Mont St. Michel (part un)

Standing in a French train station:

Kirsten: So, worst case scenario?

MBC: Worst case scenario: we don't see Mont St. Michel. We just spend the night NEAR Mont St. Michel and get to St. Malo in time for the ferry tomorrow.

MANY HOURS LATER

Kirsten: Worst case scenario: we see Mont St. Michel hauling our luggage on our backs.

France does not believe in baggage storage.


Guernsey does.

St. Malo

Kirsten and I spent a day in St. Malo, a French port town where we caught our ferry to Guernsey. It's a beautiful town.


First we took care of some business and found a laundromat. Kirsten did some amazing, in-laundromat, quick changing so she could wash the pants she was wearing. Afterwards we found a hotel that would take our bags and store them for us, even though France has a security policy that prohibits baggage storage. The girl working at the hotel was British. She may not have been familiar with the policy.


St. Malo has a section of town surrounded by the old city walls. We found a bakery and bought baguettes to eat on top of the walls.


From the walls, there are views out to small surrounding islands and fortresses. The little islandy-formation in the background behind Kirsten was closed to the public because a film crew was working there.


This is a fortress off the coast of St. Malo.


We hiked down to the beach and investigated the fortress. This is the view facing away from the fortress.


This is a street sign in St. Malo. I would love to know how it was named. I hope there was really a dancing cat involved.


Oh, and we ate these yummy pastries in St. Malo too.

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.

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.

Happy Bastille Day!

We arrived in Paris this evening and in just the few hours the Coordinatrix and I spent out in the city tonight, I've realized the two things about Paris that have always been presented to me as fact are lies. Big lies.

I have always heard the following: 1. Paris is such a beautiful city and 2. the French are rude. Tonight we went to Sacre Coeur. We were only there a few minutes (long enough for me to very quietly crow about identifying the story in the stained glass windows as Joan of Arc) when clergy entered and started a service, so we sat down for half an hour to participate. From Sacre Couer we had a great view out over the city, but it's a really unattractive view. I'm sure the buildings themselves are lovely, but the city as a unit is really not. Especially since we just came from beautiful Luzern with its lake and mountains (and cable cars and church bells and cow bells).

AND we had three experiences with Parisians and they were all soooo positive. The first was when we were on a rather rough, loud metro car and two men moved so we could sit down together. Then we had a problem with our metro tickets. (I'd already had one problem with my tickets and just jumped the turnstile but no one was in that station.) The ticket machine wouldn't take our tickets that should have still been valid and the machine to purchase tickets was refusing both our credit cards and would only accept coins, which we didn't have. A very nice (and handsome) young man came and walked us through the machine and when he couldn't make it work either, he traded me bills for coins and then walked through the gate with us and gave us directions. We would have been completely stuck without him. And then when the Coordinatrix bought a crepe for her late dinner near our hotel, the guy serving her struck up a conversation with us and was so friendly. I love the Parisians!

Tomorrow is Bastille Day. In Paris! We already did a little celebrating at the Bastille monument where bands were playing and performers were twirling fire and playing in drum lines. I still miss Italy, but Paris is making a pretty good impression so far.

Here are some pictures from the past few days. One day I'll catch up with where we've been, what we've been doing, and with whom we've been traveling.


This is the view from our cable car, which traveled 10,000 feet up to the top of Mt. Titlis in Switzerland. I'll write about our trip up there later, but isn't it beautiful? (Much prettier than Paris.)

These are some of the paintings in the Mill Bridge. The paintings are from the 17th or 18th century (I need to do some fact checking, but there's no time!) and each one includes a skeleton (mEmento mori). There's a chapel in the middle of the bridge and it was built to protect the city from floods. Families have volunteered to care for the chapel and fill it with fresh flowers for the last 500 years.

This is not the Mill Bridge. But it's similar. It's further down the Reuss River (yards further, not miles further) and the water tower is original but the actual bridge burned up about 15 years ago. This is the rebuilt version.

My favorite treats in Liechtenstein. Breads shaped like animals. Wacky animals.

A view from the bridge in Innsbruck (very close to where we did laundry).