France and Netherland

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We woke up early on the second day because we had a day trip to Mont St. Michel. We booked the tour from a local tour company and the departure point was next to Musee de Louvre. We arrived there by MTR and the MTR station has a nice platform showing Venus de Milo.

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The day trip lasted 14 hours, from 7:30am to 9:30pm, but the actual visiting time was only 4 hours because it took 5 hour bus to the Mont St. Michel. Once we would have thought that we should stay there for 1 night. We slept on the bus but you will find it worthy to be there when you arrived.

The farther look and closer looks of the Mont St. Michel. It is situated at Normandy area of France, which is famous by its inclement weather.

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We arrived there at about noon. Before we started our visit, we went to eat. Our lunch must have their famous omelette, althoguh I was told that the original one was gone and now the chef are making this omelette using the recipe left by the original chef.

Foods are nice, tho not excellent. The restaurant was busy to serve a lot of customers. Who said that a lunch in France usually lasts for a few hours?

The first picture is the restaurant we went to. They served a Normandy's famous drink, cider. This was the first time I had Cider as a pairing wine for my main dish. The cider showed some maturation character, very interesting.

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You can see from the above picture that the church was built at the top of the island. The oldest part was built in year 708. It was further developed and went through the 100 year war. So this one has both Gothic and Romanesque style architecture.

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The abbey is quiet and solemn. The monks spent their whole life there to train and worship. A lot of religious symbols were left there. You can still find out how hard their life was.

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This is the place for their meeting. The second picture showed the trace of a chimney built.

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This is the place where they copy bible. No photocopying at that time and all bibles were manually copied. Large chimneys were built to warm up the room so that they can write. The fire place is higher than a person.

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This is the place where the monks left the corpus after they passed away. A Peita at the left side, an altar at the end and there was a sculpture hanged on the wall, saying about incarnation.

The second picture is a closer look at Peita. Third picture is the altar. The letter Omega has a meaning of "From start to the end".

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An overview from the abbey. Except the hotel built on the island, the nearest one is about 3km away. No car is allowed except those permitted one. So thousands of tourists have to squeeze into a shuttle. The island is surrounded by a large piece of wet land. On high tide, it will look like an isolated island, you can imagine.

A very nice scene indeed. You see the last picture has a nice weather, but it rained just a few minutes before I took this picture.

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We had planned our third and forth day as Museum day. This was because we can buy a Paris Museum Pass to walk through a number of museums. Not only that it is cheaper than paying individual museum when visit, but also that you need not to queue for tickets. We bought a 2-day museum pass at 48 Euro and we earned back the value on our first day.

Having said that, the first spot we went to was Place de la Bastille. Nothing special there actually except its historic meaning. This is the place where the Bastille jail located during French Revolution time. The second reason that we were there was the Marche de Bastille. This is an old market and only open in Thursday and Sunday. We went there for our breakfast.