Paradise in Normandy

After getting off the TGV to Paris, I didn't realize that my stopover was so long because I needed to get to an entirely different train station to get to the train to Caen. And with two heavy suitcases, a heavy backpack with a tripod tied to it, another bag full of stuff, and a pillow, in humid 95-degree weather, I had to take a bus across town. When I got to my train, one minute before last call, there was no room on the luggage racks and the seating in 2nd class was so crowded I had to squeeze in between some small children with all my luggage and nobody had any leg room. One could not lean the seats back and there was no air conditioning, and since I was literally incapable of moving without touching someone, you can imagine the misery.

There was so little room that this little guy kept falling asleep and stretching out directly onto my stuff, which I didn't mind, but his mom kept yelling at him not to do it, so the poor thing just kind of scrunched up in the seat like this.

All I could do was to plug in my headphones and shut my eyes. I remember what album I was listening to. It was Ready to Die by the Notorious B.I.G. I was so uncomfortable, stressed, sad, lonely, dehydrated and hungry, and when the music hit my ears it tasted like lemonade. Yes. The music tasted like lemonade. And not that powdery crap. Real lemonade with real lemons and real sugar. I can't really explain it any other way. The golden solace of some good 90s gangsta rap is not to be underestimated.

When I got to Caen, however, my conditions improved so rapidly it was like walking out of Hell and straight onto the Elysian Fields. The weather was reminiscent of Santa Monica in April, and when I got to my hotel I was greeted by an inordinately kind and uncommonly handsome desk boy who got me a glass of water and took my stuff up to my room without even being a creep.

And then there was my hotel room. Oh boy.

After a month on a granite slab of a mattress in a sweaty little room with no working appliances, this was paradise.

And the bathroom didn't look like an airplane bathroom!

All the junk I had to haul around by myself in the land of no elevators. Suffice it to say, I bumped into a lot of people, and I burned a ton of calories.

From my first evening in Caen. This is the river Orne. I was starving so I just walked along it until I tottered hypoglycemically into a Pakistani-Indian restaurant where I stuffed my face with baingan bharta and naan. And oh good lord was it good. I wanted to take a picture, but the guy at the bar was giving me dirty looks. I was, however, rather impressed with the general selection of actual decent vegetarian-friendly restaurants in Caen.

On my way back to the hotel, I stumbled across something horrifying staring at me from inside a taxidermy shop.

Self-serve orange juicer in the breakfast room at my hotel. Seriously, if you're ever in Normandy, Hôtel Bristol de Caen is where it's at.

After stuffing my face with bread and cheese, I asked the same handsome desk boy what was interesting to do in Caen since the buses weren't running to the D-Day beaches frequently enough for me to get there and back without missing the train. And so said handsome desk boy spent literally half an hour giving me detailed directions for all the stuff I wanted to see. It was awesome.

So on my way to my first stop I walked by this marvelous old church and saw this super creepy pair of statues. Note that the old man totally has a fly on his eye.

Same church, different angle. It was super old and gnarly.

An actual medieval castle built by William the Conqueror circa 1060. I didn't stay here long because there wasn't much to see as it's been gutted. It was also damaged pretty badly by bombs during WWII. But I had to see it because, if my decade or so of genealogical research is correct, William the Conqueror is my 32nd great grandfather on my mother's side. I know it's silly and doesn't change the fact that I'm an American plebeian with no real credits to my name (yet!), but it's also kind of cool.

Ze moat beneass ze drawbridge by which I stormed ze castle.

At the Hôtel de Ville (city hall), they have a hideous wax sculpture of William the Conqueror about which I still have nightmares.

Look at it.

LOOK AT IT! It wants your soul!

At the Abbaye aux Hommes, the resting place of William the Conqueror. I lit a candle because I like fire.

The tomb of the thigh bone of my dear old Great³² Grandpa Billy. During the French Wars of Religion in the 16th century, when the Catholics and the Huguenots were going at it, some idiot thought it would be a good idea to desecrate this grave and scatter the bones everywhere. To date, the only bone ever recovered was a thigh bone, and here is where it chills out.

Me 'n' mah pops. Weirdest family photo ever?

Speaking of bones, they put them in little reliquaries all over the place in most of the French churches I've been in. Ew.

 After meeting Grandpa the Conqueror, I headed over to the Mémorial de Caen, which is both a WWII memorial and also a pretty awesome museum. I didn't really realize it until I got here, but there may be a reason why the Caennais were super nice to me once they realized I was American.

