For the past 8 days I was away from London on my Spring Break; probably some of the best eight days of my life, with things I’d never forget. Our spring break started out as a group endeavor in Brussels and Bruges Belgium, where all 38 students and 4 additional staff stayed from Friday night through Sunday afternoon. I enjoyed Brugge much more than Brussels, but I think that’s more of a personal choice (obviously) than anything else. We didn’t get time to see a lot of Brussels or Bruges, but what we did see was amazing. Belgium by international standards is a young country, so to see what history they did have was amazing. I’ll let these pictures (some of over I’d say 500 taken this past week) do some talking for me:
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| EuroStar arrived here... |
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| First flag!! |
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| train platform in Brugge |
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| Baker Street!!! Where's Sherlock Holmes?!?! |
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| I feel like everything is always under construction when I'm around...this is a 14th century cathedral |
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| nice looking coat of arms |
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| this is a little river....I got nothing else |
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| you could pay for a horse-drawn carriage tour (we didn't...)!!!! |
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| Chocolate Belgium waffle!!!!! It was mad good |
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| Another Cathedral in Brugges, this time from the top of the bell tower we climbed (a historical bell / clock tower as they have told me) |
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| I really want to flip this picture so you can see it better, but this is the tower we climbed |
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| this thing, when in motion, creates the different orders of tones that play out of the tower every hour |
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| outside of another cathedral |
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| best Belgian Chocolate place ever! |
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| I think the rain follows us....like everywhere we go, honestly. Now it's starting to mess with the pictures we're taking as you can see here with this mildly frustrated face |
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| just read this as you think it should sound...it's funny for me |
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| Historical Brussels behind me...the only time I was actually outside the Red Light District while in Belgium |
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| The Thalys train was pretty darn comfortable...like I was able to just fall asleep right after we set out |
I wasn’t sure how being in a group with 3 girls would work out, but it went really well. We went to a lot of sites and ate some pretty good food.
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| This is 3/4 of the crew...if you could guess, I'm the one taking the picture (we're in the main drag of The Lourve). These people are alright in my book, especially since Emily's strawberry hat made it impossible to get lost.. |
We arrived in Paris for the first leg of our journey early Sunday afternoon, and let me say the Hostel we were staying in was niiicceeee. We had a private room and shower with a shared toilet on the hall. Monday morning bright and early we queued at The Lourve museum. Prior to actually going through the museum, the only mention I had of it was in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code book and its subsequent movie, with Tom Hanks running through the halls to get away from French police as he was trying to solve a murder. We saw a bunch of famous works, including the Mona Lisa (which was mounted in a gallery with other paintings at least 50 times its size, yet still not as important as the Mona Lisa), Napoleon’s Apartments and some other sculptures. We then walked all the way to Notre Dame (A walk that looked a lot shorter on the map…..), grabbed lunch at a local café and then went into the Church, it was an awe-inspiring site to say the least. I know I'm not Christian, but I lit a candle at the Chapel dedicated to all soldiers serving in Theaters of Combat; French, British, German, Spanish and even American (I meant to at Westminster Abby, but didn't get the opportunity). Westminster Abby, Notre Dame and the Notre Dame de Bayeux are probably three of the most beautifully constructed and maintained religious structures I've seen. After Notre Dame, we climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower then walked (again) to the Champs Elysees, a famous stretch of road between The Lourve and those arches with that epic roundabout around it. I’ll insert pictures here:
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| this is where we ate breakfast for 3 mornings..it was awesome |
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| this was our room...which was mad chill |
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| this is an example of a Metro Station....very underwhelming, not awesome like the London Underground |
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| one of many cats... |
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| Paris street near the Hostel |
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| The Lourve verryyy early in the morning |
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| hey pose for a picture |
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| Bronze Chariot atop the arch at the foot of the Lourve |
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| Inside the pyramid thing!!!! |
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| Mona Lisa, this painting is a lot smaller than I thought it would be |
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| look at that frame...wow it's all gold and detailed, the painting is okay, but I mean that frame is the real art |
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| Napoleon crowning himself...for some reason the French are really proud of this one |
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| I thought I was missing Halloween or something |
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| See Notre Dame in the background? It's the awesome building that I couldn't use flash-photography in! |
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| we got saturated |
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| Paris is behind me.... |
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| .....still behind me |
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| Arch de Triumph.. |
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| this picture is blurry because I didn't want him to come over to me to solicit a donation from me...musicians just hop on The Metro and play and ask for money....a lot |
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| Versailles.. |
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| this is why Sarah needs sun glasses |
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| group photo!!!!!!!!! |
What was pretty interesting, and all over Paris, were the armed soldiers patrolling national landmarks. We saw armed guards at the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, The Lourve, and Paris-Midi (the train station we used to get to Bayeux). I’d never seen anything like it, but Parisians didn’t pay them any heed, so I tried not to either.
