CAEN PEACE MUSEUM & ST. MALO

We started our extension trip today. The first part of the day was all about getting off the ship, redistributing passengers, and general housekeeping issues.

There are about 120 or so people on this cruise, so they have us divided into three groups for our various outings. To keep it simple, we are red, yellow or green. Zoe & I are yellow. Now that the cruise is ending there are people going to Paris tonight to fly home tomorrow, people going to Paris tonight to go to London tomorrow, and people like us, who are going to St. Malo in Brittany tonight.

(y the way, I always thought Mt. St. Michel was in Normandy, it’s actually in Brittany. Shows you what I know – nothing. This morning they took us to the Caen Peace Museum and it was really interesting. It totally wasn’t what I expected, because it was really about war. I guess I expected lambs grazing in the field. But they had wonderful exhibits. They had oral histories from people who had been children during the war, and who described being in a bombing raid, for instance. All the stories and all the exhibits were done in French, English and German.

Then they showed a movie which had no narration, but they showed the Germans on one side of the screen and the Allies on the other side at the same time in the Normandy Debarkment (as they call it here, not the Invasion) It was a whole new way to see it.

After the film, they let you go downstairs to the museum, which mostly contains pictures of various things from WW2, people, places, etc. It’s extremely well presented, has sections about collaboration, resistance, holocaust, and a number of other categories, all in three languages. Zoe has moved into a mode where she keeps losing things. She lost her new hat today, probably when she took it off in the movie theater. Last night she thinks she lost at least 50 Euros, but I rather believe that will turn up. I doubt she has actually lost it.

Aha, I wrote that on the bus, and now we’re in the hotel and I dumped out her purse and voila, the Euros were there.

When we got to the hotel this afternoon, we did a quick turnaround and took a little walk around the ramparts of the old city of St. Malo.

It was a nice walk, and although it was raining when we started, of course it stopped as soon as one of our members bought an umbrella. St. Malo has the extreme tides that Mont St. Michele has, duh, like that’s a surprise since Mont St. Michele is about 5 miles from here. / So this afternoon the tide was out, and people were walking all over in the tidelands, which are such that you can walk all the way out to some sort of a defense place out in the bay, and also there’s a museum that you can walk to at low tide.

Reminds me a lot of Mount St. Michael in Penzance. I’m just posting a few random pictures. One is of a swimming pool of salt water, though I have no idea who is hardy enough to swim in this at any time of the year.