Mont Saint-Michel

Before I went to Normandy for the weekend, my host mom told me that there are some places in Frances that are truly special and that Mont Saint-Michel is one of them.  She was right.  In the words of Guy de Maupassant : " l'abbaye escarpée, poussée là-bas, loin de terre, comme un manoir fantastique, stupéfiante comme un palais de rêve, invraisemblablement étrange et belle. "

Mont Saint-Michel is an abbey town built on a stone island off the coast of Normandy.  According to legend, in the 8th century the archangel Micheal appeared  to St. Aubert, the bishop of the closest town, in a dream and told him to build a church on the island.  To this day a functioning monastery crowns the mount.

 The monastery has a clean peacefulness about it.  I sat in this rooftop garden and listened to the church bells.

Mont Saint-Michel has the highest tides in continental Europe, and depending on the season, the water level can change up to 15 meters and the coastline can recede 15 kilometers.  One can cross from the shore to Mont Saint-Michel during low tide, but only with the help of a guide because of the fast moving tides and quicksand.  We were there during low tide, so the island was surrounded by a strange, lonesome but beautiful marsh.

I know no man is an island, but if I were, I would be this one,
Maria

Traces of The War

This weekend I went to Normandy with my program, and most of Saturday was devoted to World War II memorial sites.  We visited the cemetery and memorial at Omaha Beach and Point du Hoc at Utah Beach. 

The memorial and cemetary at Omaha Beach.

In both places, I was struck by the natural beauty and the immense difficulty the troops of D-Day faced assailing those cold, steep cliffs.  The visit provoked interesting reactions from my group, as we asked ourselves what purposes war memorials serve and how we feel about those purposes and about war itself.

View from Point du Hoc, Utah Beach.

Craters left in the earth by American bombs.

I ran into two girls I went to high school with (our graduating class had a little more than 50 girls) at Omaha Beach.  The world fits inside a shoe box sometimes.

Peace,
Maria

Hello there springtime

It seemed appropriate, on the first official day of spring, to visit a chateau famous for its gardens : Malmaison.  Malmaison was bought and renovated by Joséphine Bonaparte in 1799.  It was where she finished her days after her divorce from Napoléon and where he in turn lived between his defeat at Waterloo and his exile. 

The extensive grounds (three full parks plus grounds around the house) hold many exotic plants, but are most famous for their roses.  Josephine had her favorite flower crossbred so that her gardens held roses that couldn't be found anywhere else in the world.  The roses weren't in bloom this weekend, but there was quite enough splendor to be going on with.

The day consisted of the following simple pleasures:

Cherry blossom trees reminded me of the D.C. version of home.

I stole walnut shells.

This Western redcedar is 150 years old.

And you can sit inside its branches like it's a fort.

I took off my shoes to walk barefoot on the grass.

Bridges.

 

 

The town of Ruil-Malmaison, about fifteen minutes outside Paris by train, is also charming.  I ate a wonderful millefuille in the town square as all the residents sunned themselves in the warm afternoon.

The whole day smelled nice.

Wishing you hyacinth-colored days,
Maria

Ashes to Ashes

This is the story of the Catacombs of Paris:

The remains in the Catacombs come from another time, when bodies were still burried in Paris and the living brushed shoulders with the dead.  Eventually, the cemetaries were overflowing and the Parisians wanted to purge the city of this insalubrious excess, so the old quarries on the edge of the city became the catacombs.

There is an aura of dark romanticism surrounding the catacombs - like a gothic novel full of madness, buried family secrets, and bloody deeds done by moonlight.  The catacombs encourage this attitude with a macabre theatricality.  A sign over the entrance to the ossuary reads "ARRETE : C'EST ICI L'EMPIRE DE LA MORT." (Stop! Here lies the empire of death)

The walls are lined with femurs and tibias tightly packed, broken in half by rows of jawless skulls, illuminated and thrown into shadow in equal measure by the wall sconces.  This carefully arranged display is interffupted by plaques bearing quotation on shuffling off this mortal coil, etc :

Ils furent ce que nous sommes

Poussière, jouet de vent ;

Fragiles commes des hommes,

Faibles comme le néant !

Lamartine

And though regularly cleaned, the corners hold the dusty traces of a second death - one of bones - and the promise of what we will one day become.

Dust to Dust,
Maria

P.S. It's hard to take good pictures in caves when using flash is verboten...

Rouen

This weekend I visited a rainy, chilly Rouen.  Rouen, a small city in Normandie (the North of France) famous for its cathedrale, immortalized by a series of paintings by Monet, and as the location of Joan of Arc's trial and execution.  The old city has cobbled streets and leaning eighteenth century buildings.  There is a big clock, called the Big Clock, that tells the day of the week and the phase of the moon in addition to the time.

Gros bisous,
Maria

London Calling

I was in London this weekend, and I have to say that I'm a little in love with it. Here are some reasons why:

London style.  It's way funkier than Parisian chic.  Wear anything, literally anything you want in London.  Bright colors, crazy make-up, wildly died hair - anything goes.  For example, in Portobello Road I saw a guy wearing a red military style jacket, royal blue corduroys tucked into beat up brown boots and a short black top hat with a butterfly pin on it.  Completely normal, if unique, in London, almost non-existent in Paris.

Good traditional English food.  Mediocre to bad English food is everywhere, however I splurged on a deliciously satisfying traditional shepherd's pie and sticky toffee pudding at the Portobello Organic Kitchen.

Pints!

Markets in London have lots more pipes, canes, old rugby balls and, surprisingly, Italian masquerade masks than the markets in Paris.

Street performers in Covent Garden singing opera, walking tightropes, juggling knives, doing the cancan while playing classical music, escaping from straight jackets, and having the chutzpah to wear orange Doc Martens.

