"Great things are done when men and mountains meet." - William Blake

I love the mountains. Ever since my first visit to the Polish Tatry mountains with my dad when I was 10, I have felt a profound connection to them. I have been back twice to the Tatry (once with my dad again, and once with Monika). I have also seen the Canadian Rockies, though mostly from below in Whistler, going back to hike them is definitely on the to-do list for someday.

This time around, though we are ending up in Poland, we decided to skip the Tatry in the south and focus on my hometown of Gdansk in the North. On the other hand, we are visiting the Alps, so that has got to count for something.



Wednesday was our first hike in the Alps with Ilona and Nic. We met up with Monika's sister and brother-in-law here in France, and are staying with Nic's grandfather (Papy) in Annecy. Annecy is a happening little city nestled between the mountains at the foot of the large and gorgeous Lac d'Annecy.



So as a primer to the Alps, we hiked up to Lac de Charvin, at an altitude of 2018 m. It was actually a lighter hike than that sounds, though, since we started at 1158 m. It had a very nice steady approach most of the way, with only a couple rockier and steeper sections near the top. Just before the goal of our hike we also encountered a little bit of snow.

"So how the heck would you get up to this peak anyway?" Ilona thought out loud, as she surveyed the sheer rock face from our lunch stop along the shore of the frozen Lac de Charvin.
"The approach must be from the backside," I offered, looking around the large natural bowl we were sitting in, of which the lake ice filled in the bottom bit. "Yeah, look, the path goes along the inside of the bowl and then crosses over the lip over there."
"Ah, yes, I see" said Nic.
"Wait, what are you guys talking about?" asked Monika.
"The pass from the inside to the outside of the bowl, to get to the summit."
"Yeah sis, the path goes there, then snow snow snow, those two little bloops..."
"Right before the rock gets all craggy..."
"there's a path from the snow to the top."
"Yeah... I don't see it."
I took a photo and pointed the pass out to Monika with the help of digital zoom. Ilona pointed at the screen too. "See, beside the two bloops."
"Ok, I see it, yeah. I was looking lower."
"I want to go there," decided Ilona.
"Oh I don't know. I'm content with what we've done. I'm not going any further," I objected.
"Yeah, Lonku, of course you want to go."
"Hey sis, what's that supposed to mean?"
"Well, you always want to go ahead and do crazy things."
"Hehe, true," confirmed Nic.



"Niku, today you were the one pushing ahead on the snow. Usually, it's true, I'm the one who wants to go and you're the mumun [Vincent/Chmiel families' glossary - mumun: A suck, complainer, hesitant or lazy person]. But when other people are around you get all excited-like."
"Humph, I guess that's true."
"Well, we're not going further on this snow," it was finally agreed.



This is a photo fo the four of us at the elevation of the lake with Mont Charvin in the background. As you can see, the further approach to the summit was pretty much entirely snow-capped and thus would have required some serious hiking equipment.

"I'm glad I didn't have to go. My buddy went though... lost half his battalion in the first hour" - An elderly American man we met at Longues-sur-Mer



We spent Saturday visiting the D-Day sites in Normandy. We started at the Mémorial de Caen, which gives extensive background on World War II in France, and what exactly happened during the Battle for Normandy. The most powerful exhibit was a film entitled "Jour J / Bataille de Normandie" which consisted of 35 minutes of un-narrated battle footage, interspersed with animations of troop movements on maps to give context. There were scenes shown in split-screen where the fighting could be watched from the Allies' and the Germans' perspectives simultaneously.



Afterwards, we drove along the coast, stopping at many of the major battle sites. The first was Point-du-Hoc, where American soldiers scaled 30' cliffs on harpooned rope ladders to attack the German position. The area has remained a memorial park since the war, so it is still littered with the ruins of bunkers and pock-marked with enormous bomb craters.

We also stopped at the American Military Cemetary, Longues-sur-Mer, Arromanches, and Omaha Beach. At Omaha, I wanted to photograph the new memorial statue when two little girls playing on the beach ran into the shot. To think, what happened in that very spot in order for them to enjoy the freedom to play there peacefully...





