Megan and Chris

There’s probably never a bad time to go to France, but Normandy on Remembrance Day is something special. Even though we didn’t actually attend a ceremony, hear Last Post or the “We will remember them” poem, or observe an official moment of silence, you can’t help but feel reverent at the places we had the opportunity to see.

We flew from Shannon airport into Paris-Beauvais, which is actually northwest of Paris. It worked nicely for us because we rented a car and didn’t have to drive anywhere near Paris itself. We drove to Caen, where we spent our first three nights. We got in pretty late and by the time we found our hotel it was basically time for bed.

We spent a large part of Day One at Le Mémorial de Caen, a gigantic museum that covers most of the 20th century and focuses especially on the role France had in various wars and military strategies. It was a little too much for me and I got bored after World War 2, so we didn’t actually see all of it. There was a huge amount of information and I felt a little silly staying indoors and reading about it when we could be outside (on one of our few sunny days!) actually seeing the locations we were reading about. I would have liked to see the Berlin Wall exhibit, but it wasn’t actually open to the public until the day after we were there. So after lunch at the Mémorial, we headed over to Juno Beach. By the time we got there it was about an hour and a half before closing time at the Juno Beach Center, which wouldn’t have been enough time to see the museum properly. So we just explored the beach itself and took lots of photos.

One thing that really struck home for me when we visited the beaches was how huge they are. We’d watched The Longest Day right before going, so we’d seen lots of movie footage of the Normandy landings on D-Day. But when I saw the beaches I was amazed at how immensely long, wide and open they were. The Germans were seriously well set-up; they’d been there for a long time already and had bunkers and guns on the high ground in the dunes above the beach. The Allies had basically no cover at all. I’m not sure how well it’s represented in our photos, but I’m amazed that we got through with anyone still alive.

We spent Day Two at Mont St Michel, an abbey that has been built up on a tiny island over about 1200 years. It’s a complete labyrinth for anyone who’s never been there before. When we first walked in through the main gate, we were in a chaotic market street with restaurants and tourist shops everywhere. We wandered aimlessly for a little while, and stopped at one booth where the staff member explained that we could buy one ticket for ‘all four’ museums, and gave us a map. Hurray! So we wandered through the first two ‘museums’. One was a couple of rooms set up with furniture to simulate ‘a day in the life’ for one of the royal families that lived in the castle. The next was a ‘sound and light show’ (entirely in French) which we skipped, and a tour through the dungeon cells and torture area, complete with creepy wax figures and very dark lighting.

We had some trouble navigating, even with the map, and eventually found our way up to the Abbey, which turned out not to be included in the ‘four museums’ ticket, and also turned out to be the part of the whole site that we actually wanted to see! So we shelled out some more money (hey, you only live once) and took the audio-guided tour through the Abbey. It was cool to see how it was set up. Basically the Romans started building on the island in the eighth century, and other groups have just taken it from there. Hence the labyrinth. There are rooms on top of other rooms, some whose purposes aren’t even known anymore. Religious life to took place on the highest levels, with special (i.e., rich and important) guests in the middle and the poor travellers and pilgrims at the bottom.

We did go through the other two ‘museums’ (really, more sound and light shows) that were included in our ticket, but didn’t realize until the end that we could get headsets that would translate the shows into English. In the end, I would recommend to anyone going there to avoid the four-in-one ticket and just go for the Abbey.

Day Three was Remembrance Day, and we headed back to the Juno Beach Center for 11 am in case anything was happening there. They were going to have a ceremony, but not until 3 pm. We had other plans for the afternoon, so we couldn’t do the ceremony but we did take in the museum this time. I highly recommend it for any Canadians going to this area of France. It’s really well done and takes you through Canadian history and politics pre-WW2, into the war (with a special section each for Army, Navy and Air Force) and then finishes with an exhibit on what Canada is like today. There are lots of little audio-visual ad hands-on things as well as the typical reading.

