Interviews in Lille

My week in Lille is already almost over.  I cannot believe how quickly it has flown by.  I put in a full day’s work yesterday on interviews and between them, some I got here on Tuesday and those I got in Paris I have hours of really interesting footage to work with for my project.  I have so enjoyed meeting all of the people I have interviewed and am lucky to have a reason to ask people to sit and talk with me.  It was interesting to hear the things that were mentioned by nearly everyone, some I would have guessed and others that were surprises, like the French Revolution being important to what France is today as well as paid holidays and the European Union.  And as the fellowship makes clear, I just love to hear people’s stories.

The reason I chose Lille is because one of my fellow teachers at Lane has a brother who teaches at the University of Lille who volunteered to help me out.  I have been incredibly lucky to have Chad involved with my project.  He took the time to arrange all of the interviews I have done here, which wasn’t easy since I have been interviewing many of his colleagues and students who are coming in on their summer break to meet with me.  He also invited us to stay in his home and has been organizing all of our non-interview time with discussions on culture and visits to historical locations.  Chad and his housemate, Kathleen, are both Americans who have each lived in France for nearly a decade and have had great insights from the insider/outsider perspective to add to the interviews.  My third host, Olivier, has also been incredibly gracious.  He is French and works as the head of a project to reopen an art museum here that had to be closed for expansion to house a new collection.  Olivier gave us a private tour of the empty museum and it was fascinating to hear all the explanations for and reasoning behind various aspects of the building’s design.  I love architecture’s scale and the need to be both beautiful and functional.  I hope to come back when the museum has reopened, but as great as it will be with the art I am glad to have seen it empty.

My four weeks in France end on Sunday and I have really fallen in love with it.

Arras

Arras was so nice!  A charming little town with two charming town squares and lots of interesting limestone quarries.  It was a very easy train ride from Paris on Friday and we went out to a restaurant called Le Rapiere that night.  This is the second time we have eaten at a restaurant by this name, totally unrelated to one another.  We were drawn to each because of their claim to specialize in local cuisine.  The first was in Rouen where we had a type of fish stew and Norman holes, which is an unfortunate seeming name for a refreshing apple sorbet.  This time, in Arras, we had a savory cheese flan and beef stewed in beer and brown sugar.  Delicious.

Over looking the market and Flemish facades.

Saturday we went wandered through a market, got a cold and windy view of the Flemish architecture from a belfry, and then walked across town to the newly opened Wellington Quarry Monument.  The town of Arras is situatedatop extensive limestone beds and for about 800 years this limestone was extracted for construction, but by the 19^th century the market for limestone dropped off.  What remains are the underground tunnels and caverns that were once filled with stone.  Some have been used for other purposes since; those directly under Arras’s town square have been used to store goods for markets, as a dumpsite for a china store’s broken dishes, and currently some restaurants offer seating in the tunnels. 

In the tunnels directly under the town square.

It was during WWI that the quarries probably had their most significant use.  The French troops had left Arras to move further south to defend other positions and British troops came into fill their place.  In an attempt to break the stalemate on the Western Front, a plan was designed for the French to launch a major offensive strike.  A few days before this attack, it was planned that the Commonwealth troops would launch a distraction in the north near Arras to pull up some of the German troops.  The preparation for this diversion took nearly eight months.  A group of tunnelers from New Zealand spent most of this time connecting the various limestone quarries that pocket the area until they had a u-shaped tunnel nearly 20km long with its bend in Arras and the two terminuses at the German line.  Once everything was prepared the 20,000 troops, who had been slowly gathering at Arras, moved into the cold tunnels and lived there for 8 days until it was time to attack.  The day of the attack new exits were blown out and the Commonwealth soldiers came pouring out of the tunnels to the surprise of the Germans.  The first three days of fighting were very successful, so successful in fact that the commander decided that his men deserved a day off, which was just enough time for the Germans to call in reinforcements.  The Battle of Arras lasted two months with the British gaining 10km of the front, but at the cost of 4,000 lives each day.  It is just impossible to picture what that must have been like.

