The last few days have been spent taking it easy, short trips to local towns and enjoying the peace and quiet of our little cottage. I must share one story with you, last Wednesday we made our first, how do you say "menu" faux pas (stuff up). The Wednesday prior (last week) we went to the local markets, one stall was a butchers stall that had beautiful looking very lean red meat. We looked at the meat, watched people buying it and discussed what it might be, at the time I thought it might be either horse meat, which is quite acceptable to eat here in France, or venison.
A butchers shop is called a boucherie and I had read in the guide book that some butchers sell horse meat, if they do they have a picture of a horses head on the shop sign, well our market stall had the words "Boucherie Chevaline" and no horse head picture. Anyway we decided to give it a miss knowing that it would be there again next week.
Next week is now here and we decide to go to the Wednesday market for fresh veggies and something nice for dinner. Our boucherie is back again, I had, during the week, quickly looked in the phrase book to see what "Boucherie Chevaline" meant. I was sure it read Butcher of Venison. We promptly bought 2 beautiful fillets of "Venison" meat.
We had a wonderful dinner, oven roasted market veggies, creamy mash potato and medium rare fillet of "venison" steaks. we expected the venison to be a bit stronger tasting but it was really mild. Once dinner had settled we were talking about the butcher shop sign having no horses head, I casually picked up the phrase book again and showed Chris were it mentioned the sign etc... It was then we stumbled across a different page that described restaurant menus and listed all the different cuts of meat to eat in a restaurant......guess what Venison = Chevreuil and Horse = Cheval, In my defence the words are pretty similar!!!! Anyway we enjoyed the best fillet of horse we had ever tasted.
A day later we visited a beautiful town on a river, the town of Maryanne, we enjoyed a nice lunch in the sun, a quiet day today, we relaxed and bought some books from a bookstore, it was a large shop but the English language section only contained about 50 books!! I guess it would be the same back home looking for books in french.
30th May saw us go North to see the Normandy battlefields, we decided to spend 2 days in the area so we could take our time, it was about a 2 hour drive from the cottage. The first town on our list was Bayeux home of the famous Bayeux Tapestry. This 70 meter long embroidered tapestry tells the story of William the Conqueror who came from Normandy and invaded England, he defeated Harold in the battle of Hastings in 1066. Something I learnt about in Primary school. The story was a great piece of history told on this 1000yr old cloth.
We spent time at several museums in the Battle for Normandy (D Day) area, Omaha Beach (remember the movie Saving Private Ryan?), Utah Beach, St Mare Eglise, where American paratroopers landed on D Day. It was fascinating to see all this for real, the towns in this area have a great bond with the USA. We are considering going back on the 6th June (D Day) to see the celebrations. It is a mixed day with veterans holding remembrance services but the townsfolk celebrating being liberated from the Germans.
Most of the towns have been rebuilt but you can still see remnants of the battle. A lot of roads have markers every 50 meters or so with the name of a soldier who died, as you can imagine there are literally thousands of markers along the roads.
Visiting the war cemeteries is the most sobering part of being in this area, it is very hard to describe the sight of 1000,s of headstones so meticulously maintained, each one etched with the name of a young man who died for a common cause far a way from home in a foreign country. We can only be thankful that we were not born in these times.
We stayed overnight in Cherburg a nice port town with a great aquarium and museum which houses a large de-commissioned nuclear submarine, very interesting to tour and see what life was like onboard. The Queen Mary 2 cruise liner was also in port at the time.
