History Major Geek Out Time-- Normandy

This past weekend I went to Normandy. I'm super behind on my posts because I had a huge presentation due and I'm kind of sick! I'll do my best to catch up this weekend. Look out for Normandy, followed by a summary of the week and then Fontainebleau!

We had to get up at a pretty ungodly hour for Normandie, so the sun came up after we left the outskirts of Paris. The bus was completely silent while we all went back to sleep wishing for our warm beds. Our first stop, around 2.5-3 hours later, was the D-Day Museum. It had a really awesome presentation about the origins of World War II and some extremely poignant depictions of civilian casualties. I had never been able to appreciate before how real World War II was to Europe. I saw pictures of people taken from this very region and deported to concentration camps because of their religious or political beliefs. I witnessed footage of towns completely razed by Allied planes freeing France with the following voice over by an American: "It is well worth temporary destruction to rid ourselves of Nazi tyranny." Easy for you to say when it's not your cathedral, your market, your home. Over the course of the trip, I saw numbers of civilian casualties that made my head spin. In France, thousands upon thousands of innocent citizens were killed during the Allied recapture of France by Allied bombs and soldiers. We haven't had a war on our soil since 1865 (I'll exclude Pearl Harbor for the sake of argument) and I think our collective memory of the horror of war has been lost. We are so willing to send soldiers overseas to "free" other people, and while our cause may be noble, I think we fail to grasp the reality of what happens to a country when war is fought on its territory. War creates scars that require ages to heal, not a generation or two. There is a major difference in terms of tangibility when war is fought in your home, in the territory that you thought was safe. World War II has never seemed more real to me.

Stalin with Lenin in the background. Oh dear.

Picasso and the Spanish Civil War

They are so, so, so young.

Besides being a really cool statue, one of the young IES chaperones, a guy friend and I also realized here that we needed to visit more French tourist sites together because we formed the holy trinity of things you might need to know about France: a history major, an art history major, and a literature major :-).

There was also an exhibit on the Cold War. It was really interesting to see from a European perspective.

Here the U.S. is portrayed in the following way: "[it's] ambition was to win over the world to its liberal model and establish a social order based on the law of supply and demand, private enterprise, and faith in God. Against this messianic stance...the Soviet Union...presented the idea of a fair deal for all in the best of godless worlds."

 Piece of the Berlin Wall!

After the exhibit, we went to our hotel for the evening at Asnelles-sur-Mer. It was like 70 degrees out so we all went to the beach and took awesome sunset pictures.

After a mediocre dinner in which dividing up the cider exactly evenly played a starring role, we wandered around town a little bit in search of a bar. Apparently students, party of 30 was not very popular and we didn't get in anywhere. We instead returned to the lobby of our hotel and played mafia as if we were back in summer camp. All 30 of us sat around and talked until a reasonable hour and then we all went to bed. It was a great evening.

The next morning, we got to pull off at a scherneblick or however Dad says it. From here you could see most of the six embarkation points.

This last photo is a model of the coastline in the area. The Allies had six embarkation points. In two places, such as Asnelles-sur-mer, where we were here, the Allies decided to build makeshift ports. They managed to build two (a bigger one by the British here, a smaller one elsewhere by the Americans) while under German fire, battling the weather, and racing against the clock to get supply lines flowing into France before their troops starved.

This was in the memorial hall and made me really want to watch the movie!

Omaha Beach. Hard to believe 6,000 Americans died in three hours on something that beautiful.

The cemetery is beautiful too. 

After this sobering experience, we headed back to the bus and subsequently back to Paris. My weekend, however, did not end with Normandy.

I went to church with a friend for the first time since I'd been in France. It was a two hour service in a meeting room, complete with metal folding chairs and no heat (not that there's heat in France anywhere). Nonetheless, it was an amazing, fulfilling experience! The people I met afterwards were incredibly friendly as well. It was a great few hours. My day from there continued to be glorious: I discovered the wonder that is "Breakfast in America." It's basically an island of home in the middle of a foreign land. They came and asked for our order in English, the coffee is bottomless and comes in reasonably sized mugs, the bacon looks and tastes like bacon... it's truly an amazing experience. I had a milkshake and a stack of chocolate chip pancakes and some bacon. If it sounds like a lot, it was. I had a stomach ache for the next few hours and ate my next meal a full 10 hours later, and then only because I felt guilty for only having one meal the entire day. 

So finishes the weekend! Look out for my week and weekend experiences to come up tomorrow! I'm determined to get it done :-).

Bonsoir!!