Normandy

Another two-week Schulferein (school holiday) comes to an end--this time Pfingsten, also known as Whitsun or Pentecost. We spent the first week of the holiday in Normandy. The weather was awful--lots of wind and rain, but it made the visit to the D-Day Beaches somber, which was appropriate.


We visited the American Military Cemetery at Omaha Beach, where 9386 American soldiers are buried. Some of the headstones have no names on them, because the soldiers' bodies were never identified. We visited on Sunday, the day before Memorial Day, and many of the graves had flowers on them, even the nameless ones.


Walking along Omaha Beach made me think of Saving Private Ryan, the only movie about D-Day that I have ever seen (I've never read or seen The Longest Day). I kept describing to the boys the opening scene of the soldiers climbing out of the amphibious vehicles and running through the surf, up the hills, trying not to get shot. I don't know the exact distance, but the movie made the hills look much closer to the beach than they actually are.

We also visited Arromanches, where the British established an artificial port. Quite a few metal bridges and docks still remain along the beach.

To continue learning about Normandy and its battles, we experienced the Bayeux Tapestry. I say "experienced" because it was like watching a needlepoint film. I was worried that the boys would be bored, but we got them the audio tour and they listened, while walking along the tapestry that wraps around the center of the gallery, to the story of how, in 1066, William the Conqueror defeated King Harold of England. The entire story unfolds with each panel, and near the end, gets graphic. The boys loved the beheaded soldiers and King Harold with an arrow sticking out of his eye.


The rest of the trip we spent at Mont St. Michel, an abbey on top of a pyramid-shaped island that is connected to the mainland by a causeway, which floods when the tides are very, very high. We stayed at the Hotel Le Mouton Blanc, within the medieval walls, which was a great idea, because in the evening, after the tourists had gone back to the touristy villages on the mainland, we had an entire medieval town to ourselves. Well, almost to ourselves--there were, of course, other tourists staying at small hotels within the walls of the Mont. We bought the boys wooden swords (Alex wanted a metal one), and they ran up and down the streets pretending to be knights defending the king and his castle (they didn't want to accept that this was an abbey instead of a castle).

We returned to Erlangen in time to catch the last few days of the Bergkirchweih, the second largest Bierfest, after Oktoberfest in Munich, in Bavaria. It's all about drinking beer served in a keller dug into the side of the Berg, a large hill north of Erlangen. Unlike Oktoberfest, one does not sit in a tent and drink, but on wooden benches set in the forest above the kellers, or in the kellers, which are more like caves than anything else (although some are furnished like restaurants). When the days are hot, the kellers are naturally cool, important in a country where very few places have air-conditioning.