Our Week with Chris

Our egg guy's new truck.

We arrived home Friday night and Saturday was kind of a rest and recovery day after three jam-packed days in Paris. Lisa and I went to the Saturday market, though, and it was nice to see all our favorite vendors. We had a nice chat with the people we buy apples from (they both held up the rest of the line just to talk to us!) and the guy we buy eggs from had purchased a new truck in our absence. He was very proud of this truck.

Free water outside the Franco-American Institute.
That's the American part.

Sundays are pretty slow days around here since most everything is closed. In the afternoon, though, I took Chris into central Rennes to show him around the city a little bit. We saw many of the same things as when Sarah was here (the cathedral, the tourist office, the outside of the city hall and the opera) but we also went into two churches I'd never seen before: Saint Sauveur (which was small and dark, but had several worshipers inside) and Saint Aubin (a modern, late 19th/early 20th century neo-Gothic church which was smaller on the inside than I expected).

Vegetarian Haggis for Tuesday's dinner!

On Monday, I went with Chris to Mont-Saint-Michel, an obvious must-see for anyone who comes to visit us. Unfortunately, Lisa had to stay home and tutor as well as practice her French with some locals. I thought it was supposed to rain, but it turned into a surprisingly nice day as we ate our picnic lunch outside. It was very crowded, too, much more so than when we went in December or with Jimmy and Jenny in January. There were lots of families with little kids there; I guess that's what you do on your two-week Easter vacation - take your kids to Mont-Saint-Michel! Other than that, though, there wasn't much new for me. On my fourth visit, it all seemed like old hat. Changes are coming, though. April 28th was the last day that cars could drive out on the causeway and park at the foot of the mount. Now you have to park some distance away on the mainland and take a shuttle. This is all part of the plan to remove the causeway by 2014. After we returned to Rennes that afternoon, we met Lisa and went to English Club, which was rather sparsely attended, what with it still being Easter vacation and all.

Parliament tour with Gobelin tapestry in the background.

Tuesday, we went to a lunch-time piano concert. Chris really likes classical concerts and this was the only one we could find in Rennes during his week here. There were plenty advertised for the week after he left, though, and all I can figure is that Easter vacation means the art scene in Rennes shuts down, too! Anyway, it was a benefit concert for Rennes' sister city in Japan and it was put on at the International House of Rennes (which always sounds to me like "International House of Pancakes"). Lunch was included in the price, which was nice, and the pianist was pretty good. He played Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin and he got better as he went along - there were several missed notes in the Beethoven, but the Chopin sounded near-perfect. After the concert, Lisa and Chris took the tour of the parliament building (the same one we did with Sarah, but with a different tour guide, so Lisa learned a few new facts) while I came home to get groceries and start on dinner. We re-created the vegetarian haggis we had at Henderson's in Edinburgh (recipe here), and rather successfully, too, I might add!

Stained-glass window in Dinan.

On Wednesday, I went with Chris to Normandy to see the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach while Lisa stayed home to tutor and missed out on yet another opportunity to visit her favorite region of France. Turns out, it's much harder to get to without a car! We took a train to Bayeux, then waited half an hour for a bus that took us to the cemetery, about a half-hour ride. Again, it was supposed to be a cold, windy, rainy day, but we managed to avoid most of the rain and it was actually partly sunny most of the time we were there. It was very windy, though, which dampened the experience a bit! Since I'd seen the cemetery and the beach in January with Jimmy and Jenny, I wasn't expecting much new. But Chris and I joined a free guided tour, led by a retired British history teacher who now works at the cemetery, and I learned a few more things about the site. He showed us the "wall of the missing," the grave of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. who landed at Utah Beach at age 56 and died of a heart attack a month later, and the graves of two brothers who inspired "Saving Private Ryan." It was very interesting and I'm glad we did. Unfortunately, though, we were on a tight schedule because there was only one bus back to Bayeux and the train station all afternoon!

Us in Dinan.

Chris left Thursday afternoon to spend the night in Paris before flying home early Friday morning. Before he did, though, we all took the bus to Dinan Thursday morning. I had been there with Sarah, but Lisa hadn't been back since our first trip there way back in September. It was another cloudy, rainy spring day in Brittany (although there were some occasional breaks in the rain). We saw quite a bit of the town - the ramparts, the churches (in one of which the organist was practicing), and the stores.

Hurdy gurdy player in Dinan.

Plus, we discovered that Thursday is market day in Dinan, so we enjoyed that for a bit. It's different from our Saturday market in Cesson in that there were more vendors of clothes and jewelry and crafts than food (which is the opposite of our market). We also were serenaded by a guy playing a hurdy gurdy.

Where Aaron got his Baedeker.

The best part of the trip for me, though, was that I happened to see a Baedaker guidebook in the window of an antique store and we went in for a look. This one was in French, from 1903 and for Paris. We saw that the price inside the front cover was "650" so we asked the proprietor, is it six hundred and fifty euros? To which he replied, "No, no six euros and fifty cents!" That's about a quarter of the price of the one I bought in Cambridge, so we snapped it up for my ever-increasing collection! After walking around, we went to a little tea shop to get out of the rain, before heading back to the bus stop to make sure Chris got back to Rennes to collect his bags and get to the train station on time.

Chris on his way.

It was an all-around good visit from Chris (and we hope had a good time, too!). Even though we're now repeating a lot of things with our visitors, it seems like there are always a few new things to discover at these places, keeping them interesting for us, too.  We look forward to seeing Chris again soon stateside.