After my
trip in Scotland, I still had to settle down. This is what I did the first
week. I got my stock at my friend's place and installed everything. After two
days everything was done and I began to be bored... which is a normal situation
at Chatenay's student housing. School was beginning on tuesday, september 14th.
That day wwe only had a meeting with the director and got our schedules. We
immediately saw the vacation's potential that schedule was offering. A lot of
long weekends, among them, one was beginning the next day. We were having an
english class on frida but who cares about english classes. So we began
thinking about a trip. At first we wanted to go hike somewhere but we didn't
have enough time to prepare so we decided to go at St-Malo, with a lot of
possibilities of improvisation, which means we didn't know where we were going
after. We could not leave on Thursday because Ben had paperwork for his visa to
do, so we bought train tickets for Friday morning.
We left for Montparnasse train
station in the middle of the morning peak hour with our big backpacks. The
metro trip was very folkloric. We finally managed to get to the train and we
saw that our wagon was at the end of the platform which is something like 2Km
long. The trip lasted 3 hours, with a transfer at Rennes to take a small train
to St-Malo. there we saw in our guide that the youth hostel was 1.5 Km from the
train station. We finally found it. It was pretty big. We then went in town
passing by the beach. The tide was low so the plage was pretty big. There was a
lot of big wooden pillars and we where wondering what was there use, we later
knew that they were breaking the waves. We walked for a while in th ecold water
and got to the city walls. We visited a 17th century fortress and the door was
lock so we followed the tour... the lock of the door was exactly the same as
the one in our rooms... does that means that our rooms are as old? We could
believe it. Once again, I had problems with my camera's batteries but it's now
routine. After the fort, we attacked the town by itself. It's surrounded by
walls and there is a lot of nic elittle streets and Jacques-Cartier's places.
there is Triskels everywhere too, to tease Cedric wo looked for it everywhere
in Scotland but who should have looked here.
After a
while we began to get hungry and of course we ate creps with Chouchenn as
aperitif, which is also call hydromel. Of course with the meal we drank cider.
Very good, After dinner we continued to visit, we went near the see to see
fishermen then we came back to the hostel.
We got a
strange weather, rain, sun, rain, sun... we were always changing from
sunglasses to rain gear... except that we had forgotten rain gears so we were
kindda wet.
We met a
strange guy at the hostel, some weird brittish we kept seeing everywhere in our
trip... It's fun to meet people but not anyone... but we also met a girl from
Quebec who told us to go in Dinan, that it's a nice place, so we decided to go
there later.
When we woke up, it was still
raining. That they we had planned to go to Mont-St-Michel.So we reserved our
train tickets for Dinan at the train station and took the bus to Mont-St-Michel
In the bus
we met Sheborah, a nice American girl, of iranian origin, who had a very good
french. We talk all to way but when we got to Mont-St-Michel, her friend seemed
to think that we were monopolizing her so she taken her far from us, sniff. We
visited the abbaye and got luvk because it was "les journees du
patrimoine", heritage day, so everything was free. It's beautful and that
time I really saw the difference between roman and gothic styles. But it's fast
to visit and at 1pm, we took the bus and then the train to Dinan
We had to
change train at Dol-de-Bretagne and had to wait for 1 hour. It was raining hard
but I still wanted to look around and see what it looked like. Ben stayed at
the train station SISSY!!! challenging me to find a postcard of the town. I
came back wet but with 2 postcards. I saw many funny things : a dead cat,
houses, other houses... it should be called Dull-de-Bretagne.
We were a
little tired so when we got at the youth hostel, we prepared a meal and stayed there.
I must say that the hostel was far away from town(2.5Km) and lost in the wood,
nice scenery. It was in a valley in a XVth century manor. Of course our eird
british guy was there but fortunately, one of his cocitizen was htere too. Sara
was very cool. She was tired too so we spent the night playing asshole
(cardgame!!!). I realized again my limited comprehension of the british accent,
I always had to ask her to repeat.
Finally, it was sunny in the
morning. Dinan is another small town with walls and it was still hertage day so
still free. We walked around the walls, climbed the clock tower to buzz our
head with the bells, visited the duchess Anne's castle... All in all a
wonderful day. Again we ate creps, drank cider. I bought britton beer and been
bought chouchenn. We were supposed to leave at 4 for St-Brieuc, the town we
chosen with asking around about it, mainly because the TGV was stopping there.
Once there,
we went to the hostel, 3 Km from the train station (fortunately, the trip was
not longer, we would have been at 5 km in the next town). It was desert but the
guy almost told us it wa full !?! I still don't understand. We've been bored
all evening, and the guy responsible for the hostel was always locking doors
everywhere. I called him the keys maniac.
We got up
around 11 and went to town, seeing there is nothing to see, we decided to leave
sooner. The first train was at 14h13 and we took it. originally we were
supposed to leave at 5pm. After, everyone to whom we talked about St-Brieuc
told us there is nothing to see there... Well, can't always be lucky.