We headed a little further down the coast and saw the remnants of the artificial port that that was built for the British at Gold Beach. Then we continued on to Omaha, which is the beach the Americans took and also had the most casualties. We didn’t go into any of the (many) museums that are available around there, but we did take a walk on the beach and take more pictures.

We had booked a room at a hotel in Arras for that night, so after spending most of the day on the beaches we headed inland again. The town of Lisieux is very close to where we were, so we stopped there on our way towards Arras. Lisieux is the home of Sainte Thérèse of Lisieux, and there are lots of things to see about her in the town. Unfortunately we got there around 5:00 pm and most things were already closed. Thankfully we did get to see the Basilica of Ste Thérèse, which was amazing. It was only finished in the 1950′s, but looks like one of the incredible old churches that took centuries to build. There are mosaics everywhere inside, as well as 18 small altars dedicated to the countries that contributed to the building of the basilica. Pope John Paul II visited there in 1980. There’s also a crypt under the basilica dedicated to the parents of Sainte Thérèse.

Eventually we did get to Arras, although again we hadn’t really bothered to get directions to our hotel so it took us quite a while to find it. By the time we did we were just happy to go to sleep.

Day Four was reserved for Vimy Ridge, which was really the original reason for the trip. And it was so worth it. It’s one of the most amazing paces I’ve ever been, and made me feel so proud to be Canadian. We got a tour of the trenches and tunnels from one of the guides (who are all Canadian students), and we spent a lot of time just walking around the site and being amazed by the memorial. It’s just…huge. And awe-inspiring. We also saw a few of the cemeteries on the site. They’re called Canadian cemeteries but actually include graves of soldiers from many nations. I was surprised to see how few of the tombstones include names. A lot of them at least have a regiment, but most are simply labeled ‘A Soldier of the Great War’.

After Vimy it was time to head back towards the airport and Ireland. One thing we learned about France (at least the part that we were visiting) is that the pace of life, especially when it comes to meals, is much more relaxed than we are used to. You’re supposed to take the time to sit down and really enjoy every meal. We tried to grab coffee and croissants before heading out on the road in the morning – doesn’t happen. You can get croissants from a bakery, but it’s almost impossible to find hot drinks to go. And coffee really only comes in two forms: coffee (single espresso) or large coffee (two espresso). Take-out and fast food are pretty uncommon too. We tried to get Chinese take-out, and it came cold. Apparently you can get the food, but then you’re supposed to go back to your home and heat it up. Doesn’t work so well when you’re in a hotel though. Normally I would prefer to sit down and enjoy a meal like they expected us to there, but often by the end of the day I was so tired of trying to speak French that I just wanted to eat in peace without having to really interact with anyone. Occasionally my French would be accepted without much comment or need to repeat myself, but often I was misunderstood or the person I was trying to talk to would just automatically switch to English. Which was sometimes nice but could be frustrating when I just wanted to practice my French and/or be understood without too much fuss.

Anyway! In a (rather large) nutshell, that was our trip to France. As a reward for making it this far, you get to look at our pictures now! I am rather too lazy to actually post any here, but there is a whole album on Flickr if you just click over here. Enjoy!

I’m going to try and catch up a bit on our news and travels since we’re about to embark on another trip. The more posts that I have waiting, the more I’ll procrastinate.

Lauren came back to see us at the end of October, and we did a day trip out to Dingle, in the far west of County Kerry. It was about a 2 and a half hour drive, and we stopped in Killarney on the way. Lauren and I sang Christmas in Killarney, since Chris had never heard it.

Anyway. After some very tiny twisty roads, we got to Dingle. There’s an aquarium there, complete with a pirate statue and a tank of Nemo-themed fish. There are some photos on Chris’ Facebook here. We had a pretty fantastic time there although the aquarium was a little smaller than we expected. Then we fought the crazy wind and walked along the harbour wall for a while. There are pictures of that part here.

