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Published: March 12th 2006
Canadian Poster
Here's the poster given to me at the tourist office. I personally like it - it is on my wall to brighten up the whiteness.Dieppe + Mont St. Michel
As I believe that I will perpetually begin to forget all the wonderful places I've been, I think it's important to keep up with my trips. My memory is only as great as I allow it to be. So without further adieu, I now present a very condensed version of last weekend!
Saturday March 4 Alison and I headed on the train to head to
Dieppe generally for research purposes for my now-defunked part of a French Civilization project. It served its purpose like no one's business, and filled me with Canadian pride. I shall explain. 1942. WW2 is raging. British commanders decide that Dieppe is a good place to send the Canadian troops in an attempt to squash the Nazi occupation in France. So they go. A failed attempt to say the least and almost 3000 Canadian soldiers are killed, wounded or taken prisoner out of 5000. That's not the greatest odds. The Dieppe raid though, became a warm-up, or a lesson, for the subsequent Normandy raids on D-Day. To put it simply, those in Dieppe still love Canada and put much attention to commemorating the efforts of the soldiers in 1942.
To Be Read:
Yes. Read it. Informative. Gives you the right numbers. We headed to the tourist office to get the best route along the beach and we mentioned that I was Canadian. The woman smiled, said she'd be a minute, and then went into the back. In a minute, she was holding a poster. My only description is that it is a bloody maple leaf. But you can look for yourselves. At the bottom is written: "Combien ont su pourquoi. Combien sont morts sachant. Combien n'ont pas su quoi." ("How many knew for what. How many died knowing. How many knew not what.")
From this point, we walked around the town, looking at all the Canadian memorials, me taking pictures of them for research purposes, all the while loving Dieppe more and more due to them loving my country! We walked up to the Castle, which is also a museum now, but decided to skip the actual museum and stood on the cliffs, taking pictures, and imagining how different this place looked 64 years ago... i.e. No construction cranes, no paved streets below, and the lack of 100 cars at the beach.
We headed back around 4:30 as we didn't have much to do after that point and
Old Building
I'm pretty sure this is a building that has been in Dieppe since the 1800s. If not... this is a random building along the beach! would have to wait until 6:30 for dinner. And, thus, that was Dieppe. (I told you it was generally condensed!)
Sunday March 5 We were scheduled to meet at 8:45am to take the bus ride to Mont St. Michel. As always, we didn't really go anywhere until around 9:20am. No big deal really. I sang to my MP3 player and bugged Alison beside me. 3 hours later, we were at Mont St. Michel. It's definitely a must-see for everyone coming to France. It's an old abbey built in 700something. It used to be completely covered with water - and when the tide went out, it's possible to walk across towards it. However, this was used as a defense mechanism as the water comes in VERY quickly and any who are walking across towards the abbey would drown immediately. But these days, it's rare for it to be a real island anymore due to the man-made bridge leading towards it that pushes the water back.
There's no other way to describe this place aside from pictures, so I'll let them do all the talking. (+ My added dialogue)
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