Visitors of the Wellington Quarry Monument can go 20 meters underground and walk through sections of the tunnels that were so key to this battle and where 20,000 soldiers lived for 8 days.  You get to see the latrine set up, the bunks, the kitchen and the communications area.  There are also several carvings and drawings on the limestone walls.  Some of them are humorous – one soldier carefully carved the name of a famous New Zealand cave over the entrance to a tiny storage nook.  Some of them are sad – portraits of girlfriends or wives left behind.  And it was so cold; you can imagine all those men huddled in their wool coats, just trying to pass the time until the call came to fight.

We also took a tour of the Canadian Vimy Ridge Memorial.  Like Pont du Hoc, the Canadians opted to leave the land given to them by the French government more or less alone.  There are craters from the bombings and trenches, although the original sandbags have been replaced by replicas in concrete.  And rather than a traditional cemetery, the Canadian government opted to send over North American trees to be planted there.  They sent over 100,000 and they grow around the edges of the battlefield.

Seeing the trenches was pretty cool.  It was particularly interesting to visit these because at one point the Canadian and Germans were hunkered down no more than 20 yards from one another.  I typically think of wide, smoky no man’s lands strewn with barbed wire, but sometimes they were really right up on top of each other.

Where next?

Tomorrow we will leave Paris.  I still wish I had been able to get more interviews than I did, but I had a great deal more success this week than last and am excited about the results I am getting.  We will see what happens as I continue, but as of yet my expectation that people would cite immigration as a major contributing factor of cultural change has not panned out.  I had formulated this hypothesis based on the fact that France has been addressing some immigration related issues and that it is certainly a factor of change in Chicago, but it has not come up once in my interviews so far.  The things that have come up are very interesting and I can hardly wait to get on to the next wave of interviews and then the editing.

We have two days between our rental running out and when we are to arrive in Lille.  I have bounced through several different ideas about where we should go and how we should spend our time, but since my tour of the Normandy beaches I have been pretty set on going to visit WWI sites.  It had never occurred to me that there might still be trenches to see until my guide mentioned that she had done it, and I’m not sure if that would necessarily have interested me if I hadn’t just seen the incredible bomb craters that scar Pont du Hoc.  Initially, I thought this would be pretty easy to accomplish and planned to go from Paris to Verdun to make it happen.  It is a little out of our way, but the location of some of the most important fighting of the war and I thought it was going to be worth it.  Once I took a look at the town’s tourism website I began to wonder if it would.  The website gives a sense that the trenches and memorial museum had been designed by the same people who built the tram through the “City of the Future” for the Epcot Center.  Outdated and cheesy.  Plus, getting there and getting around once we arrived both seemed difficult without a car.  I began looking at towns in the Somme Battlefield area, which would straight on our way to Lille, but not having a car continued to be a problem.  It had been so easy to get to Bayeux and to jump from there to the Normandy sites, but there didn’t seem to be a convenient equivalent for the WWI sites.  In the end I decided, based on the limited information available, that we should go to Arras.  It is the easiest to get to and from and although there are not many sites right near it, those that are sound like the most interesting.  I hope I am right.

Bastille Day!

Every city needs an Eiffel Tower!  The fireworks we saw last night for Bastille Day were the best I have ever seen.  They launch them from around and from off of the Tower.  The Tower was also set to light up in different ways at different times in the show and had rows off huge torches that would flare up in conjunction with the fireworks and lights.  Very impressive.  The show draws a justifiably large crowd; if it hadn’t been for the French spoken all around and the food vendors selling paninis rather than ribs it could easily been July 3 at Taste of Chicago.  It was fun to be in the thick of a celebratory crowd that feels so familiar.  

Picnicking in the crowd.

And it is a small world after all – we watched the show from a tour boat on the Seine and just before the fireworks began a man proposed to his girlfriend.  We congratulated them and found out they live in Chicago about five blocks from where we live.

On the boat.

