The sun has got his hat on, hip hip hip hooray
This weekend I have had the pleasure of a 4 day weekend :) yay.
So Friday Helen arrived in Caen at about 8:15 in the morning, so we wandered back to mine. Poor old Helen had been traveling since 14:00 the day before and had managed about a hour of sleep on the ferry. So she took a bit of a nap before we started off on the day’s activities.
We headed off to the ‘Hôtel de ville’, otherwise known as the Abbey aux homes.
We arrived just in time to take advantage of one of the guided tours. Although it was all done in French (and Helen managing about 10 words) we both really enjoyed it. The lady doing the tour was really nice. She knew it was an international group so she took everything slowly and spoke nice and clearly. She also waited very patiently or took questions for the others as I translated for Helen. It was really interesting. We learnt that along with the crows leaving the tower of London or the monkeys leaving the rock of Gibraltar, the fall of the British monarchy is said to come about when the church tower’s fall.
The tour however was really long- 2 hours. For a euro each this was a fantastic price but it meant that we were both rather tired and foot sore. So for lunch we made (in Helen’s words) ‘A monster baguette’. For Helen that involved cramming almost an entire camembert into half a baguette- quite an impressive feat.
After shaking the crumb covered duvet out the window (I’d love to know what the person in the room below thought of that), we headed back out to investigate the shops.
Dinner in front of ‘strictly ballroom’ and both of us ready of bed at about 8:30. However we couldn’t quite manage to go to bed so early, while it was still light- and not just a bit of light, it was gorgeous bright sunshine and blue skies!! We were fast asleep by 10 though!
Saturday we hopped on a bus to Oistreham. On arriving at the beach we found it empty!
Not for long though
Soon Helen and I were well settled in
With out bucket and spade (specially purchased at Carrefour the day before)
We set about building out sand castles (and sand crabs).
Castle building is hungry work so by the time the sea came to claim our master pieces we were famished. We had some yummy sausage and chips at one of the restaurants a little way from the sea front. Then it was back onto the beach for a bit reading- in the sun of course. Unfortunately there was quite a bit of wind so although it was blue skies and beautiful sunshine, it was lovely and cool- a fact we later found out was rather deceiving. So the evening commenced with a trip to Monoprix to get some after-sun. But then it was off to with Suzanne to start the now dubbed ‘night of the weirdoes’.
We started off with these strange English guys yelling something at us as we passed a hotel. Then in the Dublin café we found a load of English marines who all wanted to know if there were any decent clubs around. Well there aren’t, but I did give them directions to one (directions which I later realized probably wouldn’t have got them anywhere near!! Oops). Then we just chatted to them for a while. They asked us to go with them, but we hadn’t quite finished our drinks by the time they were leaving so we couldn’t go- what a shame. Instead we bid them fairwell, finished our drinks and headed out to bar number three (we had been in O’donalds for about 10 seconds but with a football match on it hadn’t been the kind of place we were looking for). In Café latin we had two French guys sit next to us and ‘offer to help us with the menu’ Suzanne and I immediately switched into French and politely informed them that we were fine and could manage the menus without a problem. Despite our blatant un-interest these guys persisted in talking to us, asking questions etc. So we chatted a bit with them, in French and englsih before heading to the final bar of the evening- whos name I have no idea of (through lack of a clear name n the front rather then me being too sloshed to remember). Twas a fun evening.
Sunday morning we gave church a miss and instead went to explore the market. It’s impressive how long you can spend simply looking around. We were there for close to an hour and a half and we bought strawberries, a goats cheese, two tomatoes and a baguette. I made Helen get the baguette- well after all she is in France so she should speak a bit of French :) hee hee I’m mean.
Lunch saw the disappearance of all but the tomatoes and well as half the contents of my fridge!
In the afternoon I took Helen to see the castle, where we took some photos for her mum (and for all of you as well)
Bizarrely after about 5 or 6 photos my camera started taking photos like these:
Now pretty as they are, they weren’t quite the view I wanted to show. I have no idea what was wrong with it, but after ten mins or so it had recovered and was taking pretty photos once more.
I dunno maybe it was too hot!
Monday was a semi holiday in France. It used to be a national holiday but then the government decided to change that. So many people still treat it as a holiday. We did manage to find a number of shops on to peruse though.
We had a wonderfully lazy afternoon in the park, lounging on the grass, reading our books and listening to the fountains
Then in the evening we went to the Lux cinema and saw 'Marie-Antoinette'. It's not bad, though a bit strange. There was quite alot of the film where nothing really happened. But we had fun.
I saw Helen off this morning *big sniff*. It was so nice having her here and I'm sooo glad that she had nice weather while she was here. There is not much to do in Caen when it is raining!
PS sorry for the larger than normal photos blogger is being stupid and not loading photos so I'm directing the photos straight from my site and they are much bigger. Hope they don't take too long to download for anyone.
