This past weekend we had our first group excursion to the region of Normandy! Because I like lists, and you like quick reading (quick...not short), I'm going to summarize this trip with "Highlights" and "Not-so-Lights" of the weekend. Here we go:
Normandy Highlights!
- Landscape= beautiful. We took the train friday morning and countryside is gorgeous. Its rolling hills, with great cypress trees (I just looked this up, i love them) lining the fields and from time to time there are quaint, old stone, farming villages.
-Food=scrumptious. Throughout this wonderful, rural Normandy are COWS! Therefore, lots of good butter and cheese! Specifically Camembert, creamy and mild. Yum yum yum. There
were brown cows, black and white cows, brown and white cows, cream colored cows All kinds. Gotta love'em. They make all that great dairy food that keeps us strong and healthy. There are also lots of apple orchards, so alcoholic cider is a popular item and
an apple liqueur called calvados which I enjoyed in the form of a tasty chocolate called "Une Vraie Normande".
- William the Conqueror: Our first day in the city of Caen, we visited an old abbey built in the 11th century (its been renovated many times of course) by this man. He built an abbey for men and one for women in the city of Caen, back in the day, to please the Pope to gain approval of his marriage. Anyway long story short William was a great ruler who 'conquered'
and ruled over England for a time. A good dude in the history of France's power. In this beautiful abbey,
there were staircases that were engineered and built without mortar and simple held together by the weight of gravity. Smarties. There was also a very humorous and frightening wax sculpture of him, for which they referenced Charles Heston's face, and for which Dior designed his costume. LoL... wow. All for good ol' Willy. Also attributed to William the Conqueror, in the city Bayeux, was a 203 foot long, intricately embroidered tapestry. It was made to recount the story of how he came to power and his triumph over the english. It's amazing how this tapestry has survived 1,000 years!!! That's some seamstressing skill.
-A long walk on the beach. We visited Omaha Beach which is now quite beautiful after having recovered from the atrocities of D-day. Most of us took off our shoes. It felt good to let our feet squish in the sand after all the sidewalks.
Normandy...not-so-lights....
This trip helped me grasp the impact of the utter destruction of WWII. So while the things on this list provided enlightenment (they could be considered 'educational' highlights), my overall response was not a positive one.
-The Peace Memorial: This museum was extremely well done. The visitors walk through the chronological progression of WWII beginning in preliminary causes and finishing with the impact. There were definitely some creepy Nazi images and some startling memories from the Holocaust. There was even a section containing saved letter from soldiers to their families. Overall the memorial evoked a feeling of sorrow. War is a terrible thing.
-The Cemeteries: We stopped at the American-french cemetery near Omaha beach
(very beautifully done). However, the overall feel of patriotism they tried to create didn't really help me overcome the feeling of loss. It was so striking to see all the thousands of graves of the soldiers. We also visited a german cemetery on french soil... which I found odd. The atmosphere of this cemetery was very different, very somber. The germans were not permitted to have white gravestones like the allies, they had to be darkly colored.
-Le Point Du Hoc: The french kept this battle site as it was so that generations today can see the damage done by militant battle. Even the original barbwire had been left. We were also able to go inside the german bunkers.
-Le Havre: This was a sad industrial port town. It was a gray, rainy sunday when we visited and the town was practically abandoned. We drove over a really sweet bridge on our way in, but the entire time we were staring out the bus windows at factories and smoke stacks. Le Havre was about 85% destroyed by WWII and the reconstruction had to be executed quickly in order to rehouse all the citizens left homeless. To re-plan the city, they hired an architect that was very fond of concrete...yuck. So I guess not every city in France is romantically beautiful. (Maybe it had been before it was destroyed by the violence of war, I think that was the point in taking us there to see it?) We did visit an Impressionism museum there that had a lot of Boudin (Monets, friend, teacher and inspiration) paintings which was kind of a Le Havre 'highlight'.
So Folks, that's my weekend in Normandy in a nutshell. One can take a lot in in a three day weekend trip!
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