France – Part 3

Saturday in our French trip, we were on our own. Jean-Marc and his lovely wife had some Business to attend to, so he gave us some suggestions, and off we went.  We started in Pleyben (little red 4, above), which has a very old Calvary.  Sadly, we did not know what a Calvary is, so we did not take a picture of it.  We assumed it was the church.  Here is Maya in front of the church.  I didn’t really use my phone while I was in France, trying to save money, and Ted was driving, and Maya was just along for the ride.  So zero research was done.  When I look it up on Wikipedia, it makes me wish I had known more of what I was looking at.  But it was a cool old church, and the Calvary itself was very interesting, even if I am a heathen and didn’t know who all of the figures were supposed to be.  To be honest, we were about ready to look at something that was not a church.  Too bad.

After a walk around the village square, which was filled on this day with firefighters and children, many of whom were dressed as firefighters (very cute, they were very young kids, maybe Kindergarten or 1st grade), we stopped in at a little bakery and had a snack, then went to the next stop on our trip, a town called Landerneau, which is known for having an occupied bridge.  The architecture was lovely, and there is a very cool artist community there.  I don’t think I liked it as much as Quimper, but I did like it quite a bit.

This is the Rohan Bridge, which has houses and shops. Note the swan in the Elorn River. We perused the little art shops, and tried to figure out which gallery was the one where Jean-Marc’s wife worked. The language barriers were enough that we never figured it out. Again, most signs are in both French and Breton, and many children attend bilingual schools there.

After Landernau, we went back to our little village by the Sea and had dinner. Sunday was a laid back, very delicious meal with Jean-Marc and his family in the city of Brest. They were a bit worried that as we are from California, and specifically the Bay Area, we might not find their cooking up to our high standards. Nothing could be further from the truth. The food was delicious, the company lively, lots of wine, lots of laughs, and a quinoa salad that we wished to copy when we got home. We did not see a lot of Brest, though we liked what we saw. Actually, we did laundry there, perhaps on Friday. Laundromats are a challange when you have no currency and don’t speak the language. Poor Jean-Marc ended up paying for our laundry, because the machine only took credit cards that you could tap, rather than swipe or insert, and we did not have one. Poor guy offered to let us do laundry at his house, but we didn’t want to put him out, so instead he had to sit with us at the laundromat and pay for things. We are jerks. That was definitely Friday, because now that I think about it, we did MORE laundry at his house on Sunday. Sigh. At least we brought him some wine to thank him for everything.