Heather's Whirlwind Intro to France

I told Heather that I’d meet her at the airport when she got in, but due to the stike I couldn’t get to the airport at all. She was a champ … found a bus into the city, got some maps, and hit lots of the Parisian landmarks before meeting me at Montparnasse station that night! We barely said hello to each other before jumping on the metro to get to another station to try to buy tickets to Switzerland for the weekend. We were unable to get tickets to Geneva that night, but we did find a train going to Lyon (southeast France, close to the Swiss border). This was the most ridiculous train ride I’ve been on because an earlier train to Lyon was cancelled, but they put the people from that train on ours, as well! It was a TGV, which are the nice, top-speed French trains where everyone has reserved seats. Well, all of those rules got thrown out the window, and people were sitting anywhere they could … on the steps to the 2nd level, in the hallways, on the luggage racks … seriously crazy. We spent the night in Lyon and then got a train in the morning to Geneva. We stayed at a really cute hostel in the old-city part of Geneva, in a square right across from the cathedral. After buying winter jackets (a necessary purchase since we were unprepared for the cold & wind!), we explored the old city … quaint, cobbled streets with galleries, shops, cafés, and the original Hotel de Ville where the Geneva Convention was signed. That night we watched South Africa beat England in the Rugby World Cup final; along with the French spectators, we cheered for South Africa (the French were all against the English since they eliminated France last week … and for some reason use the derogatory term “roast beef” when referring to the English & their rugby team). The next day we checked out the other side of the city and Lake Geneva before getting the train back to Rennes, via Lyon.

Unfortunately, I had classes everyday the week that Heather was in Rennes, but she spent time exploring Rennes and even took a train to another city in Bretagne by herself! We enjoyed some fun meals out, had an impromptu bar crawl of a night, and had fun hanging out with my roommates & French friends. One afternoon we went to St. Malo, a northern coastal resort town on the English Channel; the whole city is surrounded by old stone walls and has a long pier out into the ocean. It was a little touristy, but we were glad that we went. Then on Friday afternoon we took a train/bus combo to see Mont St. Michel, a 1,000 year old Gothic abbey on a tidal island. The most impressive part was the initial drive up the causeway, when we essentially saw the huge church appear out of nowhere, surrounded by sand and water further out. During high tides, it becomes surrounded by water and is inaccessible because there are no bridges, etc linking it to the mainland. We paid to go through the abbey and tried to follow a tour in French, but eventually gave up on that; the tour guide had the craziest voice inflection and dramatization that I’ve ever heard, so I could barely understand anything – let alone try to translate for Heather! And he actually started to make fun of us a bit since we couldn’t understand everything (and kept referring to us as “les petites anglaises”). I clarified that we were, in fact, American, not English, and we decided to part from the tour group. We preferred to give the tour to ourselves; making up stories about each room and taking fun pictures proved to be more interesting than the guide. Saturday morning we woke up early to take the train to Paris, checked into our hotel, and then met Camille as she arrived from the airport!