Normandy- Day 1

Hey guys!

Today is Friday and this week we don't have class on Friday! I took the opportunity to go for a walk this morning over by the Opera (pictured below) and to visit the Galleries Lafayette for a little shopping! I ended up walking around for 4 hours so when I got back I took a little nap, skyped with Grandmama, took another nap, and then got up and decided I had time to update the blog before I took a shower and had dinner!

This is the story of my trip to Normandy, part 1.

Our first excursion to Normandy included the entire study abroad group, so that meant there were about 50 of us, all from either the EU studies group, or the public health group. They really wanted to make sure we had a chance to bond as a group so they scheduled the trip for the first weekend, right before class started. We were told to meet at the Opera at 7:oo am sharp, which meant I got up at 5:30. We left around 7:20 on a coach bus.

We had one rest stop so the trip to Normandy in total took around 3 hours. I sat next to one of the French students in our program, Cami. All of the French kids are 18 and a couple of then turn 19 soon. They are all in their 2nd year of college. We talked about American actors and American TV shows for awhile.

Our first stop was the War Memorial Museum in Caen. (The entire first day was in Caen). We arrived around 11am and we had until 2pm. There was a scheduled movie at 12:30 and then we could eat at the museum café after the movie. As I walked through the museum exhibit, which was incredibly huge, I realized how hungry I was. I almost ran through the last few rooms of the exhibit on my way to the café so I could eat something before the movie. I did however see this painting by Picasso, this same painting hung in the restaurant in Bolivia that we were in for Bolivian Independence Day! I remember Sarah pointing it out and telling us that it was a Picasso from WWII meant to show the sorrow and anguish that people felt.

After lunch we had some extra time before our bus left, so I walked around the gardens in the back with a couple of friends. Look who I found! It's Firenze, the centaur from Harry Potter! Haha just kidding, but it is a centaur with one arm and one leg cut off.

After the memorial museum we visited the American cemetery. We had about 25 minutes at the cemetery so instead of walking around looking at the names of fallen soldiers, I sat on the wall facing the sea and watched the ocean for 20 minutes. It's been over a year since I've been to the sea and it was truly calming.

This was my view of the sea from the cemetery:

Our next stop was to Omaha beach. We only had 10 minutes here but that was enough time for about half of us to run down to the beach and put our feet in the water!

While we squished our toes in the sand, we saw this dude:

He got really close to us and he gave us a "Hello!" in a french accent as we yelled "Hi!!"

After the beach we visited what I can only call the Bomb Land. It was an area on the cliffs where lots of bombs went off during WWII and the craters the bombs created were still very much there. There were a few bunkers strew all around as well.

One of the craters:
At this point I was feeling a bit lonely because although I had made friends, all the friendships were still pretty much surface friendships (not surprising since it had been 4 days since I arrived in Paris), and everyone seemed to have split off into separate groups. But I didn't want to split off so soon, or stick to just one group, because I wanted to meet everyone without being categorized. We only had 20 minutes at this place but I decided to spend a few minutes walking around and exploring on my own. The majority of people from our program had climbed a few steps onto this lookout thing, and they were crowding it. I found a set of stairs on the back of the lookout structure, and descended into an adventure of my own.

As I got to the bottom of the stairs, I saw a doorway. The doorway led to a room on the left and a room on the right. There were no windows in either room, and the only light I could see by was the sunlight from the top of the stairs. This wasn't enough light with which to see into the room, so I used my camera to take a picture, hoping the flash would reveal what was inside. The flash was only on for about a second, and it wasn't enough time for my eyes to adjust and to see into the room. So I had to rely on the pictures from my camera. The picture below is what the room looks like, which I never saw from my own eyes.

The weird thing was, with my bare eyes I could see one patch of light on the ground, right about where that stain or divot in the ground is. The light had no source. In the square patch of light I could see dark figures with no real shape, just dark figures going across the light patch. It was as if there was a window at the top of the wall at ground level, and people were outside walking past the window. Except there was no window, and the light was incredibly faint. It was enough to freak me out so what did I do? I ran for it, and once I got to the ground I grabbed the first person I knew well enough and showed them what I'd found.

We spent 10 minutes at the German cemetery but at that point I was so sick of stopping for such brief periods of time that I didn't even grab my camera. I did stop to smell the roses at the center of the cemetery though! They smelled divine.

Our hotel was also in Caen, in the city part. I think we were suffering from withdrawal from Parisian architecture, because I heard Caen described as "the Eastern Block," "the Soviet Union," "ugly," and "institutional." It really wasn't that bad, but it wasn't Paris. There was a really old gothic church near the restaurant I ate in, but we ate for 3 hours so we didn't have time to walk over there to learn about it afterwards. For dinner I had salmon carpaccio (or something like that). It was super thinly sliced salmon, a potato the size of half of my thumb, a really yummy sauce, and a side salad. We had a nice dinner and I got home around midnight.

On this trip our room assignments had been randomized (another effort to get everyone to know one another). Let's call my roommate..Stacy. Stacy is really cool and very beautiful. A few days earlier at orientation I saw here with a dark purple Longchamp bag. I had been planning to go to the Longchamp store all week so that I could have a large bag for the Normandy trip. Plus I just really wanted one. I really liked her color, so on Thursday when I visited the Longchamp store, I got that one. When we walked into our hotel room Friday night before we all split up for dinner, she said "Hey! Our bags are the same!" and I said.."Hey yeah..they are!! I really liked the color of this one in the store." LOL.

Our room was a triple but we had it to ourselves. This hotel was like a poor man's La Quinta Inn. The decoration of the hotel (which was super cheap) reminded me of Saved by the Bell. It was very late 80's early 90's, and not in a good way. Unless you found the humor in it, as I did. The top bunk bed wasn't made, but there were two very starchy sheets and a pillow up there. the bottom bed was made, and had a scratchy thin blanket on top. We decided we'd probably share the bottom bunk because of the blanket. When I got back around midnight I took a shower and then chose to make the top bunk and try to sleep there in a hoodie and no blanket. Around 1:30 she still wasn't there and I was still awake and freezing so I climbed down and tried to take up as little room as possible. She came back soon after that and I woke up in the middle of the night with my head really close to her shoulder. Awkward! I don't know if she was aware of that..or if she slept through it. Either way I was glad we shared the bottom because it was way warmer than the top.

That's the end of the first half of my trip to Normandy!!

To be continued...

-Hillary