Nous explorons

This is Andy's "I know you're taking a photograph of me" face. This is taken at the port where we went to change his ticket, and the first time I've ever been there! And, well, it's a port...and it has a lighthouse and a lot of seagulls. I think we mainly just took the piss and some very random photographs of each other! Not that you can tell from this photograph, but it was rather windy (check out the scarf), and rather cold...it actually snowed (more on that later)!

So today was started early as I was mean to have a class. Meant to being the main word in this sentence! About fifteen minutes before we were about to leave I got a phone call from my responsable asking if I'd looked outside the window this morning (I hadn't), and that during the night it had snowed rather a lot. And I thought frost ground French public transport to a halt...try snow! So the students that I would have had would probably not have been able to get into school as most live even further out from the city than I do. So after having a bit more of a lie in, Andy and I set off to see if we could get a tram into Caen to then get a bus to the port. No trams since 6am (their starting time), and by this time it was about 10.30am. So we struck off walking in the snow down the tram tracks, which was actually really quite fun! Twenty minutes in to our snowy adventure Andy realised that he didn't actually have any of the documents that he needed to change his ticket, so we ended up heading back home...but by the time we got back and collected everything the trams again were working! Was entertaining on the way back as we counted the number of "scumbag trams" that were running up and down the tracks completely empty, "checking" safety...the strange thing was the least frozen surface of transport, between pavement, road and tram tracks were the tram tracks!

Anyway, on heading to the station we found out that the buses were not running until the afternoon so we headed into Caen for a light lunch and some more sightseeing. It's great that in France the coffee shops just let you bring in your own food from the numerous boulangeries, so you don't have to spend loads of money on buying food in-house. We had another wander round the castle, even taking in a little bit of culture in the museum, and going back up the castle walls (see here). After a quick look round Saint-Pierre, lighting some candles (I don't know why, it always seems so apt in the church) and soaking up the peaceful atmosphere we headed back to the station to get the bus to Ouistreham. And surprisingly everything worked as planned, which was awesome. As mentioned before, we spent a while generally messing around taking pictures before getting the next bus back into Caen.

Well, the evening. Might need to work on my measurements of drinks at some point! After drinking two-thirds of a bottle of Pommeau before heading out to the Maître Corbeau for some food, I ordered 100cl of wine...thinking it was about two glasses due to the price of the wine and my humanities brain. So when the one litre colossus of wine came, we had to drink it. And then we simply had to try some Normandy drinks specialities...including embuscade (beer, wine, calvados, blackcurrant syrup) and cervoise (beer, wine, lemon syrup). So we might have been very pretty drunk! But an absolute hoot of a night, and so glad that Andy is staying a few days before heading back home. Hopefully will not have a hangover in the morning...