Monday, April 1, 2013

Mont Saint Michel

hey y'all,

So Saturday morning, we took a bus trip to Mont Saint Michel. It's in Normandy, and the bus ride was gorgeous. We've been so lucky that we've had awesome weather for the last week. It's been cold, but absolutely no rain. Here's where Mont Saint Michel is on a map. It's really far from Lille, so it took us about 6 hours on a bus. OOF.



The ride was well worth it though. Mont Saint Michel is pretty incredible. It's a really old abbey that was commissioned in the 8th or 9th century. It's an incredible labyrinth of a building, but what is really cool about it is how it's on an island and just sort of sticks out in the middle of Normandy. The picture explains it a little better. This is the view from the parking lot.


Next to the Eiffel Tower, this is one of the most widely recognized French landmarks/monuments. You can find a picture of it in approximately every single French textbook out there. 

We had a great time on our visit. At the bottom of the picture above, you can see some buildings that are separate from the abbey. In order to get up to the abbey, you spiral up the streets of this town with tourists shops and restaurants on every side. It's a really neat sight. We obvi stopped in for a petit cafĂ©. 

The inside of the abbey is pretty vast and it was freezing cold, I assume from the tall ceilings and stone walls. There's a lot of places with construction going on, which makes sense seeing as it's over 1000 years old...


Here's a view of the top of the abbey.


Here's a view of the channel from the top of the abbey. 




Here's the cloister of the abbey.



After Mont Saint Michel, we started making our way back to Lille (Saturday night). We stayed in a hotel in Caen, and then stopped at two more seaside towns in Normandy, which I'll save for the next post.

Luv,
Sarah 

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