France Day 1

This is on 15th April, Day 78 of my exchange:

Fong Chi, Jiang Heng and I left for France from Eindhoven on a Euroline bus on the night of 14th april. The bus was supposed to leave at 11:59pm, but I think we got there about 2 hours early. Johnny earlier missed a Euroline bus and ended up taking an expensive train. ~200 euros, i think! ouch :( The night was cold, but still, bearable. I didn't bring my down jacket, so I had to make do with my sweater and jackets and bag! We kept running between the 2 sides of the road and around the area since we didn’t really know where the euroline bus would stop at. There were some familiar faces but they got onto another bus. When a euroline bus pulled up to the other side of the road, we rushed over to board. There were lots of ppl boarding and the bus was crowded. There were barely any seats at all!

Welcome to France!

The bus ride was quite horrible since I was squeezed in with this fat fellow who took up a portion of my seat :( There were breaks in between during which i had to remain awake, waiting for him to come back and take his seat! anyway, we made it to the euroline interchange in paris at about 7 in the morning. We were supposed to meet up with Fong Chi’s BF before going up north to some American memorial. We took the subway to the main train station in France. And we walked around a bit once we got there. We had a small breakfast consisting of stroopwaffles, some packed bread and milk :)

We rented out the car once we met up with YW. I treid driving and managed to get out of the parking lot, after which we decided that it would be safer for YW to drive! haha, my previous driving experience was during my driving test :P We then tried to change the name of the driver to him, but that wasn’t possible, he was added as the secondary driver.We also had to go back again to get a new GPS system since the one given to us wasn’t working!! After about 200+Km/5 hours of continuous driving, we got to Omaha beach memorial. There were lots of Americans there, and some school kids were having their field trip as well. The memorial building was small but very thoughtfully built. The beach was gorgeous and the wind was chilling since spring wasn’t full blown yet.

After the memorial visit, our pro driver started driving again! I wondered how he could keep the alertness up all the way for hours! The GPS system got quite cranky in its directions now and then and so we got lost once in a while. But it would always reroute and bring us back. We used the road directions a bit to help us get the the expressways was well. Finally, after another ~100km of driving for abt 3 hours, we started getting glimpses of Mont St Michel! It was an amazing scene! I’d seen pictures of it on the net but seeing it for myself was GREAT!! Here is one of the first few sightings of it! Thanks to the quickness of FC’s camera which was in my hands for the trip :)

And then, it started getting bigger and bigger until we got on to the bridge linking it to the mainland!! Yipee! haha, I took this shot with the mont and our dear driver:

We had to park by the road since the ‘carpark’ below would be drowned when the tide comes in in the evening. HAHA! What a strage thing, rightt! 

It felt really cozy walking in to the Mont. Such a small snug place with creperie, restaurants, houses but still with a stunning view. We went up and down, trying to set our little feet on every part of it! HAHA! Here is the stunning sea view of the tide coming in! I took the below pic as i was playing around with the modes in FC’s camera!

Going there and walking around made me feel like I’m in some fairy tale world with castles and a princess for me to save! And there was a museum inside too! And here is my dinner for the night: We caught the beutiful sunset as we came out of the Mont. But I noted that it’s not really possible to cover the Mont and the sun together cos the sun was in a different direction. So, all those sunrise/sunset postcards were photoshoped!!  don’t buy them!

After driving for several more hours, we arrives at Rennes, where we were supposed to meet FC’s BF’s friend’s malaysian friend to stay at for the night. That place had a university and so we stayed in their dorm :) The place was quite difficult to find with the GPS cos it failed us again, so YW had to call the ppl up for directions. One of the guys’ room was empty since he was travelling during that time and so the 3 of us guys took his room. FC slept with the girl. It was a great night for us as we all had blankets, unlike FC :P haha, onto the next day!!