Carentan/ Cherbourg (Update mini series 2/5)

I met Lydia at the Thanksgiving dinner hosted by Michelle in Ouistreham and really clicked with her. She's got a great sense of humor, an even better knowledge of WW2 and is tons of fun. She was also part of the group that came to Coutances and out to Mont Saint Michel. It had been a while since we had seen each other, and since she was always challenging that Carentan is even smaller than Coutances, I had to go check it out for myself.

Turns out she really wasn't lying. It's not a bad city to be in, but it is small like Coutances. There is a beautiful like harbor/quai which is connected to canals leading out to the ocean. There's a park area around it, and the grass, trees and sailboats bobbing in the water make for a pretty site. She showed me the collège where she works and lives and also the lycée. The courtyard area actually has palm trees in it! It's a surprising site, but Normandy winters are usually mild enough that the palms can handle it.

After a pizza lunch and a tour of the town, we took a train to Cherbourg, only about 30 minutes away, to visit other assistants up there. Cherbourg is a pretty big city, important because of it's large harbor (the titanic actually stopped there) , which means a fair amount of Brits also come over easily to visit and there's quite a large number of shops and so on.

A number of the assistants live in a high school flat, with great accommodations like.... an extra bed and couch! As my travel continues my standards for what is required for a sleeping surface have degraded to “some floor space only slightly smaller than my body... or a chair” so a bed or couch seems pretty lush! In any case, my acquaintances Josh and James, Lydia and I headed to a cafe. The rest of the day/ evening/ wee hours of the morning were spent drinking one substance or another. We went from café, to bar, to another bar where a Couch Surfing meet up was being held, to night club, to kebab place and home. We didn't get in until around 4am, and all went to sleep fairly quickly after that. The next day Lydia and I were able to take the same train to our respective homes. James was a gentleman and walked us to the train station to wait, preceded by a trip to McDo for hangover fries, burgers and sodas. It was a really fantastic weekend and I have plans to visit again, well rested and ready to go out!

Cité de la Mer- Cherbourg

On Sunday I made a trip to Cherbourg to visit Cité de la Mer. Cité de la Mer is the tallest (deepest?) aquarium in Europe and some cool exhibits. It's definitely geared towards children but it's fun all the same. We drove up there in the grey morning, which was a nice change from the train. After getting our tickets we first took the tour with audio guide of the submarine. IT'S HUGE! I can't imagine living in that confined space and not seeing the light of day for several months with 135 other people.

I couldn't even fit the whole thing in one photo!

We finished the audio guides just in time to head over to the “attraction.” We weren't really sure what this entailed, but it turned out to be ok. Basically there's this whole back story they've created about how our groups is going to be exploring the next frontier, the bottom of the sea. They made you go through these different “training modules” which are pretty hilariously stupid and then go “on the voyage” in one of those flight simulator type things. After that you are sat down to watch a video of the news conference announcing the epic trip to the world. They piece into the video small snippets from the “training modules” that we had just done to actually have us on the “news conference.” Overall, cute, not super impressive, but like most things there, probably a lot cooler if I was 10.

Meike and I then headed over to the main attraction, the aquarium. The aquarium was 2 stories high and you could look at it from three different levels. At the very bottom you could look up to the top giving a little mermaid effect to it.

"Look at this stuff, isn't it neat? Wouldn't you think my collection's complete? "

There were all kinds of cool fish swimming around with different designs and bright colors. They also had some specialty type small tanks with other fish in them and a large touch tank with sting rays and shark-type looking things. They looked like they were hungry for fingers, ready to jump out of the tank and there was no museum guide or anything so Meike and I kept our distance from that one.

Les poissons de confiture. Ok, the french for jellyfish is actually "la méduse" but I like my name a lot better.

Because of our timing and skipping some of the younger interactive sections, our trip to Cherbourg was pretty short. Nothing is open on Sunday, so we headed back soon after leaving the museum. A fun day out to try something new!