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  Outdated and cheesy.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.