Weekend in Normandy: A Review

Ruminations:

The hardest part of studying abroad has been not seeing your usual group of people every day, not communicating with them as much - being out of the loop. The best part has been creating a new loop.

The late night study culture that we have in the United States does not exist in Paris. Parisians don't stay at libraries or coffee shops past 10pm doing homework. If they're out that late, they're at a show, eating dinner, or drinking. Work that late at night is reserved for the house, or maybe your university's specific library. It is a weird transition from routinely staying up until 1 or 2am at Grainger Library. Or from being at Illini Hillel from 3pm-10pm on several weekdays.

Today is Wednesday, March 4th. This past Friday, the 27th of February, 12 of the 15 total students on our Paris group traveled to Normandy for the weekend. Specifically, we stayed in a large house in a city called Caen. I can't accurately type out how to pronounce Caen, but suffice to say its a "Kuh" sound followed by a nasal sound.

So we arrived in Caen and took a couple buses to find the house. We spent some time looking for our street, Roy Joyeuse (Happy Street). After a couple blocks of walking, we finally found the house. So us 12 American students, with our bulging backpacks, walked up to a quaint house in the Norman city of Caen and knocked on the door. Except...it was the wrong house. Turns out we were NOT actually on Roy Joyeuse, we were one street away. Luckily, nobody was home to receive the 12-uninvited Yankees. But there was a cat, so there's that.

Here I am knocking on the door of the wrong house in Caen

Okay, so the weekend itself. Our goals were as follows:
1. See the D-Day beaches

2. Cook delicious (and hopefully cheap) meals for ourselves

3. Walk around the city of Caen for a while

4. Drink a lot

5. See the famous tapestry in the nearby city of Bayeux <---more of a personal goal

I'm proud to say that we successfully accomplished the first 4 goals. After a brief confusion on Friday, we managed to successfully find the real house and our host for the weekend, Claude. Claude was dope. No other way to say it. He was incredibly accommodating and even allowed us to rent out the basement, which usually isn't available. Here's a little anecdote about Claude: On Friday night we were partying when we smelled smoke and heard noises in the basement. Obviously those are two bad signs in any situation. So we cautiously went downstairs to investigate. The cause of the sound and smell? Claude chilling in his own basement, smoking cigarettes. What. A. Bro.

One of the important things about traveling with a group above the size of like, 5 people, is the necessity to split into groups during activities. We were 12 people, and it was inevitable that we would split off during the days. You can't have 12 people rolling up in a café. And you can't have 11 people waiting for one person just because they have to use the bathroom. So on Friday afternoon, after settling into the house, about half of us went to the Caen Memorial Museum, which is dedicated to World War II and the Holocaust. The other half, myself included, explored the city center. Caen has a huge castle, as well as several large cathedrals. There are two abbeys: L'Abbaye aux Hommes and L'Abbaye aux Dames (men's abbey and women's abbey). We spent 4 hours walking around seeing all of it. The castle was the highlight of the afternoon in Caen. There are tall "keeps" - watchtowers - that look over the city. There are castle walls that you can walk along. There is a huge courtyard area and a former drawbridge/moat. You can bet your ass we had sword fights and arrow fights.

An epic battle for the ages.

Not technically at the castle, but a little later in the day. Still epic. Still a battle.

The sun was going down on Friday and by God, we were going to find a high point from which we could view the sunset. We legged it from the castle to the Abbaye aux Hommes, above 15ish minutes away. The sun was going down in the sky and it seemed like the Abbaye was closed. Just our luck. At the last minute though, we stumbled upon........an art museum! That's right. We walked by a building and noticed two girls sitting on a roof. So John yelled up to them something like Comment est-ce que nous pouvons ascendre? - How can we get up there? They pointed to the entrance to the gallery, which evidently had stairs. So here we are, six VERY American students, walking into a gallery that frankly is seeming less and less like a museum and more and more like a place that we aren't supposed to be visiting. Anyway we find the stairs, and we make it up just in time for the sunset. All of this happens as I awkwardly try to hide the two baguettes that I had bought for dinner.

We made it.

Dinner. I think that was one of the most fun and liberating experiences of the trip. Not eating it, which certainly was great. Making it. Both Friday and Saturday, we'd finish the days activities and head to the supermarket around 7pm to buy groceries for dinner. The first night, we made vegetable stir fry with an optional chicken option. Plus pasta. And cookies. Cooking for 12 people, in a kitchen that you don't own, drinking in a glass of wine, on the weekend, is splendid. It's the perfect end to a stressful week of classes. It forces you to think on your feet. It helps you bond with your friends.

Saturday during the day we bought bread, turkey, cheese, pesto, tomatoes, lettuce, onions, and two baguettes. And we made the best sandwiches any of us have had in the year 2015. Saturday night was taco bar, made by Marissa and crew. It was extra delicious.

Pas too many cooks. Shouts to Jocelyn for the pic

The sandwich of lore. Pic credit to Joc-jams.

The real reason we spent time in Normandy was because of the World War II history here. The American cemetery for fallen soldiers is in Normandy. The beaches that Allied troops landed on during the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944 are in Normandy. The American landing beaches are called Utah and Omaha Beach. And our goal was to visit them. Here's the problem - the only day that we had enough to make the trip to the beaches (about an hour from Caen) was on Saturday. We stopped by the Caen Tourist Bureau on Friday during our walks to ask about how we could visit the beaches. Their answer was basically, "You can't. Buses don't run on Saturday's." Well that sucks. So, we ended up getting taxis. They weren't prohibitively expensive and the taxi drivers took us to multiple stops along the beaches.

It's hard to describe the emotions we felt when visiting the American Cemetery, and the museum right before the Cemetery entrance. For me, it was a mix of emotions. I felt undeserving of the opportunities that I'd grown up with, and taken for granted. More than undeserving, I had a wave of responsibility crash over me. If my grandparents' generation was willing to fight, to leave their families, to stand up for very real threats to liberty, then I had an obligation to honor that. I'm quite liberal, progressive, and fairly anti-military when I can be. But I felt real pride in the role of American soldiers in World War II. There's the obvious sadness of the loss of life on both sides, and a stark reminder of the Holocaust that is ever present in World War II. The organization of the Cemetery in long, repetitive rows of crosses and Stars of David reinforced the sheer scale of the war. It was a really sobering experience for our group for the rest of the day. It was also a frisson-inducing point of pride.

We left Caen on Sunday for Paris, and now we're back in the grind on this cool Wednesday. I'm sitting in a place called "Anticafe". In most cafes, you walk in and buy coffee or food, right? In this cafe, you buy TIME. So you can buy two hours of time here. Once you do that, you have unlimited access to food, coffee, and WiFi (which here is pronounced Weefee). It's a pretty sweet deal. Tomorrow, my pals Joey, Catherine, and Alec are coming into Paris. I plan on showing them an excellent time. If they aren't doing body shots off a mime on the top of the Eiffel Tower by tomorrow night, the weekend will have been a failure.

Thanks, as always, for taking the time to read my blog. I enjoy rapidly spewing my thoughts onto this forum - it helps me work through the many experiences I'm having here. Make sure to subscribe to the blog by putting your email address on the top of the page.

Bises (kisses),

Noah

La Culture:

Oh Wonder - Technicolour Beat

Stranger Things - Local Natives


In Defense of the Notoriously Arrogant French Waiter - The Wall Street Journal

What Do You Do About Israel? - Tablet Mag
"Why American Jews should vote in the World Zionist Congress elections"


Shia LaBeouf on His Arrest - Youtube
What a man.

Deli Man Movie Trailer - Youtube