photos from a holiday in northern france
Some notes from my trip to France.
Staying in St Malo we swam every morning.
These swimming plans have led me to reacquaint myself with tide times - the low and high tide times move about 50 minutes each day, and high and low tides are about six hours apart. So at the beginning of our trip we swam just after high tide at around 11am, and later we swam around 11am at lowish tide, when the water was coming in. The first sign of the difference was the jellyfish we saw washed up as we walked along the beach, and when we actually started swimming there were more it the water. We looked it up later and learned they were probably Moon jellyfish, mostly harmless, but we still planned to swim after high tide for the rest of our holiday.
The Plage de Bon-Secours in St Malo with it's tidal swimming pool
We tried oysters for the first time, at a beachside bar. We ordered them and told the waitress, who was shocked we'd never tried them before - when she delivered them to our table, she told us her parents were oyster farmers and showed us how to eat them in English we didn't quite follow ("use a knife to detach the oyster from the shell... tip it into your mouth with the liquid... chew once or twice and swallow" and something about a part of the oyster that "combines the earth and the sea"... poetic but inscrutable).
Immediately after trying the first one my boyfriend said "Oh, it's nice!" with a genuine tone of surprise - and he's right. They really tasted more like white fish than I expected - raw white fish, like sushi. We ate them squeezed with lemon juice and accompanied by white wine.
The small orange boats in the sea
On one of the days we were there, there was some sort of event on - centred around these traditional orange boats, called Dories. We stopped off to have a look on the way to catch the ferry to Dinard (just across the bay, a 10 minutes ferry ride).
A photo I took of the ferry, and a girl waiting on the dockside
It was a pretty low key festival with some stalls of local crafts, a stand serving regional food including galettes. We stopped there and had some moules frites for lunch (with a plastic cup of white wine of course).
Several giant dogs
Charmingly there also seemed to be a big dog meet up happening at the same time. I counted at least six. At some point, they took the dogs down to the jetty so there could bark at the boats, presumably. I had a little giggle imagining the big dogs in the small orange boats.
A shot from Conte D'Été
Dinard was pretty in a more "Victorian seaside resort" way than the medieval beauty of St Malo. I mainly wanted to visit there because I'd watched Conte D'Été, which is set there. Its a French film directed by Eric Rohmer, one of my favourite of the French New Wave directors, about a 90s fuck boy who goes on holiday to the beach and agonises over choosing between 3 different women.
We walked along here! Although I didn't recognise the exact spot.
When we went to Paris later in the holiday, we actually visited Eric Rohmer's grave - he's buried in Montparnasse Cemetery. It was kind of a non-event because we'd just gotten off the train and it was very, very warm. The cemetery is pretty cool, and, not what I expected but pretty active. There were several stonemasons there engraving headstones with chisels, working under big umbrellas due to the heat. It's a big maze of graves, with lots of ornate memorials to look at.
Finally, here's the most adorable dog I saw in a cafe in Paris.
(We had coffee in this cafe and the dog had to be picked up and carried away for eating crumbs. The owner said she was "very naughty").