Finally, the last stop on our drive was Juno Beach. We lingered, and paid our respects in silence to the Canadians who died there, as the sun slowly set behind the horizon.

"Fermé" - Every other French shop

When we were in Paris last year, as soon as anyone we were dealing with realized we were struggling with our French, they pretty much immediately switched to English. While we were travelling through Brittany and Normandy, the people there took a somewhat different approach. Most, upon realizing that French is not our first language (or even second language, come to think of it...), simply slowed down their speech a bit and refrained from using big complex sentences. So we've actually had an opportunity to practice! And it's heartening to see just how much we've been able to take care of in French.

Some of the nicest people we've run into here have been the taxi driver from Dinard airport to our hotel in St. Malo (who had a nice conversation with us in slow French about our travels, and then even cut us a deal on our fare - " un cadeaux"), the hotel manager in Caen (who explained everything very clearly and cordially to us, often pausing to confirm we understood), and the train ticket agent in Caen (who was very helpful and who did quite a bit of work to straighten out a mix-up with the tickets I bought online, as opposed to the online agents I communicated with before who were most unhelpful).

On the other hand, we've also often run into what seems to be one of the favourite words in the region's vernacular: "Fermé". We arrived at an internet cafe in Caen just before 22:00, since our guide book showed its hours of operation ran until 23:00. The decal on the glass front door confirmed these hours. But the proprietor was just letting out his last customer. Our intrusion was met with a firm "fermé". I was slightly stunned for a second, and he must have mistaken my disbelief for lack of comprehension, because he followed up with an annunciated "closed" and pointed to a piece of paper affixed above the business hours decal, stating the cafe closes at 22:00. I guess you can't argue with the official air of blue ink scribbled on looseleaf.

What you can argue with, though, is a waste of food. Especially savoury, delicious, French food. The next "fermé" we encountered was at the cafeteria at Mémorial de Caen (WWII museum). Just as we approached the line-up, a server pronounced the now familiar phrase and, to dot the exclamation point at the end of it, blocked our passage with a cart laden with trays and dishes. This time it was too much. They wouldn't even need to prepare anything for us. Being a cafeteria, and still having some platters filled with food, they just needed to trasfer some of that food onto our plates instead of probably transferring it into the trash five minutes later. We snuck into line from the front, and pointed at two random platters from which a different server scooped us some grub (which turned out to be duck à l'orange and roasted lamb chops... not too shabby I must say)

"Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story" - an old saying, of which we were reminded by our Mont St. Michel tour guide



Mont St. Michel is a monastery built in the middle ages on the very tip of a small mountain which is actually a tidal island just off the coast of France. Sound familiar? If you have been reading our blog, it might sound somewhat like Skellig Michael, and in some ways it is.

We got a guided tour of Mont St. Michel, and our guide was really excellent. He had also once visited Skellig Michael, and explaining the parallels between the two was part of his itinerary. Apparently the Hebrew word Michael translates to "Who is like God?", and in the book of Revelations the archangel Michael is the head custodian of heaven, responsible for the defeat and expulsion of Lucifer. To honour this strong connection to heaven, sanctuaries dedicated to Michael are often built on hilltops, and vice-versa.

The monks who built Skellig Michael in Ireland did so very soon after the arrival of Christianity, and apparently they still mixed bits of their old pagan religions into their faith. One example is their haircut: they decided to keep up the tradition of shaving the front of their heads like their druid predecessors (who, by the way, did not build stonehenge despite the popular misconception, as it predates their religion by centuries) instead of the top of the head like most Christian monks throughout history. Furthermore, they likely still encorporated some prayers to the moon, rivers, etc. into their worship of God.