For Halloween, we headed over to Dublin for a night. We took the bus, which was much less fun than the train. But there was construction on the train line and we would have had to take the bus partway anyway. We went to the Guinness Storehouse (photos here) and spent quite a bit of time wandering through there. I especially liked the 360 degree view of Dublin from the bar at on the seventh floor. It was dark by the time we got up there, and we saw fireworks all over the place. Apparently Halloween is a firework-worthy holiday in Ireland.

We (okay, maybe just I) didn’t feel like actually dressing up for Halloween, so we took an observer’s position on this Halloween. After we got back from Guinness (and dried off from the pouring rain), we went down to a pub just outside our hotel and just watched. It was honestly probably the best Halloween I’ve had in several years. Besides the interesting social commentary that comes from observing Halloween in a bar, we saw five guys dressed as a caterpillar.

Chris went to bed early with a headache, and Lauren and I stayed up much too late drinking wine and talking. She left for Dubai (via London) early the next morning, and Chris and I headed home on the bus.

Next up, France!

This past week we had our first houseguest and we went on our first trip outside of Ireland. Hopefully the first of many on both counts!

Our dear friend Lauren, currently traveling the world, came to hang out with us for a week, and it was awesome to see someone from home, even if she hasn’t been ‘home’ in four months. The three of us went to Blarney Castle and took advantage of fantastic weather to explore the castle and grounds, climb some trees, and of course kiss the Blarney Stone.

Lauren needed to be in London eventually to catch her flight to Egypt, so we decided to accompany her in that direction and the three of us got to experience London together for a few days.

Since we had plenty of time, we chose to take a train/ferry combination on the way there. It all worked out rather well, but was an adventure. We called the ferry place a few days ahead, but were told we could only buy the ferry and train combo ticket (from Dublin to London) at the ferry terminal. We just had to show up an hour before the ferry was scheduled to leave. The actual journey consisted of:

- driving from our house to the train station in Cork
- finding a place we could park our car for four days
- going to pay for the aforementioned four days’ worth of parking and discovering I’d left my wallet at the house
- driving back to the house, in rather a hurry, finding the wallet, and making it back to the train station in time to catch our train to Dublin
- an uneventful three hours on the train from Cork to Dublin, arriving at 1:20 pm
- a taxi from the Dublin train station to the ferry port, slightly worried because the ferry was going to leave at 2:30 and we certainly were not going to be there an hour ahead
- arriving at the ferry terminal, and getting our tickets with no problems at all. Hurray!
- two hours on the ferry, arriving at Holyhead in Wales.
- our schedule said we would have about 45 minutes at the ferry terminal to wait for our train, but when we asked the staff there, we were told the train was leaving in six minutes. So we hopped on that one, which was quite full and we ended up beside a rather boisterous couple and their two small children.
- …except this train wasn’t taking us all the way to London. We had to switch, and then take the second train to the next stop, and then switch again. So three trains later, we finally arrived in London! We actually ended up there half an hour earlier than the train that we had expected to take, and probably with more stories to tell, too!
- found our hostel quite easily, got some dinner, watched The Lion King in the hostel common room, and went to bed!

Unfortunately I have yet to be convinced of the merits of hostels, ‘cause this one wasn’t great. It was rather smelly, and when there are twelve people sleeping in the same room (especially when most of those people are male), it’s a little noisy. Neither Lauren nor I slept much the first night, but the second was better. And Lauren in her wonderfulness booked us a night at the Sheraton by Heathrow airport for night #3, since she had to catch a 9 am flight. Those big comfy beds were sure appreciated!

On our first day in London we took a NewEurope walking tour, which was awesome. Lauren and I did one in Berlin four years ago, and we highly recommend them. We thought about going to a show, but didn’t end up finding the tickets we wanted (that is, really cheap ones). Instead, we met up with one of Lauren’s friends after she finished work. After that, we accidentally found The Maple Leaf pub, a supposedly Canadian bar that we had heard about but not bothered to find out exactly where it was. As a place to hang out, have a drink and some food, and chat, it’s a great place. As a representation of Canada, it was rather disappointing. There was hockey on TV, but it was a Pittsburgh-Philly game. The wine list consisted of wines from Italy, France, South America, South Africa and Australia, but nothing from the Okanagan or Niagara. And our nachos were typical UK nachos, which are Doritos with cheese sauce instead of tortilla chips with real cheese. But we suffered through our disappointment, shared some Italian wine and stayed quite late having deep philosophical discussions.

