mont st. michel!

After leaving Cancale, we took a bus back down the coast a bit to the Mont St. Michel, which lies right on the border of Brittany and Normandy. As I said before, Mont St. Michel is an old monastery set up on a sometimes island/sometimes peninsula. It is absolutely gorgeous:

And it's full of interesting history, which we all know is important for me. There is a small walled medieval town around the church, now mostly living off of the tourist industry. To get to the church you have to walk through the windy, steep streets, and on the way there are many tourist traps but also a bunch of genuinely interesting shops. We didn't have a ton on time there and a few of us really wanted to get a good look at the church and surrounding area, so we did not stop at many of these. We did see, though, a store full of Le Petit Prince postcards (!!) and a shop with cool gargoyles (sorry, Mom, I couldn't buy any).

We walked along the walls of the church grounds and climbed various parapets and such and generally amused ourselves with the group. But a lot of people preferred to go play in the mud/"quicksand" that surrounds the peninsula when it's low tide, so didn't want to go through the whole church. Alex, Martha and I - the same ones who ran up the mountain in Cancale - wanted to do both and figured we'd have enough time. However we got rather distracted by the views while going to the top of the church and lost track of time.

The church for the moment is kind of empty. Most of the statues, reliefs and paintings have been removed and copies are being made. So it was a bit weird to see such a huge church with nothing much (except a menorah?) in it. We got to see parts of the monastery, all from different periods. One chapel was begun in the 11th century, for example, and another in the 15th. There was a beautiful little courtyard inside, and we stayed there for a while. I gave a lesson on stained glass when Alex was sure the windows couldn't possibly be original, but he liked my version better.

We realized (again) that we only had about 15 minutes until we met up with the group, but thought we'd still have time to make it down the mountain to play in the mud. We would have, too, if we didn't get stuck behind a tour and the exit route wasn't so indirect. It's understandable; they want you to see all parts of the grounds, so direct you through them, rather than the fastest way down. We had to push our way through a large tour group before running down the many steps back to the bus, and again just made it in time. No mud for us.

We stayed that night outside of Mont St. Michel, and it was the first time the whole group had met up and socialized together. There was a big party in the hotel, and we became a more cohesive whole, which was nice. I know a bunch of people a lot better, but others I dislike probably more. Oh, well, at least there are a fair number who are cool. I even found a few history people, yay!