Sunday, 10 July 2005

We stayed at a youth hostel last night in the small town of Granville which is located on the coast. It was a nice place to visit with a large dock full of sailboats you could rent to take out in the ocean. The town was nice and the locals also seemed nice. One of the local bar owners was very nice to us, giving us free candy bars, but I think it was an attempt at getting one of the girls interested in his son. Later that night some of us went swimming in the ocean, it was a little cold but not as cold as the Oregon Coast, I stayed in for about 45 minutes. In the morning we got up and went to see where Christian Dior lived, I didn’t really care about it but he had a lot of nice flowers. I was actually more interested in the wharf we walked down to get to his place. The sunlight there was perfect for a morning photo-shoot which would have gone perfectly because there was a very nice Casino in the background as well as the beautiful blue ocean. Unfortunately we didn’t have the time and I left my cameras on the bus because we were going to a museum. We walked by a realtor and I noticed that the price of some very nice cottages was pretty cheap for that tourist town. I thought it would be a nice area to buy a house and rent it out to people, I bet it would pay for itself in a few years.

We left Granville and headed for Mont Saint Michel Abbaye which was of course very beautiful and very large. It’s impossible to document the place by way of film, the unfortunate part is we only had about an hour and a half to tour this vast place which was definitely not long enough, you need an entire day to visit the are, it is just too big, but then again, if you’ve seen one cathedral, you’ve seen them all, and the majority of the time I felt like I was in a castle or dungeon rather than a cathedral, which is why I think its a good place to visit. The courtyard in the middle was very beautiful though, unfortunately, again, a picture just does not do any justice to the place. I would like to go back to both of these places someday and spend more time there. Because of places like these, I’m convinced that Paris is just a big city with lots of monuments that are nice to see, but in order to know France, the people, and the culture, stay out of Paris and go to a smaller town.