Our departure from Caen was a bit rushed. My cell phone, at present, suffers from an unparalleled case of narcolepsy. This began about the time I got to Caen, which made planning a lot more difficult than it ought ot have been. Anyways, it likes to turn itself off, so I typically don't get messages or missed call notifications until after the fact. At any rate, Lude, our first CouchSurfing host in Rouen, texted me asking us to arrive closer to 19h, meaning we needed to catch the train that left Caen at 17h15. Of course, I didn't get this mesage until 16h15, leaving us an hour to get back to the gite and then all the way across town to the train station. We made it, thankfully, but naturally, the 15 minutes of rain that we had during our time in Caen occured during the 10 minute walk from the gite to the bus stop and the 5 minute wait for the bus.
Alas. After following my hand-written directions to get to Ludo's from the train station, we were welcomed into Ludo's charming flat for a Couscous CouchSurfing. He invited over a number of his friends and showed us a great time. I love that about CSing. If people are open to it, you can truly get an idea of what someone's life is like. Among his friends there was a man who went to the high school that Lucy works at in Domfront, and someone else who went to school in Portland for a year. Small world, eeh?
The next day was a Friday, so Ludo had to work. Lucy and I set off to explore Rouen. We found breakfast, then visited La Cathédral Notre Dame, which was magnificient, despite the construction. We ended up just walking and wandering. The centre of Rouen is so adorable, it felt a bit like a fairytale town, with endless cafés and crêperies and old, old buildings. The photo on the left is the marble staircase inside the cathédral; the one on the right is a view of one of one of the entrances. I tried, but couldn't quite capture the entire spire from so close, but later I managed to get a couple that show how magnificient it is. After that we walked over to the Église Saint Ouen, which you can't visit, because it's under construction, and also because it serves at part of the Hotel de Ville, though the gardens were quite beautiful.
We ate we ate at this beautifully decorated Indian restaurant called Restaurant Taj Mahal, then, because we were near already, decided to meander down to the embarcadero and stroll along the waterfront. We passed L'espace Corneille, eat your heart out Galtier! (I once had a French professor who was more or less in love with Corneille...) Then we happened upon a bridge that took us out to a (well-inhabited) island in the middle of the river, called L'Île La Croix. We sat and digested and I may or may not have consciously decided to take a picture of the catedral as viewed from the river.
Then we carried on with out wandering, this time to L'Église Saint Maclou, where someone was playing the ORGAN! The picture on the left is just to show the contrast between the old and new-style architecture of Rouen, and to illustrate the start contrast between the two. Rouen wasn't hit too hard by the war, and the rebuilding, at least on the Rive Droite (right bank of the river), is quite tqsteful.
Anyways... Saint Maclou gave his name to the city of Saint-Malo, a port city farther west along the English Channel. He's typically depicted with a bird on his shoulder, because he apparently loved nature so much that once he took off his hat to work in the field, and, upon recollecting it, realized that birds had begun to nest in his hat. He left it there for them to have a nest. The picture on the right is actually of the Aitre Saint Maclou, which is a few hundred meters from the church itself. Not the grotesque skulls. The aitre was originally an ossuary, destined to receive human bones, during the black plague, and dates back to the 16th century. It also served as an all-girls school, and is currently L'école des Beaux Arts in Rouen.
Here are a couple of other photos, one of a notice concerning the Aitre, and one of me. Pretty self-explanatory. This is getting to be all sorts of long. I didn't realize we'd done so much in one day... I have a sneaking suspicion I'm going to have to turn our visit to Rouen into a multi-entry post :/. Sorry, folks, I'm kinda a bum when it comes to blogging.
But I'll carry on for the time being...
It was starting to get late, and we were starting to get hungry, but Ludo wouldn't be off work until 19h, so we had a bit of time to kill still. Here is a photo of l'Église Jeanne d'Arc. I SWEAR she is following me around France. Or, there's nowhere in France that she didn't go. Alas. She was burned at the stake in Rouen, just to the right of where I took this photo. The church was built in her honor. Ludo told us that the "flames" on the left are representative of the flames that burned her, and the top of the church represents her body. The inside of the church looks like a boat turned upside down. It's magnificiently spacious, and of course I don't have any photos of the interior. The space on the left where you can see folks is the market, where we went to find and evening snack, or "le gouter".
Voila, bread and Neuchâtel cheese. At one point a (rather drunk) man walked up and asked what we were having for dinner, and asked if he could have a bite. Naturally, we said yes, which seemed to make his evening. This particular "coeur" was very salty... much saltier than any I'd had before.
We eventually wandered back to Ludo's for dinner. Then we all walked over to his friend Joyce's house (Joyce being the one who studied in Portland). He was also hosting some couch surfers, some Spanish girls who are doing their Erasmus in Rennes. We had some cider, then went to Le Bateau Ivre (literally "the drunk boat"), a bar atop a hill, where there was some live Balkan Folk Music. The group was called Kosia Brada, and I hate the internet here, which refuses to upload videos. Putting that on my to-do list once I finally decide to go to MacDo to catch up on QC and el jay and whatnot.
I'll finish this in the future, I promise. The near future, even!
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