Three Engineers in Paris

That sounds like the title for a new movie, or the opening line to a bad joke.  No one in my family speaks a word of French, so I have no idea what possessed us to go spend three days in France.  The French are well known for their distain for Americans, and I am sure we have been feeding their stereotypes over the last few days.

The foreign language thing is a pretty big barrier.  They even had English menus at dinner, but we still couldn't tell what we were ordering.  They basically used French words with English grammar in their descriptions.  Asking for clarification rarely shed any more light on the issues.  In England, sometimes it "felt like" they were speaking another language, but in France they actually are.

They drive on the "right" side of the road, and seem relatively sane compared to drivers in London.  Their road signs are not very intuitive, even though they are symbolic instead of in French.  That was the first place we had to drive, and it would appear that similar to America, it is required to check your brain as security for your rental car.  I was just the guy in the backseat, calmly giving directions based on my GPS enabled phone, while my dad and brother, regardless of which was actually driving, panicked every time we came to an intersection, or heaven-forbid, a toll plaza.  The French navigation system wasn't helping, especially since it was usually configured incorrectly, but my dad was convinced that the rental company was tracking us with it, in case we were speeding.  It did give us warnings when it thought we were speeding, which was a little weird, but its speed limits didn't always match the ones posted on the signs.

There was a picture of a naked girl in my hotel room, which I guess is the French idea of art.  The building we were staying in was built in the 1400's, which makes it one of the relatively newer ones in the area.  Normandy is an interesting place, because it had it's hey-day in the 1100's, shortly after William the Conqueror invaded England from there.  And with the exception of the D-Day landings during WWII, not much of significance has happened there since.  There is a village every two miles in any direction, with a church and about ten buildings, and then narrow winding roads to each of the surrounding villages.  I do find it amusing that the French spent the last 1000 years trying to prevent the English from invading their shores, and then suddenly in the 1940s, were doing everything they could to encourage them to do so.

Our visit to Mont-Saint-Michel was quite impressive.  The fact that people were able to build a huge cathedral on top of a steep mountain, on what is essentially an island, without any form of power tools, is pretty amazing.  It is a marvel of engineering, in a variety of ways.  Of course that explains why it took them a thousand years to build it, and they are still working on it.  It would have been impressive to see it at high tide, which creates a serious moat, but instead it was just really swampy and gross at the base of the wall.  Anyhow, it was interesting to see, and I am quite confident that there is nothing like it in America.