The Adventure Begins!

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After a comfy night's sleep in London, it was up at 6:30am in time to enjoy the free breakfast (something which John couldn't quite get over...I tried to explain that, technically, the price of the breakfast was in with the price of the room, but he didn't seem too interested!). Have to say, it was better than I expected it to be-fried egg, sausage, beans, bacon and toast, and all washed down with juice and a nice cuppa. We were all finished and checked out by 7:30, and made the short walk across the road to St Pancras Station to catch our Eurostar to France.

It was a bit of a scary start to the holiday; after all my stressing that things were going to go majorly wrong with our hotels, trains and pretty much everything else, I felt completely justified in my worrying when my Eurostar ticket wasn't accepted by the check-in machines. At that point, I almost turned on my heel and decided against the whole thing ;o) However, once I went up to the counter and was basically waved in immediately, I decided to be a grown up about it all, and continue on (plus, John had already checked in by this point, and I'm not sure just how well he would have survived on his own!). We didn't really have all that long to wait for the train, but we still made time for an exciting moment when David Gray walked past us in the departure lounge (we have a habit of seeing famous people on every holiday we go on-I can't see us ever beating the random 'bumping into David Blaine on the Champs-Elysees' though). I was feeling a bit deflated at this point after realising our train was also going to Disneyland-all those excited kids running around, and I wanted to be part of it so badly! There were even Disneyland cast members on board the train-were they purposely trying to torture me?! Gah. I knew I should just be grateful for the holiday I was actually having, but it was really hard!

Anyway, apart from that, the journey was really easy and quick (only about 80 mins) and we were in Lille for 11:15am. I'd booked a hotel really near the Lille stations, so finding it was really easy-just out of the Lille Europe and a two minute walk down the road. Unfortunately, we were too early to check in, but the guy on reception was really nice and let us dump our backpacks so we could go out into the city. From the hotel to the centre of the city was a nice five minute walk down a little shopping street until we reached the Place du Theatre. We liked the city immediately-bustling, but also friendly and relaxed. It actually reminded us a bit of Newcastle on a busy day (albeit minus the charvas)-it even had the annoying drizzly rain! We didn't have too long at this point before our Flander's Fields tour, so it was just a case of having a bit of a wander around and soaking everything up, seeing the main sights (Belfry, Le Grand Place etc). We did have time to have a walk through the streets of Vieux Lille for an hour or so, which I LOVED-really pretty, and very French. It really helped our heads start to come round to the fact that the trip had finally started and we were actually in France! :o) At about half twelve, it was time to make our way to Place Rihour (a small square just off the Grand Place) where we were due to pick up our tour tickets from the tourist office (which incidentally was in a very nice, but entirely random, fifteenth century building-a bit fancy for a standard tourist office if you ask me, but I guess they felt like they needed to do something with it!).

Now, technically, most of our Flanders tour did not feature Lille in any way, but as it was done on our Lille day, I'm including it in this blog (finding all the random areas we visited would be way too much hassle!). We'd booked the tour weeks in advance when I'd very excitedly seen it on the tourist board website, and it cost around 40 Euros each...which was well worth it. The bus arrived just before one, and we immediately felt out of place amongst a group of tourists who were basically either very cockney or very posh and all pretty old lol. They were probably all very confused at the sight of two 24 year old Geordies-still, I don't feel ashamed of the fact that I'm a history nerd, and it didn't stop my general excitement at the thought of seeing a lot of fields and cemeteries either (yeah, I'm lame!). The tour was done by an old French lady who was very sweet-and to her credit, she didn't get pissed at the people on the coach who spent most of their time complaining when her English wasn't completely perfect (I'd love to see them conduct the tour in French), or the old man sat opposite us who was apparently very smug about Britain saving the French people in the War lol (I'm going to let him off because there is a good possibility that he was a WW2 veteran, but the other people just deserved a slapping!). It took a while to get to our first main destination, Messines, and she kept us occupied with general history of the war and handouts about the places we'd be visiting (as John said, it was like being on a school trip!)-we also went through the pretty town of Kemmel, where there were a good few dramatic war memorials (unfortunately, I was so busy listening to the story of the war, I didn't get the camera out!). After about an hour, we reached the Irish Round Tower, which was the first major monument on the trip-unfortunately, when we arrived it was pissing it down with rain, so I decided to stay on the bus and let John brave the weather to get the photos! A couple of minutes drive from the tower was the Messines Ridge Cemetery, a pretty place overlooking the Flanders battlefields, so I made an effort to climb out and take a look around. It was really lovely, and well-kept, though the sight of the graves simply stating 'A Soldier of the Great War' was quite sobering. There were just dozens of unknown graves throughout the day and it's amazing that after so many years, there are still so many unidentified soldiers (although, of course, it's really not surprising given the amount of deaths that could occur just on single days). After the cemetery, we stayed in Messines and continued onto a huge mine trench. Messines was the site of one of the greatest victories in the war, after 19 mines were detonated underneath German lines, and one of the trenches left by the mines has now been turned into a commemorative lake. It was, again, really beautiful-our guide told us that couples actually go down there to get engaged (which I thought was a bit weird, to be honest!)-and absolutely HUGE. There were loads of lillies on the surface, and it was just a nice, peaceful place, which was quite disconcerting considering what it represents.

