Mont St. Michel, Part Deux

Legend says that Michael the Archangel instructed St. Aubert to build a church on the island where Mont St. Michel Abbey is now located. Hence the name and hence the statue.

St. Michel

This is a small part of the Grand Hall. At one time it was painted and decorated quite elaborately for guests to the abbey. The fireplaces are huge. They're fun to stand in.

This is a monk wheel, like a gerbil wheel. It's a human-powered way to pull a sledge up and down from the abbey.

This is a view from the monk wheel room out to the flats around the island.

I always love cloisters.

This is the B&B about 20 minutes from Mont St. Michel where Kirsten and I stayed. The owners were British and the community is a little English stronghold. We ate at an English pub the night we stayed there.

My Favorite Part of Edinburgh Castle

The historical exhibit about the Honours, the Scottish crown jewels, is very good and takes approximately five billion years to peruse with all the crowds of people frantic to see the goods. So, I was there yesterday and a group of little Scottish boys (probably 9-years-old) came into the actual chamber with the jewels right after I did and had this conversation with the kilted guard who looked pained to be working there (imagine this all in a Scottish accent--it's better that way):

Little Boy: What's this? (bear in mind that the exhibit ABOUT the jewels and Stone of Scone that precedes the actual artifacts is VERY long)

Long-Suffering Guard: That's the Stone of Destiny.

Little Boy: Oh. (pause) Are there spirits in the castle?

Long-Suffering Guard: Don' know. None that I've seen.

Little Boy: Do you think the spirits come out at night?

Long-Suffering Guard: They could do.

Little Boy: And haunt people?

And that's when I escaped the jewel chamber, but I left deeply amused.

Glastonbury, Wells and Portsmouth

Wednesday we visited Glastonbury and Wells. Glastonbury is home to the Tor, a large, mystical hill that some people believe was King Arthur's Avalon. Long ago it was an island with an abbey on its shores and local legend claims that Christianity was brought there by Joseph of Arimathaea. Monks at the abbey purportedly found the body of King Arthur on their land, but that may have been a publicity stunt to bring money to the institution. The abbey was the second largest in Britain in the early 1500s (after Westminster) but Henry VIII had it destroyed when he broke with the Catholic Church. The abbot was taken to the top of the Tor and killed, his head was posted outside the remains of the abbey, and his drawn and quartered body was given to Anglican churches in Somerset. The abbot's kitchen is the only building on the property that remained intact (monks couldn't worship there and there was no lead in the ceiling to be stolen) and that is where I made bread with a darling fake monk. The Coordinatrix took a video of it, but I haven't yet decided if she's allowed to post it. Too bad we can't cut me out of it and just show the cute British monk boy.

Abbey Ruins

It was pouring (England, why you gotta be that way?)

Lady Chapel Ruins

Wells Cathedral may have just become my favorite cathedral. It's so beautiful inside! Go look it up online, because I don't have access to any of the photos of it right now.

Yesterday we drove to Portsmouth on the southern coast. It's the home of Admiral Nelson's HMS Victory, the Royal Naval Museum, and other sea-lover attractions. Ships are really big. I only got us lost twice on yesterday's journey, but one of those detours involved a trip through Limpley Stoke, a village with the narrowest streets I have EVER seen.

Tomorrow AandA go home, the Coordinatrix and I go to the Lake District for two nights, and then we join our good friend Pinchy in Scotland for two weeks.

We Should Have Brought Enzo to England

We rented a car on Monday. The Coordinatrix is the designated driver and I am the designated navigator. The Coordinatrix is better at her job than I am. It's a good thing she's so even-tempered, because driving British-style is tricksy, particularly since we were upgraded to an Audi that opens with one of those fancy button clicky deals. The button in our clicky thing is dead, though, so we have to use the KEY and if we use the KEY, the car alarm goes off if the ignition isn't turned on within 15 seconds. Brilliant, right? It took us three car alarm incidents before we pulled out the manual and figured that one out.

