Hypothetically.
We're back in America, if any of you were searching for the most obvious statement of the century. It's nice to be home and yet not very nice at all. (Perhaps only the missionaries know what I mean by this.) You have horrible bread and cheese. Your cream is a joke. So is your mustard. But your drinking glasses are pleasantly large, so I will stay.
I'm searching wildly for something else that is nice to say. Well I guess I could talk about how a couple weeks ago we got together with Dustin's family to go see Danielle's opera and so on and so forth and how it was enjoyable. Because it was.
I could also discuss how we made it home from Europe safely despite the volcano, and how the day after we left London most of their outbound flights froze up due to a British Airways employee strike so we were lucky to get out of there, and how my grandparents are magnanimously allowing us to crash in their basement free of charge while Dustin sifts through the sands of recession for any sign of a job, and how we bought an adequate SUV that I have appropriately dubbed the Bronze Beast, and how its check engine light is on.
See how most of this stuff is exciting? But not always in a good way?
Which is why I now proceed to catch you up on everything you never wanted to know about what happened to us after Megatrip 2010.
Sorry Devin! Typically enough I have nothing scandalous to say about Dustin, but a lot of scandalous-by-default things to say about France.
Devin should really be happy about this though. He is currently pursuing a Thomas Jefferson education. Rule number one in becoming the next Jefferson: develop a rabid, passionate affection for France to the point that your colleagues get highly annoyed. Check. (You're welcome guys!)
After Megatrip we waited a whole month and then went exploring again, this time to Verdun. It started out very nicely with one of those cute little thousand-year-old castles you can find for a dime a dozen in France:
Then we went out to the famous Verdun battlefields of World War I and things took a turn for the macabre. What do you even say about a place like that? It's almost indescribable. Thankfully Dustin provides a little comic relief by munching sandwiches in corners:
One suggestion to the French government would be to never, ever try covering up a horrific battlefield with trees. The ground there is so ripped and pitted by these enormous bomb craters that it looks like huge sea waves. Then France decided to "hide" them all by planting a forest. End result? It's still visible, only now it's unbelievably dark and creepy.Memorials to the dead are everywhere. The Battle of Verdun was very bloody; it wiped nine villages off the map and killed over 700,000 people. It's been more than ninety years and the French still find skeletons in their fields. They bury all these along with other unidentified remains at the ossuary (or bone-yard) of Douaumont:
Every brick in there hides a bone, and the foundations are filled with them. How do I know this? Because for your viewing enjoyment, the ossuary's theater shows a free historical film whose whole introduction is a guy unlocking the foundation vault and you get to stare at piles of old shiny bones for what feels like a million years with no soundtrack but the wind blowing (talk about film noir!) and then after you're thoroughly depressed they send you over the edge by announcing that nobody in that pile was older than 30, and then the rest of the movie starts but of course all you want to do is bawl.Hypothetically.
I guess I would describe it as sobering. We watched two films on WWI, visited two or three different museums including the ossuary, and got a really good feel for what these soldiers and their families went through. Inside the ossuary they've chosen red lighting for dramatic effect. Consider that a horrible success, people:
And then of course they've got gigantic posters of WWI survivors holding pictures of themselves from back in the day. Normally old people are cute. Bathed in blood-colored light, not so much. C'est la vie. Or should I say la mort?
But like I said, I am glad we came here. The French were so overwhelmingly grateful when Americans arrived to put an end to all the butchering. And if Verdun didn't have this quiet aura of the grave all over it I suppose it would be rather charming. After visiting the freaky battlefields we came back out to the town center and ate some hot crepes at the foot of this monument:
When the Third Reich conquered Verdun in the forties they were extra-special-sure to put a swastika flag on this guy, just to get that last laugh on what the city stood for. Too bad us Americans are expert butt-kickers.But it's definitely not too bad that Verdun crepes are heaven on a napkin. Henry fell asleep while me and Dustin sat on a park bench by the river in the--wait for it--sunshine! Really, in northeastern France in April, it's kind of a big deal that there was any daylight at all.
It was also sunny the day we visited the Monstec WWI memorial, which I figure applies here. It's up on a hill and is much lovelier and more restful than the others, since it overlooks the entire conflict area.
Monstec is a beautiful site. You just have to ignore the fact that this memorial actually served as a Nazi sniper nest at one point, and everything is fine:
So, I guess I'm glad to be back in America. Witnessing Verdun reminded me how much I respect my country for the good it has done in preserving and protecting its brothers and sisters around the globe.It's also nice to see the family, and I'm definitely not pining away for some good Brie, and I'm totally fine with bread that has no crust to speak of, and there is no way that 7 weeks after leaving France I'm still in mourning for our apartment window.
Hypothe....Oh, never mind.
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