Adieu France, Hello England
I write this in our lovely four star campground in Roscoff, France, complete with waterslides and the usual infuriating keyboards for my typing displeasure. Later today we will board the ferry for Plymouth, England where it will be greatly relieving to be able to communicate with people again and be able to type properly too!
With the last leg and last country of our trip looming ahead of us, I'm feeling about an equal mixture of delight and dread. I'm looking forward to a real bed beneath me and a real roof above me. I'm looking forward to creature comforts like toilets with seats that I don't have to pay for and sweet, sweet personal space. But I'm most assuredly not looking forward to the conclusion of this grand adventure through the major sights, sounds (and tastes!) of Europe. We've journeyed through Madrid, Barcelona, Florence, Rome, Venice, Munich, Zurich and Paris, to name the major cities. I could easily have spent the entire 8 weeks in some of the major cities and not had a shortage of new things to see and do.
But to recap our last few days, we concluded our time in Paris by going up to the Eiffel Tower as the sunset to see Paris sprawling out beneath us. It was tres beautiful. Then we met up with a bunch of classmates at ythe base of the tower for a picnic of wine, cheese and other good things that lasted all night! It was Monday, but there was no shortage of like-minded people on the Champs de Mars with us.
And then it was on to Normandy and the D-Day beaches. We saw the iconic American cemetary, and both Omaha and Juno beaches, sites of the invasion that began the liberation of Europe and cost thousands of Allied lives. It was sobering to remember this pivotal moment of a very grim moment of recent history and begged the question: could even this war be called just? We're actually going to have a discussion on the ferry later on today and I'm looking forward to wrestling with that.
But, I have all of minutes left on this here connection and I will now sign off. England, here we come!
posted by Matt @ 5:17 AM
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2 Comments:
Oh! Oh! Let me know how that discussion goes.
Is there actually an American cemetary on Juno beach (or is that just a slip of the keyboard)?
Unfortunately, due to logistical problems (read: indecision) the disucssion did not in fact take place.
We did however, learn some stuff about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian and pastor who began WWII as an ardent pacifist and yet towards the end of the war was involved in no less than two assassination attempts on Hitler's life. He was executed for this three weeks prior to the liberation of the prison camp where he was being detained. I plan to learn more about the life of this man upon my return to Canada.
And no, there is not an American cemetary on Juno Beach. All three places were separate locations.
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