Monday we went to Wales. The sun was shining! First we went to Tintern Abbey, my new favorite place. It's a fairly impressive ruin from the outside.


The inside, though, is so hauntingly beautiful. There's something about the fact that is a ruin, that the roof is gone and the outside is covered in lichen, that make the beautiful, airy interior with its grass floor even more remarkable.





After Tintern Abbey we visited a Welsh open-air folk-life museum. There was a castle and gardens and forty other buildings transplanted from around Wales, including a cock-fighting arena (the animal competitors wore spurs and magic charms). My favorite part of the castle was this bushy plant in the rose garden. It's a secret room.



If I lived there, I would spend all my time in the bush. And I would wear makeup and fix my hair if I were going to have my picture taken coming out of the bush, which I did not do here. [Note: I always put my sunglasses up on my head like that and then my curls wrap around the glasses and I have to spend several minutes pulling my hair out of the glasses. I'll be bald if I keep it up.]



And then we got trapped in Cardiff, because I'm not such a good navigator and it was rush hour and British roundabouts are rubbish. We did eventually escape and made our way to Caerphilly to eat dinner in sight of the castle, Britain's second largest after Windsor. Word on the street is that it's haunted.

Why Didn't I Bring Jeans?

We are in London and we are cold.

We've been having long days and late nights. We ventured into the city for Bastille Day in Paris and watched the fireworks at the Eiffel Tower. We strategically positioned ourselves on the fringes of a crowd and had our path to the metro charted out before the fireworks began. We left a little early and got back to our hotel around midnight. Enzo drove us to Calais in the morning, we took a ferry to Dover, arrived in London by bus, and then the Coordinatrix and AandA and I took the tube to the city and got the last four tickets to Les Miserables (it seemed like the appropriate show to see considering it was the day after Bastille Day). I blame the two late nights for my extreme tiredness yesterday, which I believe is how I ended up in the men's restroom at the British Library. The man in there using the facilities seemed undisturbed by my appearance and assured me not to worry about it, but I was still a tiny bit mortified and decided I needed a nap before more adventuring in the city.

My two new London loves:
1. One pound (price, not weight) sushi from Sainsbury's (grocery store)--cheap and lovely (which is not to say that it's going to replace Thornton's chocolate as my treat of choice in England).
2. Mock the Week--A British TV show that reminds me of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me

We're going to hear a performance of the Mozart Requiem at St. Martin-in-the-Fields tonight and tomorrow we head to Bath. First, though, I have to find some warmer pants.

Visiting the Dead in Paris

The Coordinatrix and AandA went to Versailles with our tour group this afternoon, so after our city tour (a very interesting tour, since even more roads than expected were closed for the July 14th holiday), I headed out on my own. First, I found myself a bakery and purchased pain chocolat to fortify myself (ordered and paid for entirely in my bad French). Then I navigated myself to Cimetière du Père-Lachaise. Many famous people, including Chopin, Balzac, and Bizet (all of whom I accidentally wandered into) are buried there and it is an absolutely huge and beautiful cemetery. One of the things I found most striking about the cemetery was how much like a city it appears. From certain angles, the sepulchres look just like rows of houses, with beautifully decorated doors and stained glass windows on avenues lined with trees. On our tour, we've heard and seen so much about Napoleon's body parts being put on display and the body parts of saints being put on display that I periodically turn to the Coordinatrix and say, "Make a note: I don't want any of my body parts exhibited after my death." However, I wouldn't mind a nice little cemetery house. Here are some examples:

This one looks just like a shrine in a church. There's a painting on the back wall. Many also featured mosaics and gothic ornamentation. Very fancy.

I like the weeping women.

This is a man holding a face. I tried to find a name and dates, but the rest of the tomb just had some French about how the inhabitant had gone to a better place. Creepyfabulous.

This is a common symbol on graves signifying that time is fleeting. There are lots of great examples in Boston's cemeteries too. I love them.



