An Epic Weekend in Normandy: Part 2

After our overly-eventful morning, I was more than ready to do some actual sight-seeing. The Bayeux Tapestry Museum is conveniently located in the center of town, with signs pointing to it from all directions - in other words, something we could finally achieve without difficulty!

And all the signs were making me a little giddy. I learned about the history behind the tapestry during my Spring Term in London this past May - we even visited the battlefield where William the Conqueror's beat the Saxons for the English crown. Besides, wouldn't you be excited to see something that's over 900 years old?

Needless to say, I was enraptured by it, even trapped in a walking conveyor belt of tourists with an audioguide pressed to my ear. In fact, the tapestry was even longer and larger than I thought, with numerous intricate details. I think I went into art museum-mode, because as with the florescent Monets in Paris, it was a little painful to pull myself away - I could have easily studied it for hours!

Instead, I bought a mini-version which folds out like a map. But of course, it's not quite the same!

Heidi and I spent the latter half of the afternoon in another museum which presented practically anything one would want to know about the Battle of Normandy. We definitely didn't read every display, but overall it was an educational introduction for our tour the next morning.

Though I'm not sure how much my memory retained thanks to the minimal amount of sleep I got that night. It just so happened that the granddaughter of the woman running the hostel in town was having her 18th birthday party at the house we were sleeping. The woman did mention that to us before we left, but assured us that there wouldn't be many people and we would be fine sleeping in a back room. At that point, it was a side-note easily forgotten in our hunger and exhaustion.

But of course, that night we returned to this huge house crawling with teenagers: squeezed onto benches with drinks in hand, clumped randomly at the edges of the main room while the DJ plays outdated hits, and even hiding in random corners upstairs with purposes all too obvious. Heidi and I rushed past them all with our eyes focused on the path leading to our room - only to be greeted by rows of truncated bunk-beds and Disney characters when we finally got inside. Though we were the only (official) guests there at the time, in the summer the place houses school groups, presumably studying WWII or the Tapestry. And so we had the pleasure of sleeping with cartoons watching us.

At that point, we were just thankful to have beds to sleep in. We had a few ignorant visitors who announced their entrance by illuminating all the lights before one of us stumbled out of bed and mumbled something to them in French. And I swear the DJ kept turning up the volume all night. Ironically, it was pleasant to wake up in the morning simply because it was finally silent.

If only we'd had a moment to have enjoyed it! We were a little rushed in the morning because we'd assumed we'd have to make the long trudge back into town to catch our tour at 8:30. However, I quickly noticed that quite a large spread of breakfast food seemed to have been left behind from the party - I didn't feel an ounce of guilt taking some bread and oranges or making tea to subside my morning caffeine fix. Besides, we were originally supposed to get free breakfast with the other hostel, but seeing how everything else had played out so far, we weren't expecting anything.

And so when a mustachioed Frenchman strolled into the dining room and said "Petit déjeuner?" right as I was pulling my tea out of the microwave, I assumed he was asking me if I was having it presently. I absent-mindedly replied "oui" and then he disappeared. As Heidi and I sat down for a second to eat an orange, it didn't take long to realize that he was in the kitchen, making us breakfast... and we needed to leave in 5 minutes. But it was impossible to refuse the plates of cheeses and meats, the baskets of warm bread and croissants, or the huge jars of jelly, honey, and Nutella. And as I'm sure you can imagine, once we explained our situation, he assured us that we would be given a ride by his colleague - who unexpectedly turned out to be a notably tall, rosy-cheeked British professor. For me, hearing British humor at that hour made everything better.

On our ride into town, he offered his heartfelt apologies and finally uncovered all the shady business we encountered the day before with the other hostel - the old woman is actually embezzling funds from the association, and they're in this big legal war far too complicated for me to understand.

The moral of the story: be prepared for an adventure when you're staying in the cheapest (and in this case, the only) hostel in a European town! But I'm glad to say that Heidi and I survived.

With that debacle behind us, we looked ahead to the war-torn beaches of Normandy.