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Caen is a medieval French town 'liberated' shortly after D-Day. Taking it was more difficult than the generals had anticipated so, with the Germans dug in at the edge of the city and the allies dug in just beyond them, a squadron of heavy bombers came in to sort things out.
Unfortunately, the bombers missed the German lines, dropping their payloads, instead, on the town and tens of thousands of startled French civilians.
The bombing of Caen is nearly universally regarded as an ineffective action but one can only assume the spectacle of hurling large amounts of ordinance into clusters of buildings must have whet the American's appetite for carpet bombing as a means of securing submission, for they have undeniably adopted an enduring fondness for the technique.
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Caen shortly after the bombers got through with it
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Same area of Caen today. The steeple in the background
belongs to the church in the center of the photo on the left.
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The people of Caen (well, those who were left, anyway), were, naturally, pissed, and their resentment, I was assured, continues to this day.
My plan, therefore, was to tell them I was Canadian, not only to avoid spending all of my time apologizing for being an American, but also to keep the kitchen staff from spitting in my food.
Upon arrival, however, I found the locals to be well-behaved and too preoccupied with the business of being French people (you know, wearing berets and walking around with long sticks of bread under their arms) to bother speculating about what my grandfather might or might not have dropped on uncle Pierre's bakery shop back in 1944.
Besides, the town was lovely, with a spacious and attractive shopping district, wide streets and well-designed transport system; surely none of this would have been possible if we hadn't reduced the old mediaeval heart of the city to rubble and provided them the opportunity of rebuilding it properly.
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The canal next to our hotel
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A portion of the Caen shopping district
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On our first night in town, we traversed the fetching streets in search of a restaurant, so confident we could conquer French that we left our computer print-out of French phrases back in the hotel room (in looking for suitable phrases to download, I ran across
this site, which got me giggling like a school girl).
There was no shortage of places to eat or styles of cuisine but our confidence dwindled each time we paused to read a menu.
The only place were we knew exactly what was on the bill of fare was McDonald's but we decided not to stoop that low.
(I was surprised to find McDonalds in France; I thought they had better taste. On the other hand, there weren't that many and the one I did see had a classy look to it; you could almost imagine ordering the house white with your McFishwich.)
Eventually we found a menu with a recognizable word.
"Fromage means cheese," my wife said. Satisfied that we could get something with cheese on it, we went in. (We ate a lot of cheese that weekend.)
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View of Caen
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After a bit of Bonjour-ing and Merci-ing we were seated and handed a menus that, aside from the word 'Cheese,' were totally unintelligible. If you've never been to a foreign country you cannot appreciate how helpless it makes you feel to be surrounded by presumably intelligent people, but with absolutely no means of communicating with them. You, and they, can talk as loudly and as slowly as you like but the words are simply not going to magically take on meaning. We bumbled about with our halting French that we undoubtedly hilariously mispronounced--I give the wait staff high marks for not laughing in our faces--and eventually a seafood salad and rare steak arrived. (I originally ordered a slab of raw meat but the uncharacteristically kind and accommodating French waitress pointed out, in her halting English, that 'tartar' meant 'uncooked' so I switched. I must have come across as truly pathetic for her to take such undeserved pity on me.)
The food was superb, by the way.
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At the table next to us was a handsome young couple speaking perfect French. The woman, petit and pretty, was everything I thought of as the quintessential French maiden. Then they turned to us and started talking in a Texas twang, revealing they were actually American students studying in Normandy. They'd only been in France a few months and already spoke like natives. Well, to me at least. They were, however, most helpful and offered us tips on finding our way around town, but they left before I could ask them how to say, "I would like a cooked steak, please," in French.
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Young lady pole dancing in the middle of the street for no
apparent reason. This is France, after all.
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