Monday, June 08, 2009

Travel journal, part ten: Normandie 1/2

Now I've back from my last trip during my stay here in France. This time I spent the weekend in Normandie together with Sophie and her finnish friend who also went to Chartres with us earlier this spring. As Normandie is in the north of France and by the sea, it was actually pretty cold. But even though some metheorologists had said it would rain the whole weekend, it actually started only on sunday afternoon, so we were still quite happy about the weather. This was probably also the closest I'll ever get to Obama! On saturday it was the 65th D-day anniversary, so to honnour that Barack Obama visited the beaches in Normandy where the battles of the Second World War was fought. We didn't visit the same place as he did, but we were still not that far away ;)

We started our journey by driving to Rouen, a small city famous for it's old town and gothic cathedral. And I understand why it was famous! The whole old town was nothing but half-timbered houses everywhere! In many different sizes and colours facing everythig from big boulevards to tiny small lanes. And the cathedral had so many small details it was impossible to look at all of them.

In Rouen we also found a very interesting and a bit different museum: Musée Le Secq des Tournelles that displayed different old iron-works. Some of them were really beautiful! And had such tiny details, I don't understand how anyone has ever been able to make them. I was really amazed. A good thing with the museums in Rouen was also that even though they had a lot of nice stuff to look at, they weren't too big like the museums here in Paris. You could actually enjoy your visit without getting really tired or stressing about seeing everything you want.

After seeing enough of Rouen we headed to our main destination: the coast. Our first stop was a small fishing-town called Dieppe. Really idyllic with cute houses, loads of boats and a beautiful promenade by the beach. And the beach itself consisted of thousands of small, round rocks in different grey and white shades. It was only further away the beach changed into sand.

And even though it wasn't at all warm outside, me and Sophie just couldn't resist going wading in the sea. We were actually surprised because yes, the water was still cold, but not as cold as we thought it would be. And our feet felt so warm afterwards. I still wouldn't have gone swimming in it even though we saw some people do that...

In the evening we drove to our final destination for that day: Fécamp, which is another town by the sea. Here we bravely ate our dinner-picknick by the sea while the sun was slowly thinking about setting. Since Normandie also is famous for a special kind of cow they have for making cheese we, among others, tried a Normandy cheese that actually was really good! We had also bought a french cider, but that one we ended up drinking in our much warmer hotel room. And it wasn't good. I miss finnish cider...

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