With my new best friends at the Tower of London

English politeness.  I've never encountered anything like it.  It put me in a wonderful mood.  Also, English teasing.  I had to ask a lot of people for help and directions (note to self: buy a map next time) and was often met with good-natured leg-pulling.

Harrod's : one of the more magical places in the world.  Turkish delight, instant snow, shoes!

Westminster Abbey Choir.  I went to Westminster for evensong with a friend.  The choir is made up of the boys in the Westminster Abbey Choir School and some adults, though I don't know who they were.  Evensong may be a prayer service, but the real religious experience was listening to the choir.  The divinity of their voices made my soul swell, calling to mind everything in my life that makes me feel raw or guilty and lifting up all of those misdeeds and flaws to be judged by the purity of their song.

Rugby rivals sporting their colors (or colours) and chatting amicably on the Tube.

The next time I study abroad, I think I'll go to London,
Maria

The Lowest Point on Earth

The road to the Dead Sea is winding and hilly; sometimes the road opens up onto sweeping vistas of dusty brown hills carved with folds and creases.  There was something very Biblical about that drive.

I ended up taking a taxi round-trip because organized transportation in Jordan, while existent, isn’t really that organized.  My cab driver was very nice to me – he bought me a Pepsi on the way there and a snack on the way back and talked with me almost the entire way there, even though my Arabic is only so-so. 

I’ll pass along the helpful tips one of my friends gave me for doing the Dead Sea right.

Nick’s Guide to البحر الميت (Al-Bahr Al-Mayyit) :

• Do not try to swim normally.  It will not work.  Keep your feet under you.
• Do not go underwater or get water in your eyes.
• Don’t try to swim to the other side.  You’d end up on the West Bank.
• Do cover yourself in mud.  It’s part of the experience.

The water is blue green in the shallows and turns turquoise once the bottom drops away.  The water is completely clear.  As you walk out, you will see pockets of white salt on the floor of the sea, following the ridges of the sand.

Between years of swim team practice in the pool and hours of reading in the bathtub, I’ve spent a lot of time in the water, and I know what it feels like.  That sounds silly, doesn’t it?  It’s not silly if you’ve been in the Dead Sea, though, because the water feels like nothing I’ve ever felt before. 

The salt in the water almost makes it feel slimy or alive, as though when you touch the water, it touches you back.  As I swam through the shallows, the sun hit the salt that was curling through the water and cast its shadow against my skin like swirling smoke.  As I swam further out, it was as though I was still standing on the seafloor, and I floated without any effort at all.  It was such a bizarre feeling that I couldn’t help laughing for my first four or so minutes in the water.  

I did happen to get a drop of water in my eye.  For a hot second, I thought I was probably going to need a patch or a monocle.  Fortunately, I blinked it out.  Out of curiosity, I also gave my finger a little lick to taste the salt. Horrible idea.

Pickled,

Maria

A Wonder of the World

Gillian, Nick and I went to Petra on my first day in Jordan.  The entire city is carved out of these gorgeous cliffs that are burnt-orange ribboned with red and rose.  The structures, which date back to the 6th century B.C., look born rather than built, as if some accident of nature shaped columns and carved out caves.  

Petra is Jordan's most visited tourist attraction, which means that it is covered with Bedouins selling jewelry, drinks, and rides on camels/donkeys and tourists from all over the world.  It feels like a strange combination of theme park and pilgrimage site.

A really cool thing about Petra is that very little is closed off.  You have almost complete liberty to explore the ruins and caves.  Someone official looking did motion for us to get down from a kind of high cliff we climbed, but that only happened once

The bookends of Petra are the remarkably beautiful buildings of the Treasury and the Monastery.  The climb up to the Monastery was my cardio for the trip, but man was it worth it.  We saw a view called "The End of the World," and looking out over the mountains I almost felt like I was at the edge of the Earth.

Why would they call it "Petra" when the "p" sound doesn't exist in Arabic?
Maria

Provence Part Deux

The second day of the weekend in Provence was split between les Baux-de-Provence and Avignon.

Les Baux in the distance.  It was windy in those hills!

Les Baux is a very small, old, beautiful village in the Alpilles.  It is also the home of the incredible ruins of le Château des Baux, which was built in the 11th century and was destroyed on Richelieu's orders because it was a practically unassailable bastion of Protestantism.

Avignon has the charming feeling that I've found in some other cities in the provinces, like Tours and Lyon.  It's like a three-course dinner to Paris' seven courses.  We visited the Papal Palace and the famous Pont d'Avignon, which is in fact, only half a pont.

The Avignon Papacy began when Pope Clement V said, "No way, José.  Rome is crazy.  I ain't living there!"*  Benedict XII renovated the Cistercian monastery where Clement had set up camp, creating what is known as le palais vieux.

Clement VI, who was noble by birth, decided be wanted the look of the Palace to be a little less "I have taken a vow of poverty" and a little more "I am the most powerful man in Christendom."  Our guide repeatedly used the words "a castle of the Renaissance" to describe what Clement did.  He was very ahead of his time, ornamenting le palais neuf with painted tile floors and sumptuous frescos at least three centuries before even the kings of France did the same.

Of course, then there was that whole Papal Schism business and the papacy ended up back in Rome.  But Avignon must have been beautiful while it lasted!

Thank you, Wikipedia, for this wonderful picture

My favorite part of the Palais des Papes was the contemporary art exhibit of Miquel Barceló's work. So bizarre. So cool.

And of course, Sur le Pont d'Avignon :

Literally sur le pont.

Le Pont d'Avignon

Amb amor,
Maria

* May or may not be correct translation of Pope Clement V quotation.