Today we did a self guided walking tour of the Montmartre neighborhood.  This is where the film Amelie is largely set, where the Moulin Rouge is located and was the stronghold of the Paris Commune.  My guidebook is pretty good, but definitely focuses more on the popular culture history than the revolutionary history.  It’s a shame because that’s a period I would really like to know more about.  It is on my list of things to read up on.  Montmartre is a charming neighborhood and Sacre Coeur was wild.  This beautiful church is, for whatever reason, the place to go if you are a street performer or if you are a tourist who wants to see street performers.  There are street performers everywhere in Paris - on the streets, on the Metro - but this was different.  The setups the performers had were quite elaborate with amps, costumes, and synchronized dance.  There was a woman playing the accordion in front of an enormous, portable, flower covered back drop that made her appear to be a live Frida Kahlo painting.  The crowds watching the performances covered the stairs of the cathedral, patiently and enthusiastically sitting through the rotation of singers, acrobats and Brazilian dance fighters.  It definitely set a mood that set this particular cathedral apart from the many others we have visited.  I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.

www.jim-haynes.com

Jim Haynes holds a dinner party every Sunday and everyone is invited. If you want to go, send him an email and the first 50 to 60 people he hears from get the okay to show up at his place in south Paris at 8pm for dinner and, more importantly, introductions. He believes that you make memories of people, not places, so he holds these dinners to facilitate meeting people.

We were lucky to attend last Sunday's dinner and had a great time. I brought my video camera with me in hopes of getting interviews, but once I got there all the conversations were so lively and the small home and its courtyard so congested that I got too caught up. It was a mix of people from all over the world, most of whom spoke English. At least half of the guests were there for the first time and the other half were either neighbors who came regularly or fans of Jim's who attend every time they are in town. We met one couple who met at the dinner 12 years ago and married 9 years ago.

We also met a group of half a dozen twenty somethings, a mix of American, British and French, who live in Paris and invited us to meet up with them again last night. We took them up on it and had a great time. There was a lot of talk about my project and I continue to compile notes on people's comments, reactions, and stories, but last night I also got a taped interview. Romain is a graphic design student who has studied in London and speaks fantastic English, though he was a little nervous and took notes on his answers beforehand, which I liked because it is what I have done in France before every single phone call I have made. The plan was to post my interviews here, but that doesn't appear to work. I left it to upload while I took a shower and it still didn't complete. I'll try again later, but for now I am off to enjoy Bastille Day.

The Institute of the Arab World and Paris Mosque

Today we visited the Institut du Monde Arab and the Mosquee de Paris, then strolled through the Latin Quarter past the Pantheon and through the Luxembourg Gardens.

The Institute was established by France and 20 Arab countries with the aim of promoting awareness between Arab countries and the West. There is a museum that is open to the public, but for the most part it is just a display of artifacts and a collection that pales in comparison to that of the Louvre. One portion of the museum was an introduction to a website that the Intstitute has created that tracks the growth and fall of Western and Middle Eastern Empires and explores the exchanges between them in the fields of art and science. The site has not been entirely translated to English yet, but when it is I think it will be a great resource for my students to explore.

The Paris Mosque is somewhat modest on the outside, but has a magnificent interior with a beautiful central coutyard. Unlike the dozen or so churches we have visited, the mosque does ask a 3 euro donation from visitors to contribute to its maintenance. The openess of the courtyards and the arabesque stone work created a much brighter environment than the much older stone cathedrals we have seen in France.

Versailles and the Louvre

We spent a long time at Versailles, a very long time. But it is so enormous that it was very easy to pass hours quickly. The main draws, the Hall of Mirrors and the apartments of the king and queen, were very crowded and it was a little difficult to not feel as though we were moving through it on a people mover. It was beautiful, but difficult to really enjoy. Once you get down to the apartments of the dauphin and out to the Grand and Petite Trianons (which cost extra) things opened up quite a bit and we were able to peer into nooks and notice many more details. One of my favorite things were two large round tables in a sitting room of the Grand Trianon. They had tiny numbers on the top and below each number a drawer that slid out; these were used by women to store their sewing projects. These tables make so much sense in the tiny apartments of Paris, but it is funny to think of a table maker designing clever storage in such an enormous house or that princesses had to clean up after themselves and put their things away.

My favorite part, though, was the Queen's Hamlet. This was part of Louis XVI's gift to Marie Antoinette when she was fed up with court life and moved off to another corner of the property. She had the Petite Trianon, but also this little farm with incredibly enchanting country buildings, garden plots, cows and a dairy. Marie and her friends went here to enjoy "country life" and play at working the farm. It is well known that Marie wasn't very aware of the poverty and desperation of her subjects before the Revolution, but seeing her little farm, I wonder if it could even have made sense to her. Country life seems so romantic and wonderful in this perfect little setting, the place she came to get away from how tedious it was to be queen. Based on her perspective, it is easy to see how if she had heard she might have just thought the people were whining.

