Normandy: historical, windy, and short on butter

We went to Mont Saint-Michel – a tidal island with a medieval village perched there and a gothic abbey at the very top. I would describe the weather as poor due to wind. My legal assessment of the wind speed was about 80 mph and one of my tour mates looked it up and it was 24 mph so I was fairly close:

In addition to being windy, Mont Saint-Michel is struggling with a butter shortage – and so when I stopped for lunch with a couple of my tour-mates, we were given this nice basket of bread for 3 full-grown adults. We asked for some butter and, after frowning at us, the waiter brought us this pat of butter to share: (Later on in the meal, the three of us decided to bravely ask for more butter and an actual heated and gesticulative discussion occurred between two of the waiters and – after looking at us like they caught us skipping out on the bill – they came back with another single pat of butter so the shortage must be serious.)

Note: We told our heartbreaking couldn’t get enough butter story at dinner and we had other tour-mates reveal that they too could not get all the butter they wanted here in northern France. Perplexed, we, as a group, took our troubles to our Gate 1 tour manager, Robby. It’s his job to shepherd us around France and give us historical facts about sites.

It seems a reasonable stretch to ask him to help us get more butter and so we did and – in testament to Gate 1 customer service, Robby’s dedicated himself to getting us as much butter as 13 travelers require and the kicker here is that Robby doesn’t even care about butter and – in fact – has never buttered a piece of bread or toast or muffin – but he’s a professional and doesn’t belittle our hobbies.

Mont Saint-Michel is a very crowded UNESCO site – and receives about 3 million visitors a year – the most-visited attraction outside of Paris. It felt that crowded today…these are the people walking ahead of me… especially interesting since the actual island population is only 23.

Here’s how it looks at high tide:

Here’s low tide, with the tides moving in and out at up to 3.7 miles per hour. Due to that vast and shallow bay you see below – coupled with a strong Atlantic water flow across that bay – the tides are famous for being the fastest in continental Europe:

One of the reasons I picked this Gate 1 bus tour is that it fit within the date parameters of a longer trip – and it got me up to the Normandy Beach area for a bit. I’m giving up travel control for simplicity – and so we ended up staying in a town I would not have picked for a Normandy visit. But wow – Cabourg is gorgeous!

Cabourg is a seaside resort town – mostly developed in the 19th century and packed with Belle Epoque architecture. Gate 1 even put us up at the Grand Hotel:

Right in front of the hotel is a wide beach and the Promenade Marcel Proust – named for the writer, who liked to come here to write, staying in the Grand Hotel. In his novels, the town called Balbec is really Cabourg. This is the longest pedestrian beach promenade in Europe at 3.6km.

Here’s a couple of the buildings near our hotel:

You readers know that my grasp of history (and art!) is limited. What I’ve come to understand has been hard won – dates, dynasties, lineage, battles – they don’t stay in my head and it becomes a swirling mess of Peters and Catherines and Richards. It drove Ron nuts – because I can list useless things like the non-stop flight schedules from SeaTac to every city in Europe and the color history of North Face Denali jacket design.

But travel with Ron meant that, eventually, I would come to understand a fair amount about WW2. We planned to go to Normandy together – it was part of the trip we had planned right before he got sick. The area is full of museums – there are about 19 various war museums – and we only got to one in Caen so I need to return. My only real goal for this first Normandy visit was to see Omaha Beach in person and to at least stand there – where 34,000 Americans came ashore on June 6, 1944 – with 2400 casualties.

I am silenced by the sacrifices made there – the unquestioning bravery and determination – the commitment to morality and righteousness. That’s the larger story for me as well – the small rebellions, the sweeping military plans – the moral world, gathered together to overcome such a menace in such recent history.

It makes me feel a lot of things – proud, but also concerned – because as I write this, I see that Germany’s extreme right AfD party just won an election in Saxony – with 43% of the total vote. One of their leaders – Bjorn Hocke – has been fined twice by a German court for using a banned Nazi phrase – Everything for Germany – which was a slogan of the Nazi stormtroopers and engraved on their daggers. Their platform includes opposing climate change mitigation and stating that Islam does not belong in Germany. They’re anti-abortion, increasingly pro-Russian, and oppose same-sex marriage. They want to ban the sale of kosher meat.

And then this: in 2017, 10 AfD members who have been elected to German Federal Parliament (Bundestag) were found to have a little Facebook group to share thoughts/ideas/atrocities and they posted a meme that showed Anne Frank’s face on a pizza box with the words fresh from the oven.

I won’t post that picture here. I’ll post this Caen Memorial Museum item instead and just finish by saying that I sometimes think I don’t understand anything about the world at all:

Let’s talk about something else. Here’s my “air conditioning” control at the Cabourg Grand Hotel:

It appears to offer me the following temperature options – 5, 10 and 15 degrees Celsius. This equates to 41, 50 and 59 degrees as the offerings for my room, which is funny, because at no point did I get my room cooler than 74 degrees and I could feel no air flow from any vent and I know it’s mean to say, but I think that a lot of European climate control devices are merely decorative.

We also got to spend an evening in St. Malo, France – in the Brittany region – which was featured in the novel and TV series All the Light We Cannot See. St. Malo was 80% destroyed in WW2 because the Nazis had made the city a fortress in their Atlantic Wall. After D-Day, the Allies decided they needed access to a major port like St. Malo and decided to capture it. The subsequent battle with German forces left the city looking like this, with 680 buildings destroyed:

The city made the decision to rebuild a replica of the old city – starting in 1947 and working through about 1960 – and sorted through 500,000 cubic meters of rubble to save the building material they could (picture a massive room that is 8 football fields long – filled with debris). And so St Malo today is just a beautiful small city:

In (questionable?) keeping with the city decision to maintain the architectural integrity, St. Malo highlights included this brutalist-style bathroom, decorated with these tall wooden sticks:

These two friendly whippets:

It turns out that St. Malo is also famous for creating a pastry that I discovered a few years ago called a Kouign-amann. There’s a bakery back home that sells them – and based on doing no research but hearing the word “Amman” in them, which is in Jordan, I decided and long assumed that it’s a Lebanese pastry;)

But – as ever, I’m wrong. The Kouign-amann is from St. Malo. The name translates to butter cake and the batter required to make these is apparently 30% butter – and a special high-fat, salted butter from the Brittany region is required and if maybe this is the reason that the restaurants can’t serve me butter – they need it for these pastries – well I might be okay with that.

Here’s one of the bakeries:

And here are a couple shots of these beautiful treats. This is one of the top baked goods of my entire life. For my fellow Great British Baking Show friends – these pastries display the most impressive lamination I’ve ever seen:

That’s it from Normandy and Brittany. Our amiable little group of 13 – butter-eaters co-existing with non-butter-eaters – is heading down to the Loire Valley so I’ll talk with you in a few days.