The next day we got started a bit later, checked out of the hostel and moved our stuff to the hotel at the airport. This took rather longer than we expected, since it’s an hour on the Underground from the center of London out to Heathrow. We’d kind of skipped breakfast, and it was pretty much lunch time by the time we got back into town. Lauren took us to Camden Market, a labyrinth of little stalls and shops and food (hurray!) from all over the world. We had some fantastic Indian food, and wandered through the market for a couple of hours. It started raining as we left, so we took the Tube to Knightsbridge and, like all poor travelers must, explored the riches of Harrods. I expected to feel out of place but the store is really more of a tourist attraction than a place where people actually buy things. I’m sure most of the people who walk through the doors don’t buy anything. Plus, judging by the cars parked outside of the Private Entrance, I’m sure the people who actually do shop there more than make up for those of us who simply wander through.

We were supposed to meet another of Lauren’s friends that night, so we went out to an area called Acton that we wouldn’t have thought about going to otherwise. We didn’t actually manage to meet her friends, since we left before they arrived, but we did discover another neat pub and had some good food and drinks.

Lauren left early the next morning, and Chris and I unfortunately ended up spending the rest of our last day in London trying to find somewhere to print our boarding passes for our flight. RyanAir requires that you check in online, including submitting passport numbers, which are then printed out on your boarding pass. I had done this at the hotel the night before, but I had made a mistake on my passport number. Since I didn’t want to be pulled into the security office for trying to fly with a fake passport or something, I wanted to fix my error. Unfortunately you can’t just fix it online, you have to call their call center, and then re-print your pass. We called when we got back into London the morning of our flight, but we were apparently not in a part of town that had a lot of internet cafes, so it took us a while to find somewhere to re-print. Anyway, there are still lots of things that we want to see and do in London that we didn’t get to on this trip. We’ll just have to go back!

We have a place to live! We are slowly settling in to our wee cottage on the farm, which I tried to describe in my last post. Pictures are coming, as soon as Chris puts them up. Despite the incredible wallpaper and random knicknacks, it really is a lovely place. I’m currently sitting in our glassed-in sun room, enjoying the blue sky that we apparently brought with us. Ireland has had one of the rainiest summers on record, but the weather is forecasted to be sunny for the next week to ten days, so we’ll enjoy it while it’s here! Our landlady is lovely and very enthusiastic. It’s the first time she’s had renters, and she seems very excited about everything. When we got here yesterday evening, she had even stocked our fridge with food for breakfast. She and her family live in the main house on the property, with our cottage is just behind it.

In order to be able to live out here, we had to get a car, which Chris posted some photos of on his Facebook. (Apologies if that doesn’t work… we’ll put the car photos up here when we do the house ones.) It is awfully strange driving on the right side of the car and the left side of the road, but Chris is getting pretty good. I haven’t done more than drive around the parking lot when we first bought the car, but I will practice more soon. Despite our research, we did end up paying more for car insurance than we expected, due to us having foreign licenses, which they automatically classify as provisional rather than full licenses. Oh well. You only live once.

This weekend, we are planning on going to Adore, a Catholic young adults conference. We’re hoping to meet some cool people there, since our online searches for youth ministry around here have turned up nothing.

Chris is off sailing at the Royal Cork Yacht Club tonight, and I am doing some much-needed laundry and putting things away. Though our place is furnished with all the basics (and a whole lot of extras), we are still in the stage of discovering all the other little things we need. Chris nearly went crazy making stir-fry for dinner last night because the only knife we have is a very dull serrated one. We will make lists and collect things. All shall be well.

