Normandy!

I spent this past weekend on a whirlwind tour of Normandy and Bretagne (which I guess is Brittany in English), and may or may not have decided that my future home lies in the northwest of France. Here are some things they have in said region:

• Cows
• Farms
  
• Crêpes
  
• Apples
• which means cider
• and Calvados
• and Calvados ICE CREAM
  
• The Ocean (as seen above)
• which means seafood
• and also beaches

The list continues. Of course, it was only a weekend, so I shouldn't be jumping to such conclusions, but I liked it a lot.
Although my favorite part of the trip, quite frankly, was goûter-ing regional specialites, we also went to important historical sights. At left is Omaha Beach, site of the major American landing on D-Day. That sculpture is entitled "Wings of Liberty." It was really odd to be in the presence of such an American landmark... in France. Even more odd was that when we visited the American Cemetary above Omaha Beach, most of the tourists there were French... especially odd because most of the French tourism sites I've visited so far have been packed with Americans.

The most striking D-Day monument/site we visited was Pointe du Hoc, site of German gunner "emplacements" (thank you, Wikipedia) which the US Army bombed the bejeesus out of. No statues, no placards -- just huge holes in the ground and crumbling cement bunkers filled with rubble and tangled metal. It was impossible not to imagine what it must have felt like to be there when the bombs were dropping, even sixty years later. I'm also reading a book about World War I for one of my classes, so I've been thinking about the horrors of war a lot anyway, but this was a really striking illustration of the actual physical effects of heavy artillery. Despite all the heavy thoughts, the place was strikingly beautiful -- so green, as I've always imagined Ireland to be, with cliffs dropping dramatically down to the ocean. Even the bomb craters were beautiful, filled in with grass as they are -- it, to be quite (and nerdily) frank, reminded me a lot of the place where the Hobbits live in the Lord of the Rings movies.

The next day, we visited Mont St. Michel, which is, I think, a still-functional abbey atop a rocky tidal island (Wikipedia again) on the border of Normandy and Brittany. It is striking and majestic and beautiful and I think that I would probably move to the 13th century, get a sex change, and become a monk if I could live there. Most of the top part is the abbey and abbatial church (that's the spire), while the lower part of the rock is touristy little shops, etc. The kicker, however (as though dramatic Romanesque/Gothic architecture and 8 hours of prayer a day aren't enough to convince me to be a 13th century French monk), is the view. The rock is situated on a tidal plain overlooking some river (the Couesnon, apparently) where it flows into the Channel. Time was, the island used to be completely cut off at high tide, but they've fixed that problem now (got to keep those tour buses a-rollin'). Regardless, there's still very dramatic tidal change and, when the tide is out, quicksand! It's all gorgeous -- when we saw it, early in the morning, the sand was sparkling in the sun and the river snaking silver through it all.
















Gorgeous.

We finished it all off with a stop at St. Malo, a walled medieval/resort city on the ocean, for lunch (moules frites for me [that's mussels 'n' french fries] with a Breton caramel crepe afterwards [they make their caramel with salty butter, which is, I guess, distinctive. I just know it was delicious.]) and then took the TGV back to Paris. A great weekend, but even greater was the feeling I had coming up out of the metro, c'est à dire coming home. I may be settling into this thing after all.