I forgot to tell you that two days ago while exploring Caen, we had a nice little chat with an older French gentleman we met on the street. He could tell we were tourists, and when he found out we were Americans he stopped and talked our ears off! (His English was very broken, but we all understood each other pretty well.) He was about 80, which means he was 9 years old when D-Day happened. He told us about having no food during the war and then the Americans setting up the Marshall Plan after the war to feed pretty much all of Europe and how much his family appreciated it (although he said they did have to eat yellow bread made of corn instead of wheat, and he wrinkled his nose at that)!!! He spoke so kindly about the U.S. and you could tell that the people here really appreciated everything we did for them.
He also mentioned, with some sadness, the bombing of Caen (which was done by the Allies). It was in the weeks leading up to the Normandy invasion to cut the Nazi supply lines before D-Day. (In the Caen Memorial Museum, it said that 20,000 French civilians in Normandy were killed during the summer of the Normandy Invasion by Allied bombing runs. I think usually we know of the liberation of Normandy by the Allies, but maybe we tend to forget how much damage we also did to civilians in the process. The more I travel in Europe, the more I see how terrible war was for everyone in these countries, not just the soldiers on the battlefields.)
He also was very funny when he talked about the weather here. All three days have been cool (mid 50s), windy at times, and overcast. The day we talked to him the wind was quite harsh, making the air very cold. He said the wind comes from the English Channel so the people in Normandy call it an "English wind" (which he was laughing about with a wicked glint in his eye because it was a subtle slam against the English)! :-) In Normandy, unlike the rest of France, the weather is much more like England (and Seattle). Much cooler and cloudier.
OK. We're moving to Bayeux today. I'll write more tonight if the wi-fi in this new hotel is working well!
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