From Messines, we then continued onto the town of Ypres, which I'd been really looking forward to visiting. We were given 45 minutes to go off on our own and look around, which unfortunately didn't leave us with enough time to visit the 'In Flander's Fields' museum (I WILL get there one day though!), but we did get to see a fair bit of the town. Pretty much the whole place had been destroyed in the war, but had been rebuilt to look pretty much exactly as it did at the start of the 20th century, and they did a great job-it genuinely looked like a really old area (not unlike Durham, actually). There was a brass band playing outside the gorgeous Cloth Hall, which really added to the nice atmosphere of the place, and we just really liked it there. Most of the time we spent there was at the Menin Gate, a big memorial to the missing of the British and Empire armies. The gate was originally passed through by British soldiers on the way to the front line, and the space was offered up to the British government by the people of Ypres for use as a memorial after the war. It's now a giant archway, and inside has the names of hundreds of missing soldiers. We climbed up to the top where there were some nice views of the Ypres rooftops-although we soon got sick of the sight of teenagers scoring with eachother up there and headed back to the town centre! We had a bit of time to look around the shops on the way back, and then all too soon, had to get back on the bus.

There was quite a bit to see on the way back to Lille: first, we stopped at Essex Farm Cemetery, where John McRae wrote the 'In Flander's Fields' poem. Essex Farm was the site of some Advanced Dressing Stations, and as a result, a cemetery was created nearby to bury the wounded. The stations were really small, damp and dark, and again just really got across the conditions both the soldiers and medical staff had to deal with during the war. From there, we moved onto an industrial estate near Boezinghe, where (very randomly) there was an existing trench in the middle of two large factories. I have no idea what those factories were producing or destroying, but the place smelt really bad and as a result, it wasn't the nicest part of the tour. The real trench was only visible through a metal grate and was mostly underwater, but a replica had been built around it to show roughly what it would have been like. There was barely any space for walking around and it was all a lot more wind-ey and maze-like than I imagined (I don't know what I pictured in my mind, but I think it was just more of a small straight line). Our final stop on the tour was Tynecot Cemetery (although on the way we did pass a really interesting and poignant German cemetery at Langemark). John and I were very interested in visiting this, because it was actually named by the Northumbrian Fusiliers who were fighting in the area-they saw a resemblance between the guard posts in the middle of the cemetery and Tyneside worker's cottages (aka Tynecots). Our tour guide was actually very excited to learn that we were from Newcastle upon Tyne and announced it dramatically to the whole tour group lol-who were rather less impressed, it has to be said! There was a small museum at the entrance to the cemetery with really emotional letters and belongings of the soldiers, as well as a video naming many of the soldiers buried there. It really added to the whole experience of walking around the huge cemetery-the only thing I'll say is that it's a shame Tynecot is positioned so it has to be last on the tour, because it really would have added a lot more gravitas to the whole day had we been able to go there first. Never mind...it was a really excellent tour anyway, and I've fulfilled a big ambition by seeing the battlefields now :o) We ended up getting back to Lille a fair bit later than expected, thanks to our tour guide and bus driver combining to make a complete mess of showing us a DVD on the way back. They just could not get the sound working, and rather than just give up, they insisted on leaving us waiting in the carpark while they fixed it-and when they finally got it going, it only lasted about ten minutes and was actually very uninteresting (although narrated by Michael Palin, which was pretty cool!). One good thing it had going for it was that it meant our tour guide stopped talking; her microphone had broken while we were in Lille, and as a result she had to stand in the centre of the bus and speak loudly so everyone could hear what she was saying. Unfortunately, while (like I already said) she was really sweet, she had quite a bad habit of spitting when she talked-and John was right next to her! Poor thing...although I feel it was worse for me, trying not to laugh and appear really rude! Anyway, aside from that, we both really enjoyed ourselves-John had been a bit wary of spending the whole day looking at fields and graves, but he admitted he'd found it really interesting...and I just loved it. Considering we aren't fans of tours at all, I'd say it went pretty damn well :o)

We finally got back into Lille at half past six and were dropped off outside the Palais de Beaux Arts (which was a bit of a bonus, as it meant getting to walk through a part of the city we hadn't gotten to earlier!). We walked back down to the hotel down a pedestrian shopping street, and were completely amazed at how much busier the city had gotten. There were just crowds of people everywhere and the relaxed vibe had really gone out of the window a bit, to be honest! We got back to the hotel and checked in, and then just had a quick shower and a rest before heading back out for tea. We ended up at a restaurant on the corner of the Grand Place, which was full of snotty French waiters (saying that, we encountered a lot of snotty waiters on this holiday-I think it's because we're just more used to friendly American people serving us when we're on holiday!) and really crappy food! It sounded nice on the menu, but did not turn out as we'd hoped...I ended up with truly disgusting beef carpaccio and John had a burger made up of raw mince, big slices of onion and dry fried egg. Yummy. He did enjoy his french lager though, so at least that's one plus! Rather unsurprisingly, we decided not to risk dessert and as we were getting quite tired (and the streets were filling up with hen nights, stag dos and rather scary-looking french charvas...as well as an insane amount of rubbish on the streets) we decided it was time to go back to the hotel for the night. We did, however, stop off at the Quick in the Euralille complex next to the hotel to get their version of a Smartie McFlurry, and sat outside as the sun started setting...which was nice :o) It's a shame we didn't get to see more of Lille really, as it did seem like a nice city (in the daytime at least) although I don't regret at all doing the Battlefields tour in our time there. It's a small place, so unless we had gone to the art museum or something like that, we might have gotten a bit bored with a whole day, so I think it worked out well in the end :o)

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