Bayeux!

Well, it's 23°F (-5°C) in Bordeaux right now, meaning the chance I'll get out of bed today is 50-50. So what better time to blog about Bayeux! After Mont Saint-Michel, we drove to our hotel in Port-en-Bessin, which is a smaller city near Bayeux. The next morning, we headed into Bayeux for breakfast and tourist-ing. Bayeux is most famous for the Bayeux Tapestry, a 230 foot long tapestry about the Norman conquest of England, and the gigantic Cathédrale Notre-Dame. Unfortunately, the Bayeux Tapestry was closed for the month of January, but I wasn't too crushed. I was interested in seeing it, but it wasn't on my must-see-or-will-die-unfulfilled-omg list. On to the Cathedral!

The Cathédrale Notre-Dame was incroyable! This was easily the biggest cathedral I had ever seen (we hadn't been to Chartres yet). It was consecrated almost a thousand years ago, in 1077 (!!!), and Wikipedia tells me it is in the Norman-Romanesque style of architecture. It's incrediblely impressive how people were able to build such a huge, intricate, imposing structure so long ago, before any machines or computers. I don't know how they did it! We stood outside, just walking around the cathedral for a while before even going in because the outside alone was so amazing. 

The inside as well was extremely impressive and well-preserved. The vaulted ceiling is really cool, and the stained glass windows are beautiful. There were almost no other tourists there; it was crazy to be walking around in this huge cathedral almost all by ourselves. 

There was also a crypt that we went down into. It was spooky! And it was too dark to see any of the murals on the walls very well, so we went back up to the main level pretty fast.

Creepy!

Pretty soon, we were grabbing a baguette and off to see the beaches of Normandy. À bientôt!

















P.S. I found out you can buy beer in the on-campus dining halls here! Oh, France...