St. Malo & Mont St. Michel

Here's a quick update about our field trip last weekend!
It was supposed to rain all day, but we lucked out and had fantastic weather. Blue skies, sunny, nice temperature. First we went to St. Malo, which is an adorable town on the English Channel. It's surrounded by an old wall so we started by walking around the ramparts, and then wandered around the beach and climbed on the rocks. It was so beautiful! I would love to go back there for a vacation.

Then I got a nice leisurely lunch with my two friends. We picked the restaurant because we could smell garlic from the outside, and it turned out to be a great choice. We had bruschetta and salmon risotto. After that we just sat around in the sunshine near the palm trees until we got picked up by the bus. Such a nice change of pace. It was just a cute, small town with lots of fun places to eat. And lots of pirate themed things to buy because apparently there's some random pirate history for the town. That random building out in the water is Chateaubriand's tomb. Anyways, like I said I would love to come back here for a week of vacation or something. Rent a house and hang out on the beach and wander the streets. Also, during the summer season I guess there are a lot of ferries that go to England, so I'll just have to go there for the second week of my fantasy vacation!

Next we went to Mont St. Michel. This was a lot more touristy. We also passed something called Alligator Bay on the way, which apparently just has a lot of crocodiles and alligators to look at. We were all pretty sad that wasn't on the itinerary. When we got there, we booked it up to the top right away to get our tickets to see the abbey. Our chaperone was our grammar teacher who is kind of intense and scary but we like her anyways. She was insane and practically ran up to the top through all the hills and stairs. It was a struggle for the rest of us. Then we all wandered through the church and abbey and stuff at our leisure. It was alright, but we were getting tired and as sad as it is, cathedrals all start to look the same after a while. A lot of the stained glass windows had Celtic designs though, so that was interesting. We had a lot of time to kill after that, so I walked around the whole thing with my friends on the sand/mud/clay. RIP our boots. Whatever we were walking on seems to have permeated the leather. There were random spots of quicksand too which was weird. Then we got some hazelnut coffee to kill the time we had until the bus left. Once our bus driver finally woke up and let us on the bus, we headed home. We got a nice nap in on the drive. Afterwards, I went out for Chinese with 7 of my friends. It was great because we got to the restaurant early enough that we got the private party room off to the side, so we could be as loud as we wanted! It was great to have the day away. I'm totally ready for winter break, which is next weekend. Until then, I'll be working on projects and starting to get ready for the upcoming midterms. And possibly starting the papers that we got assigned for April. But who knows.