The building of the Mémorial itself. The words engraved on the front are "La douleur m’a brisée, la fraternité m’a relevée, de ma blessure a jailli un fleuve de liberté," which roughly translates to "Pain broke me, brotherhood raised me up again, and from my wound, liberty has sprung forth."

By the entrance there are little commemorative stones from a bunch of different countries...here's the US.

Translation: I was born to know you/To name you Liberty.

Canada's was my favorite.

Now we enter the museum. Be warned: some of this stuff is a little grizzly in nature. I can't discuss this museum without making an attempt to treat the subject matter with due care. War and genocide are ugly but they are also real and I refuse to turn a blind eye to them.

My German isn't so good, but I'm pretty sure that says "Our last hope." I was very impressed with the way that this museum went out of their way to show that Hitler went about his Hadean chores quite legally and with an awful lot of support.

An American comic book about General Charles de Gaulle. As an aficionado of comic books, France, and World War II, I thought this was pretty cool.

French antisemitic propaganda for children. The first page translates to "A little later, he ratted someone out to the teacher in order to curry favor—Because he was a Jew!" The second says "At an older age, he cheated at the game so he could increase the number of his toys—Because he was a Jew!" What strikes me particularly odd about this comic is that the little Jewish boy doesn't look stereotypically Jewish, nor does he really look like a little boy. He looks like a very short adult.

 

 

 

More antisemitic propaganda. This is pretty typical, although I don't think I've ever seen one with a humanoid body greedily clutching the world like that. From the propaganda I've studied, the Jew wrapped around the world more often has the body of a snake. To render something subhuman makes it easier to murder, for some reason.

    

Unlike the American museums I've been to that deal with the subject, there was not a lot of sanitization or censorship regarding the brutality of the murderers. Here, they played interviews of witnesses to the massacre at Babi Yar in the Ukraine on the 29th and 30th of September, 1941. Between 100,000 and 150,000 were murdered there, but we'll probably never know exactly how many, or even who many of them were. The woman pictured here was a child when she hid behind the trees and watched the horror in the ravine. Translation: "The earth over the trench opened up at one place, from which the blood spurted out like a fountain."

Bloodstained prison garb from a Russian gulag.

A journal entry from July 15, 1942 entitled "A new St. Bartholomew's Day massacre." (Understatement of the millennium, methinks. The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572 was a torrent of violence by the Roman Catholics against the Huguenots all over France and resulted in thousands of deaths.)

Vive le monde libre!

Dummy paratroopers used to fool the Germans. Or, as I like to call them, "die Gummipuppen." (The Longest Day, anyone?)

Americans on Bloody Omaha. There were a lot of things like this around to show the loss of American life in Normandy, and there were American (and British and Canadian) flags all over the place.

The museum also has a temporary display area and right now they've got up all these rather controversial cartoons.

Of said cartoons, this was one of the more humorous, I thought, myself coming from the land of Priuses and banned plastic shopping bags.

For some reason they also have a pretty big wing on the Cold War, and they had a bunch of stuff from the States and the USSR at the time, and this old bottle of Pepto-Bismol made me chuckle for some reason.

I'm pretty sure that's a Soviet MiG-21. I drooled a little.

A section of the Berlin Wall. It would have impressed me, except the largest section of the Berlin Wall that currently exists outside of Berlin happens to be found on the Miracle Mile about a ten minute walk from my apartment, and the graffiti on it is gorgeous. (It did, however, make me really miss Los Angeles and all the mouthwatering vegetarian food trucks that always hang out about five yards away from that section of the Berlin Wall.)

Outside the museum is a memorial garden where they have little memorials from many countries, but since I was running late, I mostly spent my time paying my respects in the US memorial. There is a huge fountain that turns into a waterfall, and in a little sort of grotto underneath the waterfall are plaques from every US state and territory, and I took a picture of every single one of them. I can't include all of them, obviously, but I put up California, Texas, Arkansas, and Arizona, because the people most likely to read this come from there. However I shall post the link to my Dropbox where I shall upload all of my pictures from Normandy, because I took about 600. (It may, however, do you good to wait a bit for those because it says they'll take four hours to load.)

You'll note that the plaques are on different kinds of stone, and it's usually the state mineral. For instance, the Hawaiian one is pretty distinctive because it's made of lava rock.

Eureka!

Friendship.

Regnat populus.

Ditat Deus.

E pluribus unum.

Overall, Caen was Paradise on Earth, and it was kinda nice to let my hair down and be American for a day. If you find yourself in France, check out Caen. It's tiny (Only about 10 square miles!) and chill, but it's got some really interesting history, great weather, good vegetarian food and extremely kind people. Absolutely loved it.