France had terrible weather leading up to the Revolution, which had caused huge shortages of food and I wonder if Marie noticed any difference in the production of her gardens. More likely she relied so little on the gardens that they always seemed overly abundant. The gardens were full of berries, lettuces, squashes, etc when we were there and I would imagine they were equally productive then, only no one had to live off that produce.

Yesterday we went to the Louvre. We arrived in late afternoon on a day that the museum stays open late so, like Versailles, it got less and less crowded the longer we were there. Once again, I took lots of pictures to use in my lectures. Hammurabi's Code was definitely a highlight. We also, of course, saw the biggies - Venus de Milo, Winged Victory and the Mona Lisa. The crowd around the Mona Lisa lived up to the reputation. It was huge and pushy and full of flash photography. Lots of flash photography. There were four or five museum employees standing around and not trying to stop the use of flash, which brought me to the conclusion that we were not looking at the original painting. If they swapped the real thing for a poster reproduction, who would know?

The Louvre is obviously filled with amazing things, but I was just as impressed by the palace itself. The ceiling paintings, carved wooden doors and stone staircases were pretty spectacular and rivaled those of Versailles. We saw the mock up of the new Arab art wing. It is supposed to look like a blowing veil, which is interesting since the country passed legislation to limit religious articles like the hijab from public schools. But I thought it looked more like a flattened jelly fish. I guess I will have to come back to Paris to see the finished product.

The Macaroon Epiphany

I had a marvelous day at Versailles yesterday and a marvelous time at the Louvre today, but after a full 8 hour day at the former and 4 1/2 hours at the latter I am exhausted.

I do want to share one quick thing though. Yesterday we stopped for an appropriately decadent treat of thick hot chocolate and macaroons at Angelina's right inside Marie Antoinette's Petite Trianon. Angelina's was Audrey Hepburn's favorite place for hot chocolate and between that recommendation and having sites in posh locales (the other is right across from the Louvre) they ask a pretty hefty price for the pleasure. It was delicious though and, again, seemed like the thing to do before touring Marie's little corner of Versailles.

I was sitting there enjoying my macaroon when suddenly it occurred to me - this is what Nora is eating in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. She is eating French macaroons, not coconut macaroons. Maybe that was obvious to the rest of you or maybe you don't know what I'm talking about, but I love that play and I love coconut macaroons. I love them so much in fact that when my students read the play each year, I bring in coconut macaroons for the whole class so they all know what it is she's eating behind her husband's back through the whole first act. It never occurred to me that she was eating anything but coconut macaroons, because until yesterday I had probably only had/seen French macaroons once and I recall them being dull and dry and certainly not delicious enough to carry the symbolism of Torvald's infantilizing/Nora's deceit.

French macaroons makes more sense, right? Would they have had a lot of coconut in mid-19th century Norway? How will I find out for sure? And what will I bring to class next year?

Following the Revolution

Monday we got up early and climbed the stairs of the Eiffel Tower. The view was pretty good, but the structure itself was awesome. It makes me wonder if Ferris shouldn't have fought to keep up his wheel. From there we went to Le Bon Marche, the first true department store. I talk about it briefly in my Humanities class in a unit on how the Industrial Revolution changed the role of women and women's fashion changed along with them. Department stores like Bon Marche offered socially acceptable work to women of a variety of classes and began the push of marketing to women as consumers. After being at Harrod's in London I was really looking forward to seeing it and it is the only thing in France that has let me down so far. Based on what I had read, I thought I was going to the Bon Marche, but what I found was incredibly modern and even more incredibly high end. It was difficult to imagine women in crinolettes ever having had a place there.

That afternoon we took a guided tour of French Revolution sites. We had the guide to ourselves and it was so cool to stand in the places where the history happened. Well, almost always. The Place de la Concorde, where so many were beheaded during the Terror, is a busy combination of high speed traffic and temporary Bastille Day scaffolding. Our guide was forced to motion to far off points and say "Louis was executed right under those bleachers and Marie about where that blue car is turning." I have started taking notes of the things I don't want to forget and the questions I still need to answer. Our guide told us that the doctor who performed the autopsy on the Dauphine removed his heart and kept it in a jar through the Revolution until it could later be safely brought to the St Denis Basilica, where the French kings have been laid to rest. It didn't occur to me until later that I had no idea what became of Louis XVI's remains. Turns out he was dumped by the Revolutionaries, then located during the Restoration and his remains also brought to St Denis.