On Tuesday, we woke-up early (again) and went to Versailles. It was an awesome site. My only complaint was the entry price; many exhibits were not put together, and based on the floor plan of the palace they distributed, we only got to walk through a fraction of one wing of the palace. Honestly though, it was great to go, fulfilling its tag as a “must see” place. The gardens were amazing, they looked hard enough to maintain nowadays, I can't imagine having to cut that grass and trim all the shrubbery in the 18th century. Also strewn throughout Europe (Paris, Brugges, Brussels and Bayeux) are tributes to people in the local community lost during WWI and WWII.
Words really can’t do justice to everything I saw, I’m just thankful over all that everything went off without a hitch, that we caught every train, bus, cab, train and ferry that we were scheduled to get and got to all the destinations we wanted to get to. Now I liked Paris, even with the language barrier, but Bayeux was by far my favorite place. I honestly think that if I learned a little French at some point in my life, that I wouldn’t mind living there during my retirement or something. It was a nice town, it actually kind of reminded me of Saratoga a little. People had a generally happy disposition and were friendly, right down to the guy who sat behind us on the bus from Caen to Ousterham (the ferry port) who pushed the “stop” button on the bus to make sure we got off at the right place. When we got to Bayeux though, it wasn’t looking to good. Directions I had to the “hostel” (which turned out to be a really nice hotel, an old Best Western) were wrong, and it was raining. I asked for directions at a Renault Dealership (European cars…actually kind of nice and practical looking too), which she happily provided even though her English wasn’t the best. We got to our Hostel, were greeted and checked-in by a nice receptionist and then went up to our rooms:
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| this was actually 2 beds, looking like 1...so like a French Transformer of sorts.... |
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| our bathroom...with a tub and shower head |
It was nice to say the least. We got 2 doubles, each with 2 beds in them so we all had our own beds and I didn’t have to fulfill my chivalrous duty of sleeping on the floor / cot. We walked around the town, finding that there was pretty much 20 people per bread store (there were a lot of bread stores), and that baguettes were pretty darn good. Until then I couldn’t comprehend how one could buy a baguette and have that be like the big part of a meal, but after having one myself, I saw the light. What was really cool was this small shop I went into that had a display of old WWII gear. The guy tried to sell me a gun that was dropped by a paratrooper on D-Day, but obviously I wasn’t (nor probably will ever be) in the market for a working firearm. Why I’m mentioning this though, is that this gentleman had been working on a coin collection for – if I understood correctly - a couple years of non- Euro coins. He showed me his American sheet, and asked if I could help him locate some coins. In the end, I took down a list and his address so that maybe I could send him 4 or 5 coins from America when I got home. He didn’t ask me to commit to him that I’d do it, but thanked me for my interest and a prospective letter with these coins. Honestly, I’d love to help, and if I can put these coins together and postage isn’t too bad, I might just do that. I haven’t decided. Probably the single best day of this past week was Thursday, the day-long trip to Point du Hoc, Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery off of the invasion beaches. I’m speechless, the tour was amazing. We were picked-up at the Bayeux train station in a VW van for a tour with 4 other people (9 in total including the tour guide). When we got in the van, we met a nice woman and her grandson from Boston and two Chinese nationals who were very talkative. It was a 20 minute drive to Point du Hoc, and along the way our tour guide (I believe his name was Jean-Pierre) gave us a run-down of WWII up until D-Day. Point du Hoc was important because during the landing, the Germans placed big guns on this cliff – du Hoc – that could take-out allied ships and troops on the beaches. Army Rangers scaled the cliff, captured the guns, and held out for 2 days waiting for relief from the invasion beaches. Of the 200 or so that set out to compete this mission, 93 survived in total, making this an important place to see. In the 70’s, France gave this cliff area to America (so officially it’s American soil, just like the American Cemetery later on) on the condition the U.S. would not make a profit or turn it into a military base. I think the U.S. has done a great job preserving this important facet of history for all to come and experience and educate themselves on. I’ll let the pictures and awesome captions fill in the story:
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| American Soil: a grove of trees leading to the plots |
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| Time capsule |
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| Picture of the D-Day invasion |
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| This is the monument at the foot of the cemetery |
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| At the door of the Chapel |
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| The Judaic side of the Chapel |
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| The Christian side of the Chapel |
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| Cemetery Register at the British Cemetery |
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| Crypt of the Cathedral de Notre Dame |
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| Point du Hoc, the remnants of a German bunker blown apart by a grenade |
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| A view of the Atlantic Ocean |
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| 88 mm gun shelter |
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| same bunker from behind |
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| 110 mm gun shelter, that was empty on D-Day b/c the German's moved the guns back further inland |
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| machine gun trench, the first position taken by the American Rangers |
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| Pillbox machine gun bunker |
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| Omaha Beach |
