myself in the middle of what would be the market later that morning. It was cool to see it in the process of setting up, and to see the city so sleepy and quiet. I got home and slept until one-thirty, when my host mom knocked on my door and woke me up, because she hadn’t heard me come in and thought maybe I had missed my train and hadn’t come home. And there end my adventures in Normandy.