France! (Sam)

Hooray!!! I am writing this blog from a gîte (holiday cottage) in France! Although we have no internet so I will save and post from an Internet café later.  We took the ferry from Dover to Calais Monday morning. In the afternoon, we went to Arras, a beautiful Flemish town. We spent some time admiring the beauty of the architecture, but we were also searching for accommodations. Our latest edition of Lonely Planet France told us that there was a hostel downtown but unfortunately it had disappeared without a trace. So we walked through the streets looking for reasonably priced hotels, but there was no such thing. We then went nearer the train station and found a hotel that was much the same price as the ones in the square, but we were tired of searching so we went for it. The next day we had more fun in Arras, we got a parking ticket! When we went to pay it the policeman told us we had to give the real money to the tabagie, (they sell tobacco, lottery tickets etc.) who would give us stamps which we could then give to the police. After we sorted that out we decided that we did not want to be harassed in Arras anymore so we waited in line for an hour to buy a cell-phone from which we could book this gite in the country.

On our way to the gite we stopped at Vimy Ridge, the site of a WWI battle, where the Canadians beat the Germans with death tolls of 3,500. The French had tried, and lost 150,000. On the top of the Ridge they have a giant piercing white monument surrounded by fields pock marked by bombs. Further back, you can go into the trenches and the underground tunnels from where they launched the attacks. The walls of the tunnels were made of chalk with chunks of flint sticking out; not great when you are walking around in a uniform from which hung bits of metal and you are carrying bags of dynamite and ammunitions.
Photos: Arras, The towers of the Monument from the back, Front view of the Monument, Flint in the tunnel wall, Helmets in the tunnel