So Friday Helen arrived in Caen at about 8:15 in the morning, so we wandered back to mine. Poor old Helen had been traveling since 14:00 the day before and had managed about a hour of sleep on the ferry. So she took a bit of a nap before we started off on the day’s activities.
We headed off to the ‘Hôtel de ville’, otherwise known as the Abbey aux homes.
We arrived just in time to take advantage of one of the guided tours. Although it was all done in French (and Helen managing about 10 words) we both really enjoyed it. The lady doing the tour was really nice. She knew it was an international group so she took everything slowly and spoke nice and clearly. She also waited very patiently or took questions for the others as I translated for Helen. It was really interesting. We learnt that along with the crows leaving the tower of London or the monkeys leaving the rock of Gibraltar, the fall of the British monarchy is said to come about when the church tower’s fall.
The tour however was really long- 2 hours. For a euro each this was a fantastic price but it meant that we were both rather tired and foot sore. So for lunch we made (in Helen’s words) ‘A monster baguette’. For Helen that involved cramming almost an entire camembert into half a baguette- quite an impressive feat.
After shaking the crumb covered duvet out the window (I’d love to know what the person in the room below thought of that), we headed back out to investigate the shops.
Dinner in front of ‘strictly ballroom’ and both of us ready of bed at about 8:30. However we couldn’t quite manage to go to bed so early, while it was still light- and not just a bit of light, it was gorgeous bright sunshine and blue skies!! We were fast asleep by 10 though!
Saturday we hopped on a bus to Oistreham. On arriving at the beach we found it empty!
Not for long though
Soon Helen and I were well settled in
With out bucket and spade (specially purchased at Carrefour the day before)
We set about building out sand castles (and sand crabs).
Castle building is hungry work so by the time the sea came to claim our master pieces we were famished. We had some yummy sausage and chips at one of the restaurants a little way from the sea front. Then it was back onto the beach for a bit reading- in the sun of course. Unfortunately there was quite a bit of wind so although it was blue skies and beautiful sunshine, it was lovely and cool- a fact we later found out was rather deceiving. So the evening commenced with a trip to Monoprix to get some after-sun. But then it was off to with Suzanne to start the now dubbed ‘night of the weirdoes’.
We started off with these strange English guys yelling something at us as we passed a hotel. Then in the Dublin café we found a load of English marines who all wanted to know if there were any decent clubs around. Well there aren’t, but I did give them directions to one (directions which I later realized probably wouldn’t have got them anywhere near!! Oops). Then we just chatted to them for a while. They asked us to go with them, but we hadn’t quite finished our drinks by the time they were leaving so we couldn’t go- what a shame. Instead we bid them fairwell, finished our drinks and headed out to bar number three (we had been in O’donalds for about 10 seconds but with a football match on it hadn’t been the kind of place we were looking for). In Café latin we had two French guys sit next to us and ‘offer to help us with the menu’ Suzanne and I immediately switched into French and politely informed them that we were fine and could manage the menus without a problem. Despite our blatant un-interest these guys persisted in talking to us, asking questions etc. So we chatted a bit with them, in French and englsih before heading to the final bar of the evening- whos name I have no idea of (through lack of a clear name n the front rather then me being too sloshed to remember). Twas a fun evening.
Sunday morning we gave church a miss and instead went to explore the market. It’s impressive how long you can spend simply looking around. We were there for close to an hour and a half and we bought strawberries, a goats cheese, two tomatoes and a baguette. I made Helen get the baguette- well after all she is in France so she should speak a bit of French :) hee hee I’m mean.
Lunch saw the disappearance of all but the tomatoes and well as half the contents of my fridge!
In the afternoon I took Helen to see the castle, where we took some photos for her mum (and for all of you as well)
Bizarrely after about 5 or 6 photos my camera started taking photos like these:
Now pretty as they are, they weren’t quite the view I wanted to show. I have no idea what was wrong with it, but after ten mins or so it had recovered and was taking pretty photos once more.
I dunno maybe it was too hot!
Monday was a semi holiday in France. It used to be a national holiday but then the government decided to change that. So many people still treat it as a holiday. We did manage to find a number of shops on to peruse though.
We had a wonderfully lazy afternoon in the park, lounging on the grass, reading our books and listening to the fountains
Then in the evening we went to the Lux cinema and saw 'Marie-Antoinette'. It's not bad, though a bit strange. There was quite alot of the film where nothing really happened. But we had fun.
I saw Helen off this morning *big sniff*. It was so nice having her here and I'm sooo glad that she had nice weather while she was here. There is not much to do in Caen when it is raining!
PS sorry for the larger than normal photos blogger is being stupid and not loading photos so I'm directing the photos straight from my site and they are much bigger. Hope they don't take too long to download for anyone.
posted by Sarah at 10:43 AM
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