moving swiftly on: bayeux

after leaving the friendly embrace of verchocq, we decided to wend our way westwards to the town of bayeux. located in normandy, bayeux is small, charming, and packed to the gills with history. its main attraction (besides its massive cathedral) is the bayeux tapestry, a thirty-some-odd-foot length of linen embroidered with the tale of treacherous king harold and his subsequent death-by-arrow-through-the-eye-socket at the hands of william the conqueror; a pre-enlightenment storyboard, if you will.

for all of its traits as a legitimate piece of 'serious' history, the tapestry is actually quite bawdy at times--if you keep an eye on the illustrations in the margins, you will find depictions of naked men and women, exaggerated in all the usual ways, doin' it (and by 'it' i mean 'their thing'). not necessarily something your high school history books will make a note of, though the audio tour makes quite gleeful mention of it.

after viewing the tapestries, we decided to make a pilgrimage to one of normandy's other great, macabre attractions, the american cemetery at omaha beach. the cemetary is a visual spectacle: immaculately maintained, it is a testament to the beauty of simplicity, comprised solely of rows of simply hewn white marble laid out on a cool green field which overlooks the sea. to say it is tidy is to discredit the sense of orderly serenity that pervades the place; more appropriate (though ironic) would be to say that the cemetery seems pure. there are no garbage cans, but there is not a speck of litter to be found anywhere; it's as though, after all the filth that accompanied the war, the world wants this place, these memories, to stay clean.

appropriate, however, to honor the memories of those who died for something so much more important than oil.

we went to the cemetary to pay our respects, but we were also looking for someone. dom's friend B had a brother. they both fought in WWII, only B made it home. his brother H is buried in the cemetary at omaha; B has never seen his grave. we wanted, while we were there, to find H's grave and bring B back a few photographs of it, as he is getting on in years and unlikely to make it out to normandy himself. while as a gesture, it's not as good as being able to bring him there, we hope it will bring him some happiness, just to see the green hills where his brother rests.

our sojourn in bayeux lasted two days; long enough to get some culture and mangle some french, eat some tasty duck, knock the car into a concrete planter, do something good for someone, and brace ourselves to be hurled once again into the great unknown.

also, to resolve to bring a guidebook next time we came to france.