Adventures in Normandy

You may remember from a previous post, but in early spring, while some of our dear friends were visiting us from the states, we visited Utah and Omaha Beaches, the American cemetary and the amazing WWII museum in Caen. All of these sites are located in the northeastern pays of France known as Normandy. While that experience was incredibly moving and eye-opening, it also afforded a glimpse at some tremendous landscapes, and I had therefore been eager to return to the vicinity.

Thus, I just returned from a five-day trip through parts of Normandy. Normandy, you may wish to note, is not an area that is especially easy to explore via public transportation. The one day I spent eight hours riding four different trains, two buses, and one taxi to make a trip that ought to have taken about two and half hours in a car can attest to that fact. However, this stringing together of public transportation/wasting hours of time waiting in train stations was the best option for someone like me.

And by "someone like me", I mean someone who does not know how to drive a standard transmissioned car (renting an automatic is about three times more expensive and thus, on principle alone, ridiculous) and who also unfailingly believes that when the GPS lady says, in her crisp and precise language, to bear right in 300 meters, I am sure what she really means is that I must turn right immediately. Even if there is no right to be had.

Cut to me panicking, frantically trying to figure out how to turn the hazard lights on, usually only succeeding in making the windshield wipers go full tilt, sweating, and crying because the "stupid GPS lady" made me lost.

In any case, all this public transport may have resulted in my over-meeting my yearly quota for vending machine coffee and in my having to share a bench (or six) too many with local riff-raff, but at least I saved myself quite a bit of both stress and gas money (all that getting lost/being lead astray by the GPS lady can really drain the tank). And--bonus alert--I also saved Europcar from having to replace a transmission on one of their rental Renaults. Well, hello silver lining!

So this time around in Normandy, I went to Honfleur, the coastal town that is known by some as the "birthplace of impressionism", with a good friend of mine. I then travelled on to St. Malo and Le Mont St. Michel solo. Honfleur is an adorable little harbor town, and we did what I imagine most people do whilst there: ate seafood, drank wine, walked around the harbor and the surrounding hills, and relaxed.

Oh, and I took a bunch of photographs of cows. Mostly because they were there, but also because they seemed to enjoy posing.

Despite its reputation, there are no impressionist museums in Honfleur, nor many art galleries of any sort, nor anyone sitting around painting the harbor. If you were hoping I would follow up the mentioning of the town's venerable nickname with proof as to its deservedness, I am sorry to disappoint you.

We ate an especially delicious meal one night at a place called "Le P'tit Mareyeur," which is not situated on the overly touristy, over-priced old harbor, but is only about two minutes away. The menu boasts that the staff is not just a bunch of 25 year olds and that it is a serious, family-run, business. I see nothing wrong with 25-year-old servers, especially since I was one, but I see their point. The food was extraordinary--we both had seafood--exquisitely presented, and accompanied by a delicious Sancerre that was crisp and fruity and fantastic. I could go into the details of our dishes, but I have so much confidence that you would absolutely adore your meal, that I will just send you there with no hesitation.

That is, if you happen to be planning a trip to Honfleur; if you are only spending a weekend in Paris, it would be stupidly out of the way to go there for dinner. But if you do happen to be planning a visit to Normandy, I would definitely recommend you stop in this sweet little place for a day or two, and try that particular resto for a meal.

Moving on...during the solo portion of my trip, three major things transpired. One involves an egg, one involves manipulation by bus, and one involves a humanistic tragedy. The latter two are somewhat linked.

I will preface the details to the aforementioned by stating that St. Malo is an incredible place. It is a walled city, located on the coast, essentially on the line between the Normandy and Brittany regions of France. It is so charming you almost cannot stand it. I could stand it, and you could too for that matter, but it is fun to be extreme at times. The beaches just outside the city walls are gorgeous---the color of the water is a very light aquamarine. If you go there, you might want to eat a crepe, a regional pastry treat called a ker-y-pom, and most definitely indulge in some seafood.

Now about my three events.

#1: The egg. I ate breakfast at my hotel only because it was POURING rain outside and wandering the streets in search of food under such climatically disastrous conditions seemed a self-masochistic choice. Yes, even more so than spending 12 euro on a hotel breakfast that, at best, could be described as "fine." So at this "fine" breakfast, they had this egg tree sitting on the table, next to the toaster, a large panier of bread, and a basket of jams. There were eggs all perched into this little tree, and I assumed that they were hard-boiled.

The fact that there was a vat of bubbling water on that same table did not really strike me as odd, mostly because barely anything strikes me as odd these days. I did make a mental note that a cauldron of openly boiling water would never fly at a United States breakfast bar. Umm, can anyone say lawsuit?

As it happens, the purpose of the boiling water was not purely decorative. I found this factoid out when I sat back at my table and cracked my egg on the side of the plate only to find out that it was not hard-boiled at all. It was just raw. Yup, raw.

There I sat, with a raw egg all over my table.

There was a table of three French ladies sitting in front of me and they all sort of turned and ogled me. They made disgusted faces and glared at me as though I had a communicable disease and was happily sneezing all over their food. It was really comforting, that Frenchie support.

I think that this sort of scenario would actually have been really funny had I not been alone. Alone it was mortifying. Especially when the waitress came by my table, stared at the eggy mess, and immediately turned around to clear an already entirely cleared table.

Such a boost to self-esteem, that "fine" breakfast was.

#2: Manipulation by bus. Post-eggy breakfast disaster, I took a bus to see Le Mont St. Michel, a famous abby that was first established in the 8th century, and is a symbol of fortitude and natural beauty. It has been a site for religous pilgrimages for almost as long as it has existed and has been listed as a UNESCO world heritage site since the 1970's. Anyway, it is pretty famous, so you might want to look it up and be wowed by the pictures.

There are two buses per day that travel from St. Malo to Le Mont St. Michel. One leaves at 9.30 in the morning and the other at 9.50. Both get you to the Mont around 11. In the afternoon, one return bus picks you up at 3.50 and the other at 4 pm.

I have no idea why these buses are so close together in terms of their time tables, but the world is not a sensical place, so whatever. And, in case your math is a bit slow: no matter how you shake the dice, if you are traveling by bus, then you are required to stay at Le Mont for five hours.

Five hours is too much time when it takes less than 1.5 hours to thoroughly tour the abbey, and 30 minutes to fully circumnavigate the ramparts. Add in lunch, and the whole affair takes 3.5 hours. MAX.

What does one do for the remaining 1.5 hours? Well if one is me, then one spends the majority of the time squeezing down the streets, being jostled between the various Japanese tour groups and German tourists, drinking botttled water that costs as much as a down payment on a house, and marveling at all the overpriced crap-tastic jumk in all the souvenir shops. And then one becomes a bit incensed thinking about the marketing ploy into which one was so blatantly ensnared: that bus KNEW I would have time to "kill". Thus, the whole enterprise is engineered to snag tourist dollars by essentially forcing us poor bus travelers to buy chotchkes since we have nothing else to do with our time besides trying to avoid being stabbed in the toe by German walking sticks. Manipulation by bus: there you have it.

#3 Humanistic Tragedy: So Le Mont St. Michel is beyond beautiful in photos and in theory. Really captivating, majestic, ethereal. But then the reality of it is a parking lot with hundreds of HUGE tour buses, so many shops selling all overpriced junk, restaurants serving food that ranges from fried ick to decent fare, and all those PEOPLE. Good golly. It could have been amazing, instead it was a humanistic tragedy.

I did see some cows on the bus ride back though. You know me: always a silver lining.