The National Assembly and bridge constructed from the remains of the Bastille - Pont de la Concorde.

On Tuesday we went back to the Marais to visit the Musee Carnavalet, which houses a wide range of items relating to Paris's history, from Roman times to the present. Spread out through over 100 rooms of 16th century mansion is an amazing assortment of paintings, signs, keys with their locks, portraits, letters, magazines, furniture, models of seemingly every Paris bridge, you name it. I spent the longest time in the rooms of the Revolution, just amazed by the things that were held on to through all the chaos. They have the copy of the Declaration of the Rights of Man that hung in the National Assembly, Danton's spoon and fork with an oddly bent tine, Robespierre's satchel, and a medallion wrapped with a braid of Marie and the Dauphine's hair. They also have a pair of her shoes that would still be pretty fashionable, but are remarkably small. We had the fallafel for lunch and it was worth waiting in line for, but thankfully since it was a weekday we didn't have to.

Today we climbed the towers of Notre Dame, which I thought was more worth the wait and effort than the Eiffel Tower. The gargoyles and the detailing on everything, high and low, are awesome to take in. The cathedral itself was not my favorite of the many I have seen so far, but I loved to stand there and think of Napoleon having been on those same steps for his coronation. I had a teacher in high school who was in love with Hemingway and spent her summers on 'follow Hemmingway's foot steps' tours. I thought she was so weird then, but now I totally get it.
From there we went to the Conciergerie, which is made up of the scant remnants of medieval castle that housed the kings before their move to more fashionable housing off the island. During the Revolution a newer portion served as the jail for Charlotte Corday, Marie Antoinette, Robespierre and so many others on their way to the guillotine.

At the Conciergerie: Fire place and spiral staircase that used to lead to a great dining hall. Female prisoners' courtyard.

By far my favorite part of the day was stepping into the upper chapel of the Sainte Chapelle. By the time we got there the rainy day had mostly cleared up and the sun lit up the stained glass. This chapel was built by Louis IX in the 13th century to serve as the reliquary for the crown of thorns, nail and piece of cross he had purchased and it is made up of more glass than stone. The effect is just stunning.

I have been disappointed that I have not so far had the opportunities I had hoped for to interview Parisians. In order to stay on a budget we haven't been out to too many restaurants and while we have done a lot of chatting in lines while waiting to get into attractions, the people near us in line just haven't been French. Our tour guide had some good suggestions for situations that might better lend themselves to getting interviews, which I will try soon, but today I did have an interesting conversation with a woman who worked at Sainte Chapelle. I didn't get it on film, but we were talking about the maintenance of the windows. One couldn't help but notice that one half was much, much cleaner than the others. She told me that they had just finished cleaning the south side and were about to begin the north, but it was a very large undertaking. It had taken five years to clean the half that were done and it was at a cost of 10 million euro. I asked her who paid for it, knowing that in 1905 the government took over control of then existing religious buildings. This is an issue now with religions, like Islam, who arrived and built after that date. The cost, she said, was in fact largely shouldered by the government wit some support from a private company. But she pointed out that this is not really a reflection of preference for Catholicism, as the building is and was not just religiously important. In fact, since the relics have been moved to Notre Dame and services are no longer offered there, today it's no longer a very religious site at all. She pointed out two sets of stained glass in which Louis IX had associated himself and the role of the king of France to the kings of the Bible and that the relics had made it possible for him to claim the right to rule with God's blessing, strengthening his power immensely. Even as a chapel it had been a political statement, important to France's secular history that is inextricably entwined with its religious history.

Tomorrow I'm still walking through the past with a trip to Versailles, but I am getting anxious to get interviews going. I'll keep you posted.