This is one of the door designs I liked.

Tonight I think we're going to brave the crowds at the Eiffel Tower to see the fireworks.

Pictures!

Ah! Not enough time to post lots of pictures. Here are a few.

Here I am at the Leaning Tower. While we were there, the Chinese President (or ambassador?) who was here for the G8 Summit arrived with a GIANT motorcade. Pisa was the first place we ate pizza. A loved it. I preferred the pizza in Florence, where we had our very best food. I now adore prosciutto and I have a new and abiding love for eating smoked pig parts.

This is the baptistry (baptistery?) at Pisa. It also leans but in the opposite direction. This is where the amazing acoustics are.

Yesterday we went to Venice. I have my handy Rick Steves Italy guidebook with me, which is how we knew that if you have a backpack to check, you can skip the line at St. Mark's. I took one for the team and dragged my bag into the city, so we could check it. According to the guidebook, two people per bag check can enter the basilica ahead of the line, so we wanted to check A's bag too, but only backpacks are allowed to be left. When we hesitated, one of the bag check staff told us to go ahead, because the check was good for all four of us. And then a second employee piped up with, Stop reading, Rick Steves! It's bull! The basilica was gorgeous, we got in fast, and we paid to go into the treasury so we could see the relics (including a mummified hand) that the Venetians stole from Constantinople. And then we took off to the lagoon, avoiding most of the crowds most of the day. When we came back to Venice proper, we strolled through the backside, which was practically deserted. Most of the tourists stick to the Rialto Bridge and St. Mark's areas.

Here I am with the Coordinatrix and A on Burano, a fishing village in the Lagoon known for its lace work. So charming! The story goes that the houses are painted brightly so that when the men came home drunk, they could find their homes.



Last night I was walking through the hotel lobby, when an Italian man smiled and greeted me. I smiled too. I'm polite. Then he started walking with me, patted me on the back, and asked me how I was doing. It took me a minute to realize it was our driver, Enzo (it had been his day off and I didn't recognize him). Enzo (who I thought was named Ansel for a bit) is so nice to us and helps us off the bus and calls us Bella, actually all the Italian men call us that. It's very endearing.

When in Rome

It is a terrible shame that I canàt download photos on this computer (although maybe not, since my curls get bigger and fluffier as the day progresses) and also a shame that I canàt figure out where the apostrophe key is on the keyboard. Itàs even trickier than a German keyboard.

We are making a whirlwind tour of Italy this week. Highlights so far are as follows (Um, I cannot find the colon key either but picture one here)

1. Tour of the Vatican, Colosseum, and Roman Forum with Francesco, who bears a stiking resemblance to Ira Glass. Francesco knows everything in the world about art history and studied with the artist who restored the Sistine Chapel, so he was a fantastic guide. Also, did I mention that he looks just like Ira Glass? There is a new (to me) trend in tourism in which tour guides have little over the ear microphones and all the tour participants have boxes around their necks and ear pieces so they can hear the guide without being near him. It is fantastic. It made everyone on my tour look like bad CIA operatives and we could wander around the sites without sticking too close to the guide. (Although why wouldnàt you want to stay close to an Italian man (Italian is dead sexy) who looks like Ira Glass?)

2. I took us the secret slow way to the Cappuchin Crypt, but it is morbidly delightful, and we treated ourselves to gelato after the grueling march to the church where the bones are housed.

3. Love the Trevi Fountain.

4. Love the Baptistry in Pisa. The acoustics allow sound to linger for 10 seconds, so a single person can sing three notes and create chords and harmonies with himself. The guard demonstrated and it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard.

Having been a Humanities major is pretty much the best preparation in the world for a trip like this, since I already have memento mori and Medici and other important M words stored up in my brain. I studied Michelangeloàs Pieta in college, but I still wasnàt quite prepared for how gorgeous it is. Seeing it is overwhelming.

Florence and Venice later this week.

Ciao!