Every day I'm hustlin'

(click photos to enlarge. they're high quality)

Yesterday was the best travel day ever, probably in my entire life, but I don't like making superlatives without reflection. So just a probably. At 7:30 am, I departed Angers with les filles (Gabrielle, Liana, and Amy) on a charter bus for St. Malo and Mont St. Michel.

My favorite professor (and CIDEF director) M. Melin was our tour narrator, which meant I was vastly amused whenever he'd come over the PA to explain the various cabbage-based crops growing by the highways. Speaking of the highways, I discovered that the French are very fond of roundabouts and vague road signs.

St. Malo

St. Malo is a really old French town, currently a center of maritime commerce and ferry traffic to England. Back in the day, it was a center for naval activity, both for trade to Asia and as a base for French corsairs. The town is completely walled in, and we circled the town by walking on its huge, wide ramparts. Please refrain from dirty sheep jokes. It's soaked in the culture of its departement, Bretagne, and has tons of crepe shops, gallette restaurants, apple-based pastries, beautiful hand-painted ceramics, hand made lace, seafood, and cidre. I think I'd like to visit Bretagne for an extended period of time sometime someday, it's lovely.

I was pumped that we could walk down to the beach from the wall, thus satisfying my desire to see the Atlantic (though we were facing England, not North America) and smell the ocean. The girls and I got our touristy fix by taking lots of pictures and snacking. St. Malo is surrounded by rocky islands way off in the surf, most of those outcrops topped by eerie, box-like forts. It was a photographer's dream, and even though it was cloudy and windy, the water was a beautiful shade of blue-green.

Hopping back on the bus, we headed off to the Mont St. Michel. If you've checked out my other headings on this blog, you know that I have wanted to visit the Mont St. Michel for a long, long time, and would pick it over Paris if I could only choose one. Now that I've been, I think I can say that Paris might be a safer pick in terms of attractions, because the ancient Abbey on top of the mount is only marginally open to visitors, and was rather empty, though I suppose a guided or audio tour would have filled up the space nicely.

 Mont Saint Michel

The Mt. St. Michel itself, as an island, is beautiful and incredible. We saw it from a few miles away from the bus, and it was very boggling to the mind to see a large, purplish pyramid sticking straight up from the flat, coastal landscape. This tiny town (year-round population c.30-40, half of which are monks/nuns) is walled as well, and very, very touristy. M. Melin reassured us to not be dismayed by all the tourist boutiques and cheesy souvenirs, since Mt. St. Michel has been that way for literally hundreds of years, as much of its commerce came from religious pilgrims. I found most of the souvenirs quite charming, myself, and in addition to some postcards for family, I bought two cheap prints to take home.

On the road, I saw some really cool things as well, and the bus-ride itself really added to the trip (well, outside the bus. Inside, I couldn't sleep because of the constant chatter of a group of sorority girls in front of me). In Normandy, I noticed that lots of the older houses had alcoves carved above the front door. Most of these contained statues of Mary, or sometimes of Jesus. In Cancale (Bretagne), the oyster capital of France, the tide varies greatly, and the actual sea is very far from the shore. So the fishermen and oystermen's boats have big tires on them. It's a very strange sight. They looked like tanks crossed with shrimp boats.

We also passed a large tower out the left side of the bus that M. Melin pointed out to us. He said that it was "surrounded on the ground by white." At first I couldn't find it, because it was very far away and I thought that I was looking at reflecting water. Then I thought "oh, I see. It's cotton," because the whole field around the tower was gray-white. I don't know why I thought there'd be cotton in France in February, but M. Melin told us that it was, in fact, an American cemetery. All the white was crosses, each cross for one dead soldier. It was very sobering for me; there was an awful lot of white. I suppose I'll get an even bigger dose of that when we go to Normandy next month.

All in all, I had a fantastic time. I came home completely beat and dying for some American food (all the girls and I want right now is nachos + queso. Be a hero and send us some). I've uploaded close to 90 photos, which you can see on my Facebook, and I'll put a few on this post and under "Faux Pas." Thanks for reading, and God bless you back home in the States!

Leah