Ouch, Patriots. I’m almost glad I wasn’t home to watch that catastrophe. Not news that I like waking up to :(
This past weekend I had a nice, relaxing weekend in Bretagne. Well, almost Bretagne. I am only now realizing that I wasn’t in Bretagne but in the next department over, Le Pays de la Loire!
My friend’s host family invited us to stay at their beach house in Le Pouliguen, a small beach town on the west coast of France for the weekend. Yes, my final research paper due dates are quickly approaching but I definitely couldn’t pass up a trip to the French coast! I specifically remember one of my Hamilton professors telling me to blow off work in order to travel around and see more of France, so I’m really just following orders.
Like all my trips thus far in France, this one of course started out with another chance rencontre at La Gare Montparnasse. I get to la gare wicked early, pick up my tickets from the ticket window (the automatic ticket machines do not accept American credit cards) and am waiting for my friend while she does the same when I see an American couple at the window picking up their own tickets. I thought, “That’s weird, that guy kind of looks like Bob Ryan.” Well, of course, the guy turns around and it was actually Bob Ryan! What are the chances that I run into a Globe sports writer at 8:30 in the morning at a train station in Paris? I have had so many chance rencontres lately. I ran into the Patriots in London, my old high school French teacher on the metro, and now Bob Ryan and his wife at the train station. C’est marrant.
After starting my morning on that strange note, I hopped on the 9am train for La Baule Escoublac. The trip was about 3 hours, with a couple stops towards the end of the trip. Édouard, my friend’s host father met us at the train station and gave us a little tour of the town before bringing us to the house. As it turns out, the house used to belong to Édouard’s grandparents so he spend many summers in the house and has a lot of close friends who still come back to Le Pouligruen with their families. He has a lot of childhood memories in the house and I can tell that he really loves going there. He ended up being the only member of Meredith’s host family there for the weekend. His wife is in the process of starting her own business so she stayed in Paris to work and their fourteen year old daughter wanted to have friends over so she stayed behind too.
Pouliguen is a summer beach town, so everything was pretty quiet this weekend (which I see now is why the rest of the family chose to stay back in Paris this weekend). There are three small towns along the beach, which happens to be the largest sand beach in Europe. Like all the seasonal beach towns back home, a lot of the little stores and restaurants were closed for the winter and a lot of the houses were boarded up. Nevertheless, there were still a good number of people out and about and plenty of surfers, kite surfers, and people just walking along the beach so it definitely still had the beach-y atmosphere.
Meredith and I spent the weekend walking along the beach, visiting another beach town down the road with Édouard and enjoying authentic crêpes, galettes and cidre. Now, I’ve had some tasty crêpes in Paris but they are nothing compared to the crêpes Meredith and I ate this weekend. In Paris, crêpes can be either sucrée (sweet, sugary and delicious) or salée (salty, savory and delicious) but in Bretagne (and obviously Pays de la Loire), crêpes are typically strictly sucrée and galettes are sallée(There isn’t much difference between the two, just different flour used in the batter).They were hot and crispy and delicious and a perfect treat after our long bike ride along the beach (which included a bit of rain).
I may not have actually been in Bretagne, but it sure felt like an authentic Breton weekend.
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