Laura en France: Just visiting castles, no big deal.

This weekend IES took a field trip to Mont Saint-Michel, an island with an abbey about two hours away from Nantes. We got on the bus at 7:45 and headed off. The kids on the bus went snore snore snore and we eventually woke up to a view of Mont Saint-Michel off in the distance.

We walked to the top and saw the gorgeous view from there. It was mostly dry around the mountain, surrounded by marshy clay-y wetland area, but I was talking to my family about it later in the weekend and they were telling me that it's only like that at low tide. At high tide, the water rushes in at a dramatic speed; it used to be a huge danger because people would go out searching for shells and get trapped in slightly higher land because the water approached the island with the "speed of galloping horses." Apparently since it's all pretty flat, the tide is late but once it comes, it rises very quickly.

There was a pretty garden in the middle of the top where the commune was:

We took a lot of pictures from the top of Mont Saint-Michel and walked through the abbey, seeing all the ancient rooms where monks ate, prayed and did other monkly things (notice I didn't say monkey... I was tempted.) It was a fitting adventure after having watched "Des hommes et des dieux" (The english title is "Of Gods and Men"), a french film about Cistercian monks who choose to stay and stand their ground when confronted by fundamentalists in Africa. It is a touching film, a little confusing in french, but it focuses more on the human aspect than the religious and there is not a lot of conversation so I definitely got most of it without having to know the details of its historic context, etc. I need to see a comedy here, though; all the movies I've been watching have been phenomenal but so depressing! It is another film I recommend to everyone, though. It's very good and my family told me it's up for a lot of international film awards. Anyway, it was very fitting for me to visit this beautiful abbey after having watched a movie about monks. I'm living a themed life.

We traversed back to the base of Mont Saint-Michel and I took another picture of it in all its glory...

After that, we drove another half hour or so to Saint-Malo, a walled port city in Bretagne on the English Channel. We traversed the wall around the city and then were free to explore as we wanted.

The architecture was breathtaking...

... But it was hard to tear our eyes away from the scenery!

We found big huge rocky mountains that were so easy to climb that we had to go to the top of the tallest one. This is me and my friend Abigail from Bates College in Maine:

There were beautiful ships at the port...

...And there were beautiful babes at the beach...

We walked around the town, got some treats at boulangeries and drank hot chocolate at a place where we should have been getting ice cream (apparently the place we went was renowned for its ice cream desserts... we saw far too many pass by us to other customers.) After our snack and rest time we saw some little markets with fruits de la mer outside...

And we got so excited that we just had to go back to the beach and jump for joy.

Elise from California, me, and Preston from Texas jumping for joy on the beach.

Okay, so these pictures and this story might be a tiny bit out of sequence. But I'm sitting on my bed writing this and it keeps falling apart which is very stressful because I have no clue when it's going to collapse on me and so I'm on the edge of my seat at every moment! Well, literally I'm on the edge of my bed. But I'm using it as a seat so I'm basically sitting at the edge of my seat as I write this. Also I had a cup of tea this afternoon and I think (know) it had a fair bit of caffeine in it because I am chatterin' away like a chipmunk here. Long and off-topic story short, we took a lot of happy pictures, had a grand old time exploring and climbing and jumping for joy, I have cool friends...