Well we’ve been in Ireland a week now, so I suppose it’s time for another update.

We had booked two nights in our hotel in Cork, hoping that we might have found a place to live within that time. We didn’t get to Cork til after 2pm on the first day, though, and found that very few people (especially estate agents) are willing to show properties as soon as we call. The response is usually “sure I can show you… how’s 4 pm tomorrow?”. So we arrived on Tuesday afternoon, saw a few places in Cork City Center on Wednesday and several on Thursday, and by Thursday night we hadn’t seen anything that we really liked. Most of the places in our price range were much lower quality than we had expected or hoped for. The nice thing about city center is that it is, obviously, central, and we can get a lot of buses quite easily. However, with Chris working from home and me not having any idea where I’ll be working, we don’t really have any reason to need to be in the city center. So we decided to start looking out in the suburbs, particularly in an area called Douglas, which is only a five or ten minute bus ride out of city center. We quickly found that we can get waaaay more for our money there, but most of the available properties were outside of the center of Douglas, making them more difficult to get to by bus.

On Friday we met up with a property manager in Douglas named Mark, who showed us three places. One was directly in the center of Douglas village, one was a little further out but still fairly accessible by bus, and the third was a ten minute drive out of Douglas. This last one, instead of being part of an apartment complex, was a ‘granny flat’ at the back of a farmhouse, surrounded by fields, trees, gardens, horses, and so much space. At first we kind of wrote it off for being so far out of town, since we had no plans to have a car while we’re here. But of all the places we had looked at, none were so appealing that we said, “Yes, this is absolutely where we will live.” Also, most landlords seem fairly attached to the idea of a one-year lease, which would be a bit of a problem for us if I don’t get a decent job and we end up leaving before our one-year visas are up. The owners of this ‘granny flat’ apparently are very open to a six-month or indefinite contract, are asking less for this place than anyone else is, and seem super nice. Plus we can get a car for under 500 Euro. And yes, we’ve looked into insurance and taxes and if we get a small enough car, they seem quite reasonable. Nothing is official yet since things don’t happen over the weekend here, but we are 90% sure that we will end up living in this farmhouse/flat in semi-rural Ireland.

So that led us to start looking for a wee car to drive while we are here. The idea of driving a car in a country where everything road-related is backwards to Canada is somewhat terrifying to me, but I’ll learn. If my mom can do it, I can. We’ve found a couple of possibilities of very wee (i.e., 1.1L engines) cars for sale, but have had some minor issues getting to see them, as they tend to be located in tiny villages that only have semi-regular bus service. For example, today we went out to Carrigtwohill, which is actually rather large by Irish standards, but found once we got there that there had been a miscommunication and the person we were supposed to be meeting was not even home today. Being Sunday before noon, nothing except the local grocery store was open, so we spent two hours drinking tea in a bus shelter, since it was also pouring rain.

I feel like I need to describe the decor of the granny flat that we will likely be renting, but I really really cannot. I’ll post pictures when we can get them, but even that just won’t capture the essence of Irish granny-ness of the place. It was especially shocking after having seen the other two places in Douglas that were furnished in a very clean, modern, fairly minimalist way. Then we walk into this farmhouse, which probably has ten different wallpaper patterns, enough china to serve a family of twenty, knicknacks on every surface, and a stair lift (motorized chair to get you up the stairs if you can’t walk). That said, it’s very tidy, cozy and spacious (two bedrooms, three bathrooms, good-sized kitchen, living room and sun room!) and the farmland outside it is beautiful. Like I said, words do not do it justice. There will be photos. We are hoping to be in by Tuesday or Wednesday, if everything goes well.

Otherwise, we’ve wandered the city a bunch, been out to a few yacht clubs, and we visited the heritage museum in Cobh today, for lack of anything better to do. It was actually pretty interesting. We are looking forward to buying groceries and not having to find a restaurant to eat in three times a day.