Rennes, St. Malo, Mont St. Michel

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One of the excursions from CEA was to the Normandy and Brittany regions to visit Rennes (the capital of Brittany), St. Malo and Mont St. Michel.

Rennes is a nice-enough town. It has a beautiful parliament building that was recently rebuilt after a fire for a gigantic amount of money (I can’t remember exactly how much). Another interesting thing here is that signs appear in French and Breton (see the picture).

St. Malo is on the coast of the English Channel. It used to be an important wealthy area, mostly because of the profiteers (a nice French name for pirates) who were based there. They were famous for being fierce and taking things from ships around the area. The people there don’t like them to be called pirates; apparently there’s a difference if you board a ship to steal things from it and you have the permission of the King. The King liked them because they had money, because of their line of work, to support him and the things he wanted. St. Malo was also the home of the explorer Jacques Cartier, who is often credited with discovering Canada when he sailed up the St. Lawrence River in the mid-to-late 1500s. The old walls of the city still stand and we walked all the way around them. These walls are where most of the pictures I took are from.

We left St. Malo and went to a hotel/motel near Mont St. Michel to spend the night. It also had a campground for people with tents, and cabins (which is where we ended up sleeping). Nice enough . . . pretty fun. The next morning we left to visit Mont St. Michel, which is close enough to see from the entrance of the place we stayed. Mont St. Michel was built in 708 AD to be an abbey. It was built because the archangel Michael appeared in a dream to a Bishop telling him to build the abbey. The bishop waited because he wanted to be sure that he interpreted the dream right, so the angel appeared again to him. I think that the bishop still wasn’t totally convinced so the angel appeared a third time and put his thumb on the bishop’s forehead leaving a mark. This was convincing enough for the bishop and the abbey was built. It was raining on and off for most the time we were there, so it was kind of dreary, but still very beautiful. It is situated on kind of an isle that is surrounded by water during high tide, at least until a permanent causeway was built in the late 1800s. In all of its history, Mont St. Michel was never taken by the enemy (Britain), even during the 100 years war when the British took all of Normandy.

That’s all for now. . .

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