There was a story our guide told us about Mont St. Michel: Once, after a dinner he had had with the Benedictine monks who lived there at the time, the abbot took our guide to the side. He opened a cupboard, and pulled out a silver box containing a plain-looking rosary. He challenged the guide to guess the significance of the rosary. Taking a stab in the dark, he guessed the pope had visited and had left it as a memento of that event. He was wrong, for it was no pope but rather an American named Alan Sheppard. Sheppard, a devout catholic, was one of the Apollo astronauts who visited the moon. He took 3 rosaries with him and left them out on the surface for the duration of his mission. He promised God and himself that if he got back to Earth safely, he would keep one of them for himself, give one to the pope, and leave one at a religious place on Earth that struck him particularly. So thus the third ended up at Mont St. Michel.

If you suspend disbelief for a second, you can kind of draw a parallel between the moon worshipping catholic monks who built a monastery on the tip of a rocky island in Ireland in the 6th century, and the moon visitor who left a gift for the catholic monks living in a monastery on the tip of a rocky island in France. Or not. It's up to you whether you choose to believe the facts or the legend (A side note... anyone read Life of Pi? If he read it, I think our guide would have enjoyed it very much).



That's all I'll say at this time regarding the parallels between Skellig Michael and Mont St. Michel. There are also a world of differences. Refer back to another photo here of the Skellig monastery. Whereas it was remote, simple, isolated, and had an eerie sense of space, Mont St. Michel was buzzing with tourists. The single road leading up to the ornate church at the summit was bulging was souvenir hockers trying to intice you with Mont St. Michel snowglobes (made in China). This street is refered to as "the village". In the church, our guide pointed out a statue of Michael with a balance in one hand. Since he is associated with judgement day, the balance is to weigh the souls of us men and women. The light souls will rise to heaven, while those weighed down with sin will fall down to hell. Or, in the peak tourist season of July and August, they need travel down no further than the village...

"...And we had the pagans in Britain... And they built Stonehenge. One of the biggest henges in the world! No-one's built a henge like that ever since. No-one knows what the fuck a henge is..." - Eddie Izzard



We arrived in London on May 31 and rented a car to get to Oxford. This was my first experience of driving in Britain. As you all must know, cars are driven on the wrong side (ahem, I mean, left side... opposite of right is not always wrong...) of the road here. What's more, the driver sits on what we would call the passenger side of the vehicle. This is actually what threw me off a little at first, as I'm used to being in a certain position relative to the lanes on the road. Monika got a little antsy a couple times when I drifted closer to the curb or shoulder than she would have liked. After a few minutes, though, that was no longer a problem either. Driving manual with the stick in the left hand wasn't really a big deal at all, mostly thanks to the fact that the clutch, brake, and gas are still in their usual North American configuration. Road junctions and roundabouts were quite new and different, but manageable as long as you stay concentrated at all times on exactly what it is you're doing.



We stopped in Oxford where we stayed with Monika's friend Nuala who is doing her phD there. We got to see some the university, and got a very good tour of some of the local pubs. The beer and food was good, as was the company, since we shared the evening with Nuala and some of her collegemates and friends.


The next stop was Stonehenge. One of the problems with the most amazing places on Earth is that they often become tourist traps. This, of course, detracts from the amazement these sites should evoke. Before travelling to Europe, I read up on people's experiences from their visits to Stonehenge. Basically you travel in a horde of tourists along a cordoned path around the stones, never getting a chance to actually walk up to or between any of them or to be any further than a metre away from the next person. The site is also next to a road which gets pretty busy and loud during the day. It cuts so close that many people stop on the shoulder and just snap pictures through the fence since it's not really much further than the cordoned path.





Luckily, you can book to see the Henge outside of regular hours, when they let you in for an hour to walk freely amongst the stones. Best of all, these touring hours are limited to 25 people at a time. So, we got up at "the ungodly hour" (as it was aptly put by Chris, Nuala's housemate) of 4:15 am and headed off for our reserved touring at 6:15. But getting to go right up to the stones, and getting to just stroll around with so few people about (even the traffic on the road was light), made it totally worth it. It allowed us to actually soak in some of the mystery of the site, without having it all dispersed in a tumult.