Introduction to Paris

We arrived quite late Friday night and had been warned well in advance that weekends in Paris can be overwhelming, so we started out slow. Saturday morning we explored the 10th arrondissement, the neighborhood of the apartment I have rented for these two weeks. It is a quiet area, away from the tourist attractions that is filled with a range of diverse people speaking a great number of languages. That afternoon we followed a self guided tour along the Seine, taking hours to weave through the oldest parts of the city. And the guidebooks are right - the lines that stretched out in front of Notre Dame seemed endless. We ended our walk at an Alsatian brasserie where I had an amazing bowl of cassoulet and Aaron ordered the choucroute, a pile of sauerkraut topped with assorted sausages. He kept commenting on how the liver sausage was good, but so odd. I had been so taken with my food that I hadn't really been listening to him, but then suddenly heard and saw what he was talking about. That's not liver sausage. Then what is it? Blood sausage! He grimaced, then shrugged and said he was glad he had tasted it before he knew what it was because it wasn't all that bad. He then proceeded to polish off the entire plate.

Sunday we did a second self guided tour through the Marais, which began in the 14th century gardens of Charles V and then wove through trendy boutiques to the Pletz, Paris's oldest Jewish Quarter where people were lined up down the middle of the very narrow Rue des Rosiers to get what we would later find out was very delicious fallafel.

By this time I had a sense of the lay of the land and I spent the rest of the afternoon sculpting out and confirming plans for the rest of the two weeks. What's next to what and what closes down on which days. It is a pretty exciting plan.

A nod to America's Revolution at the Hotel de Ville. Happy Fourth of July!

From France in general

Is it even worth saying that the food has been fabulous in France? The street food, the restaurants, the pastries; it has all been delicious. I had a set menu in Rouen of foie gras and langostine ravioli in a cream sauce, followed by bacon wrapped salmon in a tart orange glaze and dessert of a nougat ice cream that was possibly the most wonderful thing ever. This afternoon I snacked on a carre Breton, a cornbread-like cake and this one had a layer of salted caramel through the center, a local specialty that makes you want to stay.

My French gets better every day, though it remains broken. I had to have our Eurail passes validated and wasn’t sure where to do it, so I wanted to ask when reserving our first ride that will count on the pass. The best I could come up with was, “You to write here?” me pointing at form, “Or who?” It didn't sound pretty, but it got my question across. So far people have been incredibly patient with, and sometimes charmed by, my slow communication and we haven’t had any trouble. That being said, we have not been able to have any real conversations except with the few English speakers we’ve met. For the first time I wish I had studied French instead of Spanish, but look forward to getting into Paris and getting my planned interviews underway.

St Malo - Intra Muros

Early this morning we arrived in St Malo, a seaside town in Brittany surrounded by 17th century ramparts. Tomorrow we’ll day trip to the famed Mont St Michel, but today we explored the fortifications of the city, walking up along the wall. When I was on the Omaha tour yesterday, I was with a father and son who were a bit bothered by the beach goers at Omaha. We discussed it for a while and I argued that the French can hardly be expected to live in constant memorial of those events, after all, what were those soldiers fighting for if not for the kinds of experiences people have at the beach with friends or family? In St Malo today, looking at the fortifications that date back as early as the 12th century, I also wondered how much we Americans can understand a history full of invasions and liberations. Although Bayeux was spared, 80% of St Malo and considerable sections of Rouen were destroyed during WWII. The process of restoring, rather than rebuilding is amazing.

Bayeux: Gateway to the Battle of Normandy

Although my fellowship is focused on developing material for my Humanities class, I am taking this small side trip to benefit my World Studies. We left Rouen on Sunday, June 28 for Bayeux, one of the few towns in the area spared the destruction of the Battle of Normandy. We started out on Monday a little further back in time with a visit to the Bayeux tapestry, a 70 yard tapestry that is, more or less, a comic book version of the Battle of Hastings. It was commissioned in 1077 for the opening of Bayeux’s beautiful cathedral and served as a reminder of the story of William the Conquerer’s 1066 conquering of Harold for control of England for a largely illiterate population. It is amazing that the thing still exists; not only is it nearly 1,000 years old, but it has been misused in a variety of ways including serving as a tarp for an ammunition cart during the French Revolution. Today it is on display in a small museum where we were able to listen to an audio guide of the history as we walked along the tapestry. It was hardly necessary though, as the pictures are incredibly vivid and easy to follow.

