“The supreme moments of travel are born of beauty and strangeness in equal parts; the first panders to the senses, the second to mind.” –Robert Bryant

Oh, this weekend! How is it possible that each one gets better and better? I went to Normandy and Brittany with the Accent Center. (Translation: 40 students and one annoying chaperone on a charter bus.) To be honest, I wasn’t that excited about going beforehand, but it was one of the best weekends I’ve ever had. We left Paris really early on Friday morning. Our first stop was the Peace Memorial/Museum in Caen, as a sort of introduction to D-Day before we went to the landing beaches. The Peace Museum, ironically enough, was all about war – not really my cup of tea, but all I could think of was how much my Dad would like it! It did, however, put D-Day in perspective, since I didn’t really know that much about it beforehand. I realized how absolutely terrifying it must have been – I’m pretty sure I would have started crying and refused to get out of the boat and go on the beach, were I in that situation. After visiting the museum, we got back on the bus and drove to the American cemetery, which overlooks Omaha Beach, one of the major landing beaches on D-Day.
The American cemetery (which is actually American territory, donated to us by France) was very pretty, but very similar to Arlington National Cemetery in DC (lots of white crosses, etc.) It was neat how it overlooked Omaha Beach, though. I’m sure it is very moving for people with relatives who are either buried there or participated in D-Day. So, that was Normandy.
After the D-Day stuff, things got fun. We drove to Saint Malo, this tiny town in Brittany right on the coast. Oh, how I adore Saint Malo! It was unlike any place I’ve ever been. It is a medieval town surrounded by ramparts (big walls). It’s chock-full of quaint, twisty streets, and lots of anchor memorabilia! (An anchor is my sorority’s symbol, for those who don’t know…) I could go on and on about how much I love the town – it is so beautiful, because it is right on the beach, and you can basically walk all the way around the town on the ramparts which give you a fabulous view.
Anyway, we found out that they ran out of room at the hotel where all the Accent students were supposed to stay, so the AU students were told we would be staying in a different hotel around the corner. (There were several different universities participating in this trip through Accent, and there were seven of us from AU.) We totally lucked out! Our hotel was so nice – the rooms were really big (for a French hotel) and it was really clean and modern, with a fabulous breakfast in the morning!
So, we were given free time once we got to St. Malo. We (the AU students) went to a market around the corner from our hotel and bought bottles of wine, then went on the beach and watched the sunset and enjoyed the wine. It was sublime – one of those one-of-a-kind moments which nevertheless happen so often here! After a long time on the beach and a lot of wine, we went to a seafood restaurant, one of about fifteen on a single street. The Brittany region is known for their seafood and their galettes (buckwheat crepes filled with anything you can imagine.)
The next day, we went to Dinan, another medieval town, even tinier than St. Malo. It was so cool! There was this one really picturesque street lined with beautiful old buildings and shops – honestly, I felt like I was on a movie set. It was so quaint! We lunched in Dinan, then headed back to Saint Malo to play. When we got back, we walked around the village and did some shopping (again, lots of anchor stuff – I was in heaven!). After shopping, my friends and I went back to the beach and walked over to this island called Le Grand Bé. It’s a very, very tiny island, and when the tide is low you can walk on a narrow pathway from the beach at St. Malo over to it, but you have to be really careful to watch the tide, because it comes in so fast that you can get stranded! (Apparently this happened a couple of years ago to a few Accent students and they had to be rescued by the Coastguard.) Anyway, this island is really cool because you can climb it and get a great view of the ocean and St. Malo. Also, the author Chateaubriand is buried at the tippy top. (He was born in St. Malo and he requested to be buried on Le Grand Bé because he wanted to be “between the ocean and the heavens.” Honestly, his final resting place is as beautiful as he made it sound.) There were wild blackberries on the island, too, that we picked and ate – so cool.
That night, we went out to dinner in St. Malo and went and bought wine (it’s exciting to be legal!) and went to the ramparts. We drank the wine and listened to the ocean and talked nonsense and it was amazing. We then tried to go to a karaoke bar and were quite pissed off when they told us the machine was broken. (I’m pretty sure they just didn’t want to hear a bunch of tipsy Americans singing Journey’s Greatest Hits.) We ended up going to the other hotel where the rest of the Accent students were staying, because it had a bar with (gasp!) a bartender who loved Americans. It was a great night.
The next day we got up horrifically early and left St. Malo (tear) to go and visit Mont St. Michel. Mont St. Michel was, in a word, unreal. If you don’t know what it is, you must look at pictures on the Internet, but basically it’s an island with a huge beautiful monastery at the top. The site dates back until something like the 700s, and it is one of the most beautiful places ever! My only complaint was that I didn’t get to spend enough time there – we had to take a guided tour of the monastery which lasted an hour, and then they only gave us half an hour for lunch. It was pretty sad – the tour was interesting enough I guess, but I would have much rather have had time to explore it myself. There’s also a village on the island that surrounds the monastery, and we only had time to walk through it on our way back to the bus. Sad day. But, all in all, I’m so glad I at least got to see it, because it is truly magnificent.
Here are some cool things about Mont St. Michel, though, to prove to you that I do actually learn things here and that I do more than just drink a lot of wine:
-The Mont St. Michel was built after the archangel Michael appeared to the Bishop of Avranches (a nearby town) three times in a dream, asking him to construct a pilgrimage site on the top of the island. The first two times, the bishop figured it was just a dream and not a vision, but in the third dream, Saint Michael directed a beam of light at the skull of the bishop. When the bishop woke up, he could feel a hole under the skin on his skull where the beam of light had been pointed. The bishop took the hint, and a grotto for the veneration of St. Michael was built on top of the island shortly thereafter.
(They actually still have the skull of the bishop with the hole in it, in a museum in Avranches.)
-In the Middle Ages, Mont St. Michel was a huge pilgrimage site – people would leave their homes and their families and travel on foot for months and months just to have a chance to worship there. Over hundreds of years it grew in size to become a giant Benedictine monastery.
-Mont St. Michel is really only an island when the tide comes in, but it comes in so fast that pilgrims used to say it came at “the speed of a galloping horse.” (It really only moves at about two miles per hour. However, if you were a pilgrim walking to the island, you’d have to time your walk exactly right to avoid drowning. Even then, when the tide is out, the island is surrounded by quicksand, which apparently actually is deadly. I thought it might just suck your leg under a little, no big deal, but if you step in it you can actually be swallowed whole and suffocate. Fun. Needless to say, I stuck to the paved footpath!)
Anyway, after Mont St. Michel, we got back on the bus and made the six hour drive back to Paris. I’m so sad the weekend is over!