I got woken up this morning by people walking across the floor after taking their showers. Trust me, that's enough to wake us all up. It was only 7. I'm still suffering from the 48 hour wakefest so I was a tad grumpy.
After breakfast we headed out to Caen, to a museum there all about world war two. It was pretty detailed, with every last part of the war written about. The first thing we did there was go down this cool spiraly globe thing, and all the events were written on the walls in chronical order. At the bottom, there was a freaky Jewish people room, with pictures of Jews with really really big eyes. I was disturbed. Also, there were models of ships and planes, those were cool. I thought that they did a good job in the museum, but I felt so sick that that could have happened to humans. I felt responsible for it.
We went back upstairs, and into a cool imax theatre, where we watched two movies. The first one was on D-day, and what both sides [the screen was split in two for this] were doing. So the Germans were loading up warheads while the Canadians were crossing the Atlantic and playing dice. It was powerful. Then they showed d-day, and it looked pretty real. I don't know if it was real footage, or from a movie, but it was good. The second movie was this cool risk game type of movie, where they showed what happened d-day. They showed this map and where the British [and others] forces were, and how they pushed the Germans out of France over the period of time it took. It made the fighting look easy as they only got pushed back by the Germans once.
We took a look in the giftshop after the movies [in which I almost fell asleep because the seats were so comfy]. Didn't buy anything spectacular. Bought a french book ["La vie est belle", which is an awesome italian movie]; M. Pelletier would be proud. We also saw "Au nom de tous les miens" for sale there. Carazy.
After the Caen museum, we got back in the bus and went to Juno beach. It was the windiest day ever. The coldest since we had gotten here, and ended up being the worst weather we got during the whole trip. We travelled down the beach a ways, saw the cool house that is famous because it's still standing, a house there before D-Day ever happened, and that was all at Juno beach. I grabbed some sand. The foam was scary, it moved, like an animal [Shannon's words].
We tried to go to the Memorial Centre for Juno, but it's still being built. Their goal is to have it built for the 59th anniversary of D-Day this June 6. I hope they make it. We didn't even get out of the bus, but I did get pictures of it. My grampa will have a brick for him there once it's completed. I'm glad they're making a Juno beach memorial, because they seem to have memorials for everything else over here. France sure likes to remember the wars. I think that's great.
We went to the cemetary for Juno beach next. We had a mini ceremony, where there was a speech, and a laying of the wreaths, and Shauna singing Oh Canada after two minutes of silence, in which I cried. After, we were given a flag each and were told to go lay it on someone's grave. I picked someone from Queen's Own because that's the outfit my grandfather was in.
Afterward we headed over to this couple's house that Mr. Porkka had met when he taught in Holland. They were alive during the war and were there in this small town when the Canadians liberated Juno Beach. They were so happy that the outfit that came to their town spoke french. They were ever grateful and gave the soldiers food and water and blessings. The man gave one soldier his family's horse. I thought that that was cool. Ever since, they've been still grateful to the Canadians because we liberated them. So they invited all 50 or so of us to their house for tea. I was so happy that they had peach ice tea. I love this stuff. They introduced us to some really good cookies called BN, and now we're all addicted to them. They told us their stories about d-day, and then we had another mini ceremony in which we gave them some of our scarves. They asked Shauna to sing again, and she sang a cool french opera song. It was different. Mr. Porkka wants all of us to send a postcard once we get back, to thank them, and I think it's a great idea.
Once they kicked us out [haha, they didn't] we went to a small cemetary [small compared to the ones we had seen so far] where one of Sarah's relatives were, and she planted a flag there. I don't know who I was looking with, but we were looking through the registery for red deer names and found Robert Forrester, and we think it's the same one that went to our school many many years ago. That was cool.
We got back to Bayeux, and we had to fend for ourselves for supper, but we had the option to go to a grocery store instead of in town, so Shannon, Lisa and I, and a lot of others decided to do so. We bought food for tomorrow [travelling day], and tried to find suitable food for a supper. We didn't really, but we stopped in the fast food outlet attached to the grocery store and got food. It was funny; Lisa had just bought her food when they told her to leave [and she was the first one buying] because they were closing in ten minutes and clearly thought we could not possibly eat our food in ten minutes. They practically kicked us out. We were puzzled at first, then remembered that people in France eat really slowly. Not us Canadians. But we did leave, and ate while walking back to our hostel. We didn't go to town that night, but stayed in for once, took a really nice long shower, and packed for the moving process tomorrow. We were told that we were living out of our backpacks for the next two days, with no access to our suitcases, so packing took a long time. Then I went downstairs and helped Shannon phone home in their way too cool londonish phone booth, that was even red. I heard Shauna and Murray practise for Vimy Ridge, it was beautiful. We talked for a while, Shannon and Murray and I, then we went to bed.