That afternoon we rented bicycles and rode about 6 miles to Arromanches, code named Mulberry Harbors during the WWII landing. In the past, when I have taught WWII, I have skipped right over the Western Front to get to the good stuff – Stalingrad and the Pacific Theater. Now having been to the sites of the Normandy landings I am convinced that this is just as much the good stuff. I don’t think I ever knew how interesting the Battle of Normandy was. At Arromanches we visited the Musee du Debarquement, which is dedicated to the enormous undertaking of constructing ports since the Allies knew the Germans had an iron grip on the existing ports and would destroy them rather than lose them. Large pieces of the breaker walls and floating bridge are still visible from the beach.

Tuesday morning we visited the Musee Memorial 1944 Bataille de Normandie in Bayeux, which is great. It is full of the quotes and narrative that make me love history. Pilots dropped aluminum paper strips in the channel to confuse German radar and during the Battle of the Bulge, when the Germans demanded the surrender of General MacAuliffe’s troops, his response was, “Nuts!”

That afternoon I left Aaron to his own devices while I went on a tour of Omaha Beach, where the Americans landed and faced the most difficult conditions of the invasion. I had a fantastic guide who took a small group of us through the plan and then through the actual assault. I tell my students that the Normandy invasion was important and bloody, but to stand there on the beach and see the cliffs with the German bunkers visible and to imagine them with guns while the tide rose so quickly makes the success of the operation stunning. Again, I took an incredible lot of pictures and look forward to walking my students through the nuances of the landings. My visit to the Normandy Beaches was so fascinating that I’m wondering if I can’t find a way to get to Verdun while I am still in France…

This gun was one of 6 that the Germans placed on Pointe du Hoc as part of the Atlantic Wall. On the morning of D-Day, 225 Rangers were to climb the cliffs on either side of the Pointe and make sure that the guns were destroyed by early morning bombings so that they could not be used on the approaching armada. The Rangers arrived to find that the Germans had removed the guns several months earlier in order to build bomb proof shelters for them. In there place were gun sized logs. The Rangers were able to report the mission as a success, but had to wait there for two days before receiving backup due to the fighting conditions on the beach.

Rouen: City of Spires

Ahhhh, France. Let me start by saying no, I do not speak French. And, no, neither does Aaron. I have been really nervous about this since throughout all of my traveling, I have never traveled through a country without speaking the language. Half of the people I talked to in the planning stages said it would be no big deal at all, the other half said we’d struggle continuously. Based on two days experience I would say it is somewhere in between and will only get easier over the weeks to come. I realized that the most wonderful thing in the world is being literate – turns out I can read French signs and automated atm/ticketing machines like a champ. We had to take five trains yesterday to get from Orly airport to Rouen, our present location, and were able to do so without any trouble. What a huge relief.

Rouen is our first stop on our way through Normandy. It is called ‘the capital of light’ on the map given out by the tourist center, a reference, perhaps, to the overwhelming number of towering gothic churches built in cream colored stone. There are five marvelous churches within the small city center, an amount that makes it possible to see spires at any given turn. The city is old, this is where Joan of Arc was tried and executed, and it bears the modern scars of World War II. The Cathedral Notre Dame, which Monet captured, is still in repair today and throughout the city there are walls that come to sudden ends, foundations of buildings that no longer stand and doorways that lead nowhere. As the capital of Normandy it sees a lot of tourists and expensive shops line the cobbled streets, creating an interesting mix of old and new.

Tonight we are going to the Cathedral Notre Dame, where they project a show of Monet’s work on the exterior wall. Tomorrow we will travel to Bayeux where we will visit the Normandy beaches.

The cathedral's right tower is known as the Butter Tower. It might be because of the color of the stone, but popular story has it that the funds to build it were raised by selling forgiveness for eating butter during Lent.

From London

When planning this trip I discovered that it would be hundreds of dollars cheaper to fly into London than Paris, even after factoring in two nights in a hotel and the flight between the two. I was pleased to have the opportunity to see another city in Europe, but didn’t think I would honestly see that much in 48 hours. Now I know that I was wrong. I still cannot believe how much we crammed into those two days.

