Rouen, Étratat

On Sunday, I took a train to Rouen, where one of my former students, Audrey, lives (she was in my club; I never had her in a class). We went to their Beaux Artst museum, which is quite nice. Here are a few pieces from there that are of the city (their collection is much more varied).  

 Rouen has a famous cathedral and is also known as the city of a hundred bells. It is also where Joan of Arc was jailed and burned. And it has a famous clock (as attested to in one of the above paintings).

This picture is along one of the sides, rather than the center -- it's much bigger than this image might lead you to believe.  The statues have been taken down from the roof because they are working on it right now.

Rouen has a very distinctive style of building in the center of town. It kind of reminded me of Strasbourg. (Notice how the windows on that one building are non-rectangular parallelograms!)

I took a lot of pictures of other churches, but I am only including a few here. 

Here is a building that has kept the bullet holes from WWII.

We drive to a cliff above the town to see an overview and I imagine it would have been stunning on a sunnier day. Audrey then drove me around her town a bit (she lives just outside of Rouen), which was neat. It's nice to see a smaller town. We went to a McDonald's, which was way fancier and nicer than I remember US McDonald's being. All the ordering was done on fancy panels, they'd bring your food to your table, and they had knock-off (I assume) Eames chairs.

Then! we drove to the ocean, to see the Étratat cliffs, which were amazing. Here is the view of one side, from the beach.

Here is a view of the other side, from the top of that cliff.  It had been rainy all day, but the sun came out when we got there.


And here is the view from the top of the cliff, in the other direction.  (That photo is huge and I recommend viewing it in full.)

And Audrey insisted we needed to get some good pictures of cows. Normandy is a big dairy producer. These are not the classic Normandy cows, since they aren't black and white. We saw a lot of those from the highway, though.

I also got to briefly talk to Audrey's mom, who'd I'd met once before in Chicago. Then, pop, onto the train back to Paris.