Bayeux and Mont St Michel

The weekend in Bayeux was chill and I mean that literally...the only place I could get warm was in the shower. You might think that when the temperature is hovering around 2 degrees most restaurants and cafes would keep the doors closed. And you would be incorrect. And you would be cold, so so so cold all of the time, everywhere. And you would ask yourself: ¨Self, you´re from Canada. You´re supposed to be able to handle this kind of shit. What are you, some kind of sissy?" And then you would be forced to admit that yes, you are a complete failure when it comes to dealing with cold temperatures, you don´t understand these french freaks and their obsession with fresh air, and you decide to get the hell out of there.

Got up early Monday morning and took the train to Pontorson or as I like to call it "the gateway to Mont St Michel". The lockers at the train station were of course not operational but the train master (don´t know if that´s an official title, but I like it) took pity on me and let me store my bag in a spare room for the day. Then he tried to explain where I had to go to wait for the bus, I pretended to understand and walked outside...wandered around for awhile and then approached the first person I saw "Pardon, je cherche l´autobus a Mont St Michel." The look of horror on the poor guy´s face at being addressed in french made me realize that this was no frenchman....indeed it was Kohhei from Japan who was also waiting for the bus. He was carrying around his huge backpack still and when he found out I was able to dump it in the train station took off running in that direction. Unfortuntely he came back a few minutes later with the pack still on his back as the train master said no way...I guess a little french and some long eyelashes help in a situation like that. Good thing I mascaraed that morning.

Mont St Michel was pretty cool but I´m not sure you need a whole day unless you want to see the tides come and go. We were there for about 5 or 6 hours (trapped by the bus schedule) and managed to see all of the church at the top, walk around, get kicked out of one restaurant for not wanting to spend enough money on lunch, finallly go somewhere else to eat some crepes, THEN get kicked out of ANOTHER restaurant for only wanting to drink coffee, and wander around desperately looking for a warm place to drink coffee. We finally find the latter but not the former in a little hole in the wall run by a nice Corsican dude who tells me I need to go there. There are tonnes of Japanese tourists on this particular day and Mr. Corsica tells us that different nationalities visit at different times of year.
A minor stir is caused by a Japanese television crew which is wandering around the site led by two pretty young presenters....they have picked up a trail of people of all nationalities who follow them around through the narrow streets.....we see them go by and Kohhei runs outside to see if he recognizes them, but alas no.

Finally we leave to catch the bus....it takes a while to get back to Pontorson and Kohhei has missed his train by approximately 30 seconds (literally he was on the wrong side of the track and couldn´t get around in time I think). So I get to continue practicing french and we work out how the Train Master can change his tickets because now he´s going to miss all kinds of connections. Eventually everything is worked out and the Train Master and I bid Kohhei adeiu....hope you had a good time in Lyon! Thanks for the company at Mont St Michel!

Then begins a stage of the day I like to think of as "waiting in the unheated train station, with vagrants." It is really ·$·%//&% cold in the station and the only room with benches in it is not the nice well lit one shared with the Train Master´s booth. No, it is the lowlit colder backroom populated with various men of various scents and various respiratory ailments. Coughing up and spitting out various mysterious substances. It was a happy two hours.

Finally I boarded the train for Rennes, then caught my connection to Paris, THEN boarded my overnight train bound for Bayonne (and beyond as I later learned).

Sleeper cars are pretty comfortable (I can´t stay awake on a train anyway) but that doesn´t mean you get to take your sweet damn time when they call your station at 6 am. Because if you do, Sleeping Beauty, you will still be putting your shoes on when theÿ announce "next stop, Biarritz" and the train starts to move out of YOUR station. And then you will get to spend the morning in the train station in Biarritz.

From Biarritz I took another train to Hendaye, which I now believe to still be in France but for a little while I seriously was not sure which country I was in (french didn´t work anymore for communication) and then caught another train to the deceptively named Donostia (this seems to be the Basque code word, or name, for San Sebastian. Good to know).

And that is how I got to Spain.