We landed Tuesday morning and within a couple of hours had dropped our bags off at our hotel. Immediately we were off to Harrod’s, where after several laps around the enormous rooms of food we bought the makings of what turned out to be a pretty spectacular picnic, which we ate in nearby Hyde Park. From there we walked through the parks to Buckingham Palace (where we stopped and watched the marching guards and admired how centuries of sitting tourists have smoothed the edges of the fountain), to Westminster Abbey and to the Houses of Parliament (where we took in a session on Iraq and where I took great pains to step on all of the markers that showed where people like Sir Thomas More were sentenced to their deaths). We had classic English fare in a pub with Wimbledon on in the background before taking a stroll around a lit up Piccadilly Circus.

Wednesday we stood in line for discount theater tickets and then spent nearly the entire day at the British Museum. I was impressed by the things that I knew I would see there and thrilled by the things I stumbled upon by accident. And I took TONS of pictures. I very rarely take pictures in museums and when I see people doing it I often wonder what they plan to do with them, but I know exactly what I will be doing with mine. Although it seems like there are images of everything online, I often cannot find pictures to accompany my lectures. I either resort to descriptions that can’t suffice or subjecting my students to my terrible drawings. But now Athens will have the pediments of the Parthenon, Persia’s Persepolis will be more than just foundations and the Kingdom of Benin will have its plaques.

We ended the day with Les Miserables at the Queen’s Theater, just the thing to get the gears switching to France.

Do you think he is going to make it?

Au revoir.

Within the hour we will be leaving for O'Hare airport. I am finding the packing process difficult, even more so than usual. I am not sure what to bring or how much to bring and I just want to get going!

We fly into London and will arrive there in the morning. I am incredibly looking forward to the British Museum. How many times have I mentioned items in its collection in my classroom? And now due to a lucky layover I will be seeing them myself.

I am going to complete a test run of the video camera I will be using for interviews and then back to packing. The next post will come from Europe!

The Plan

Fund for Teachers is an organization that provides teachers with funding for summer fellowships. FFT asks teachers to design their own professional development and then backs them in making it happen. I don't remember exactly how we found out about this exciting organization, but as soon as we did Aaron and I began planning our dream summers.

In 2008 Aaron won a fellowship and we spent a month last summer kayaking over 1000 miles of the lower Mississippi River while Aaron conducted water quality research. It was great experience and Aaron has created a fantastic unit for his students in which they analyze his data and gather their own during trips to the Chicago River.

This year it was my turn to create a proposal that would support my teaching. I have always been interested in the creation and evolution of culture and national identity and proposed that I go to France to conduct qualitative research on the way the country's growing Islamic minority is changing French culture. Fund for Teachers gave grants to 29 individuals/groups of teachers in Chicago and I am fortunate to be one of them.

I will be leaving June 23 for France where I will spend two weeks in Paris and two weeks in Lille conducting interviews and recording oral narratives on French culture. I am very excited about all I am going to see and learn.

The Background of the Plan

When I began my senior year at Southern Illinois University in 2000, I was a month away from turning 21, four months away from getting married and two semesters from graduating with a degree in History and a teaching certificate. That fall I took a class with the late Sen. Paul Simon and I expressed to him that I longed for broader world experience before entering the classroom as a teacher. At that point I'd had done little beyond school work and waitressing to pay for that school work. I'd never traveled outside the US and very much wanted to. He strongly encouraged me to join the Peace Corps, which turned out to be the best "push" anyone has ever given me.

Aaron and I, married less than 10 months, packed our bags and went, literally, half way around the world to the tiny archipelago of Vanuatu. We spent two years teaching in a vocational school, hosted by a small, wonderful community in one of the least developed areas in the world. We were offered the chance to stay for a third year to work with an NGO in the country's capital, which gave us extensive opportunity for travel within Vanuatu and its neighbors Australia, New Zealand and Fiji.

We left Vanuatu in December 2004 and spent 9 weeks traveling from Costa Rica to Mexico before settling in Chicago and into classrooms. I was always aware of how much I benefited from my travels, but was surprised by how well my students respond to them. To them, my pictures and stories are more interesting than anything out of National Geographic. I think this is largely because they feel that my stories, no matter how topical, are not actually educational. They aren't work, so they are fun. But more than that, I think that my travels make the world seem more real and travel more possible to them and they like to imagine the places they might go someday.

Although I have traveled enough to impress my students, I feel I have a huge gap in my resume. I have never been to Europe. I turn 30 at the end of the summer and feel strongly that I need to get to Europe before then, so in June I am heading for France.