Pourquoi pas?

Walking around in St. Malo, I ran into this street sign, which translates to street of why not. It’s becoming a good motto for this trip in general. Which is probably why I'm working on the French 15 (cousin of the freshman 15). There's no shortage of regional baked goods around here. There's regional specialities, departmental specialities, town specialities, and maision specialities down to the individual bakery. Crazy apple fried things, plum custard-y things. That makes for a serious amount of eating. Here's a photo of more kouign-aman.

I've had some legitmately awful food so far. In Rennes, I ate mackeral on plain pasta - what the heck they were think i have no idea. But the night before, I ate at a place that was a dream come true - not expenisve but with tasty, simple food. I had a lamb stew with figs and almonds - so good. I wanted to tell them they're geniuses, but I didn't know how it would translate into french.

St. Malo has about a thousand moules and frites places. The oysters weren't bad, but not amazing. It's always a good warning sign when you only see tourists eating the local food. St. Malo does have some very good bars, suprisingly, probably due to the influx of Paris tourists in the summer.

Two of the main sites are located on islands just outside the walled city, which are unreachable during high tide but are connected by a land bridge during low tide. As if managing the hours of local tourist sites weren't hard enough, I'm now tuned in the tidal schedule to get the work done. On one of them, two young guides were giving the tours. Talking to them afterwards, they told us they get to live in the old fort on the island for the summer as part of their job. That's the fort at sunset, on the left. Pretty cool, also vaguely creepy.

Brittany's WWII history is also everywhere. Most of St. Malo was destroyed by the Americans, as it was one of the last strongholds of Germany during the war. I took a tour of German bunker that was built, along with kilometers of underground tunnels they dug out. It's probably the first time I've gotten a real sense of how dire things were in WWII, and what a task the Americans had landing here. I felt oddly patriotic, as they described how American troops took Brittany and Normandy by land, arriving in mined and bombed out cities the Germans would leave behind. What an incredible task it was.

One last stop at the butter store before leaving St. Malo. Here's a short poem I wrote about it - "Dear seaweed butter, I love you." I fasted from butter for (almost) a whole day for this last meal...