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| Charlie Company and the Dog Green Company sector of Omaha |
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| walk down to a German living bunker |
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| It was awesome to see this |
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| Section G of the American Cemetery |
The next stop was Omaha Beach, a picturesque setting, with only a couple reminders of the massive invasion force that landed there 70 some-odd years past. I retrieved a rock from the beach as a keepsake. There was still part of the old Mulberry port built by the British intact. Normandy was selected because it was the last place the Germans would think the American’s would invade. This was so primarily because there was no deep-water port. Mulberry ports were constructed in London to function as floating platforms to off-load troops and material after the beachhead was secured. A big storm destroyed the American Mulberry port, and after decades of corrosion and pioneering French farmers, not much remains of the British one either. There was also a nice memorial to the U.S. National Guard troops that landed first, with some words inscribed on it:
The final stop, and perhaps the most powerful image one can ever attempt to muster, was the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy. We had about a half hour to go through the cemetery, lined with Crosses and Stars of David marking the final resting place of 9,387 of the American servicemen that died on D-Day and in operations right after. I won’t show a picture of this, but I went up to the first Star of David I saw, and saw a rock on it. I started to tear-up a little knowing that so much time had passed, and family still had come back to visit. I noticed one marker that had no rock, however well-kept by the American care-takers it just didn’t seem right to me. I placed a rock on this gentleman’s marker, a soldier from New York who died a month after D-day. I wrote his name down, but I still remember it anyway, and I'd like to contact his family somehow to let them know that his service and sacrifice will always be appreciated.
An interesting fact is that most graves in military cemeteries face East, but here, they face West, towards home. I’m not naive to think that family members of those buried there read this blog, but regardless out of respect to them I’m only going to put a couple pictures up, ones that I think paints an honorable picture of the price of war but not disrespect those who died in it:
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| The soldiers dog tag number |
Poibt du Hoc and the American Cemetery are both maintained by the ABMC (American Battle Monuments Commission), the organization responsible for maintaining 24 permanent American burial grounds on foreign soil. The British Cemetery also shook me up a bit. In both the American and British cemetery’s there were grave markers for each un-identifiable soldier. But this one read: “A British Sailor known only by God,” with a little sign in the ground that had written a sailors name, rank, date and place of death. After so long, that family will finally be able to know where their son is, how he died, and that he died so that his way of life could be preserved. Another grave marker read “he died today so that Britain would live on tomorrow…” It’s really hard to write or even talk about this kind of thing. It was such a powerful image, but I’m glad I went.
We could have easily taken a train from Bayeux back to Paris and then the EuroStar back to London. That probably would have taken around 4 or 5 hours. We picked a more circuitous route. We took a train to Caen, then a bus to Ousterham, a ferry to Portsmouth, a cab to the rail station, a train to Waterloo Station in London and finally a 24-hr bus back to Clerkenwell. It was about 12 hours or so of travel, but we wanted to take the ferry, and it was AMAZING!!!! I felt like I was on a cruise or something, there were so many amenities, like a 4-bed cabin we would chill in, restaurants and bars to hang out and talk at, a game room, cinemas and a good size deck to watch the ship cast-off and go back to port. I know my picture-taking could use improvement, but the blurry pictures I took in Portsmouth are the reason I want to go back so bad (I tried to get a picture of the HMS Victory and Warrior but they were too blurry for even me to post...and that's saying something):
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| Breezeway between one of the shops and the Blue Note Bar |
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| It was actually mad dark out when I took this |
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| Active duty destroyer |
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| Wannaker Tower |
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| Trucks on the bottom of the ferry, I kept forgetting it was a Ferry |
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| our cabin |
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| before we set off, all pumped to go |
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| Ping Pong!!! |
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| This is our cabin all rolled out and ready to go |
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| It was dark, and the boats were far away, so the flash makes the shots look a little more blurry |
The ferry passed right by Her Majesty's Royal Dockyard, giving me a front-row viewing of some of Britain's active-duty Naval vessels. Also, the Spinnaker Tower looks awesome. I'm sorry this post is so long, I just really enjoyed break and want to make it sound as awesome as it really was. I'm sure I'll be adjusting this as time goes by. But until that happens, I'll leave you with some things that are sticking with me:
"In memory of General Dwight D. Eisenhower and the forces under his command. This sealed capsule containing news reports of the June 6, 1944 Normandy landings is placed here by the newsmen who were here, June 6, 1969."
~inscription on a time capsule of news reports filed on D-Day. It's scheduled to be opened on June 6th, 2044. I will be there.
"These endured all and gave all that justice among nations might prevail and that mankind might enjoy freedom and inheret peace."
~ incription on American Cemetery Chapel
"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."
~ inscription on base of statue at American Cemetery
Stay Tuned...
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