Thursday in Rouen

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Today we got up a bit earlier, and made the sacrifice of breakfasting on day-old bread (fresh yesterday evening, not this morning), and easily caught our train to Rouen.

The trip was very interesting. I saw more different kinds of architecture of the "small housing" kind on the hour train ride to Rouen than I've seen all over the rest of France. Plenty of the warm tan stucco with red tile roofs, but also bricks, stone, half-timber, mosaic tile (on the sides of the houses -- these often had big ceramic motifs, too, like bigger than life flowers, with 3d petals and everything)..... I kept seeing more and more kinds of architecture, in some very small towns or villages, all mixed (not one village of one sort and one of another)..... Very interesting.

Also many views of what was the river Seine (the same one that goes through Paris) at least part of the time, but not sure if every river view was of was the Seine.

Rouen continued with the very interesting and mixed architecture.

Lots of Rouen was destroyed in the war, including very heavy damage to the cathedral which was painted so often by Monet in different lights.....

Seeing many displays in the cathedral (repair/restoration is ongoing...) of the destruction, I was left wondering who, exactly, had bombed it, and was afraid I knew the answer............. We had to destroy it to "save" it??????????

Shrapnel in the pillars holding up the church roof. Shrapnel in the statues that used to be on the face of the building.........

Sigh.....

It will be a very long time before everything is clean and in place and there has been enough money raised to replace all the stained glass..............

Much history there, over a very (VERY) many years. We saw the tomb and effigy of Richard Coeur de Lion (Richard the Lion-heart).......

The Hotel de Ville (city hall, I think) is gothic, and many other buildings are in all the styles of houses we saw on the way there from Paris, and probably others, too.

We had a very nice lunch, and later a very nice pastry made with apples and cream (both typical of Normandy).

We got some lovely bread from Paul (the bakery chain where we bought bread in Bordeaux), and got some yogurt from the grocery, and ate those things on the train back to Paris. We had thought we might visit the small park near our hotel that was built on former train track (something like the raised former-train-track park in NYC, but my plan did not include heavy cloud cover which made it pretty dark by the time we got to the hotel. We decided not to go out to see a park/garden in the darkness, and weren't sorry, as it rained briefly (but pretty hard) not long after we got to the hotel.

The weather was lovely and cool -- and dry -- in Rouen -- a much better day to have spent there, weather-wise, than yesterday.

We have been so lucky with the weather. A bit of rain, here and there, and a too-hot day in Carcassonne, but otherwise, lovely.

Can't quite believe I'm going home tomorrow.......

The foodie will stay on for a few more days, and then return to A2 early next week.

We'll be glad to eat as much broccoli as we like, and to not have to figure out how to get everywhere, for a bit.

Today on the train I kept wondering where our luggage was...... Safely back at our Paris hotel, just like most of the last week, was where, but this was our first train ride where we didn't shift locations in over two weeks...........

Probably no post tomorrow.

I expect I will be crashing tomorrow when I get home. 4:50 pm will be nearly 11 pm for me....................

Au revoir!



In order to facilitate chronological traverse of these posts, here is a link to the post that comes after this one.

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