Mon voyage vers la belle France: The Family in France Part 1

Happy St. Patrick's day everyone!
I am sporting my Irish pride in lots of green and even though I am in not the most Irish country people still seemed geared up to visit some Irish pubs and maybe even sing a shanty or two. We will see how that goes. As many of you know my parents came to visit me last weekend and that is why there was no post, we were filling our time as best we good and then I was thrown right back into school work. I am going to do my parents' visit in two parts because we did two big trips and to discredit either would be a crime as they were independently really awesome. However, lets talk about some of the craziness. Apparently renting a car in this country is about as difficult as me trying to enroll in my French university, it took about as long with only a little less paperwork and that was because much of it had been online. My favorite was when they sent a guy to go find out the exchange rate of the day because they were trying to calculate a payment for a prepaid rental car. O the french and making things more difficult then they need to be. Then once we had the rental car we tried to get to their hotel but of course every street in Rennes seems to be one way and while this normally causes no problem for me because I go everywhere on foot it was quite the hijinx in our tiny little rental car. It also is insane cause the street signs are not visible until you already need to be in a turning lane but whatever we got there eventually! For those of you who know my mum dad and I you can imagine for yourself the ridiculous dialogue occurring while we trying to navigate a country that seems intent on avoiding another world war or invasion by simply confusing the heck out of the invaders (thanks dad for this observation) if you don't know my parents and I very well, or our enjoyment of sarcastic banter it definitely bordered on a Monty Python skit (if only we had british accents). So once at the hotel and parked we decided to go out and see what we might find for dinner. After a few false starts and my wandering delaying dinner a bit we found a restaurant called L'amour des pommes de terre. It translates to a love of potatoes. They were not kidding... seriously I have never seen more potatoes in my life. If you are ever in Rennes and are really really really hungry you should check it out, it is an experience you will remember for the rest of your life. I have never been so full! We decided to get an appetizer even thought the waiter sort of cautioned us against it, interesting in my opinion but we really had no idea what to expect. Mum got a fondue which came with two kinds of meat and two entire potatoes and a mini wheel of melted Mont d'Or, very good. I got tartiflette which came with enough salad to be my dinner for the rest of the week and a giant pas of potatoes. Dad's I believe was the most interesting, he was given a hot stone to cook the meat he was given and on the plate was also and I am not exaggerating here 5 potatoes, baked, au gratin and french fries. Any way you could cook a potato they had figured out how to do it very well and in large portions. He too got salad. I thought they might have to log roll us out of the restaurant. Anyways it was very good and lots of fun and we couldn't think about food well into the next day. We tried to turn in pretty early because it was Normandy the next morning and we had to get an early start. The Normandy beach visit started at the Caen WWII memorial which is one of the best museums in the world, with every exhibit in French, English and German it won an international peace prize for its testimony to the incredible forces of destruction during WWII. If you ever go make sure to catch the 15 minute movie on the D Day landings it is very well done and really sets the ton for the museum. After 2 hours in the museum (there is a lot to see) it was time to get in the car and try to find the beaches. We attempted to do this without anything but the map we bought at the gift store in the museum which was more of a commemorative map than anything else so basically I got very lucky and my Dad and I managed to figure things out on the way. We stopped at Juno, the main beach where the Canadians landed. Then we saw some of sword, the British landing spot. Then we moved on to Gold and Omaha. Our goal was to make it to the cemetery before it closed. The American military cemetery is really beautiful and maintained very well by the French who work there. They recently built a small museum at the cemetery which was also impressive. We were there until close and we able to see the lowering of the flags and they always play taps as the last flag comes down. It was incredibly moving. The cemetery has just over 9,000 graves and there are 41 sets of brothers buried in that one cemetery alone.
After the cemetery we continued on to Point du Hoc which is just beyond the cemetery and is the site of one of the worst sections of the beaches because there was an intense amount of bombing but for the most part we missed the guns on the top of the point and in order to stop them soldiers had to scale the cliffs and take out the guns individually. It was the reason why there were so many deaths on the American beaches because the Germans really had the high ground. The point is the only place where the craters formed by the bombs have not been filled in and it is very powerful to see how close we came to hitting the guns directly and somehow missed. The landscape is very beautiful but it is a solemn occasion. Once we finished we decided it was time for dinner so we ended up in Bayeux. After a walk around the city a couple of stops into some shops there we found a bistro. It was Friday so of course everyone had fish! It was amazing. I started with some sort of chowder like appetizer with scallops and lots of really good sauce. Then some sort of white fish with a white butter sauce. Dessert was an ice cream sundae. Amazing! Dad had had the best oysters of his life. All in all a great dinner. Getting home was a fiasco but after stopping paying attention to signs that were completely useless we found our way home. Post number two on this weekend coming soon. Hope you all enjoy your Irish pride!
Love from France!