up north

Fall break is already upon us.

Last year I flew to Spain to visit friends who were doing their semester abroad and spent my week training between Madrid and Salamanca. This year, I am staying in France, but have travelled as far north as I can get. I’m sick of palm trees and balmy weather in October — give me rainy, gloomy skies and thick scarves.

Kiely and I took the train from Aix to Brest, a main city on the westernmost coast of the region of Bretagne, or Brittany. The 13-year-old boy in me can’t help but giggle every time I say/hear/see the name, and it turns out that this is the only amusement Brest has to offer. There is absolutely nothing there. I’m not too clear on the facts, but apparently the entire city was razed during World War II, and it was rebuilt with ugly concrete. It is also strangely deserted (maybe as a direct result of its lack of aesthetic appeal). Kiely and I went wandering around last night and probably saw a total of 10 people on the streets. Coming from Aix, this was weird. We’ve gotten too used to the hoppin’ nightlife.

Aside from our two nights in Brest at the beginning and end of our séjour en Bretagne, we didn’t have to spend much time there. Instead we rented a car, an adorable little red Fiat Panda, and hit the road. We went south along the peninsula-ed coast, staying a night each in Crozon, Bénodet, and Carnac. We got lost a few times, did our fair share of retracing our steps, and had an interesting few hours where we couldn’t figure out how to put the car in reverse, but driving through this countryside was amazing. I was the captain of the Panda, taking charge of the driving since Kiely didn’t know how to drive a stick shift (but greatly improved thanks to our grocery store parking lot lessons), and Kiely was chief navigator/DJ, choosing the music from the iTunes open on my computer while simultaneously trying to find the right roads on a map that showed more drawings of little Breton boys on sheep than actual street names. We were so badly prepared and had to figure everything out at the last second — like where to spend the night in Brest when we got into the train station at one in the morning — but it was all a part of the adventure. And it was ridiculously fun.

Kiely had found us an adorable hotel right on the port of a tiny hamlet called Le Fret — Ar Fred, in the Breton dialect. A ten-minute drive from Crozon, we spent the evening in an old stone pub where they were showing a soccer match: Brest (hehe) versus some lame team that lost to Brest. All the locals were getting really into the game, pounding the tables and cheering when goals were scored. We savored our beer (Kiely) and cider (me) with little regard for the fact that we stood out as the étrangers, and hooliganed it up with the rest of them.

With a long stop in Argol the next day — where we went for a country promenade, attended the cider festival, saw a lot of French lady buttcrack (the woman kept crouching down as she was making the cide and her jeans did not fit her in the way one would have hoped), and ate delicious baked apples — we made our way to Bénodet, which the woman at Arrrrrrr Fred had told us was super fancy. It was one of those seaside resort towns that seems more like an amusement park than real life. It was hard to imagine anyone actually living there. We got in kind of late and, after attempting to drive up several one-way streets, managed to find our hotel, which was considerably less charming than what Ar Fred had to offer. We passed out for a couple hours and around ten at night went out for a walk, desperate to get out of our claustrophobic room that smelled faintly of the smoke of a thousand French cigarettes. We ended up at a restaurant/lounge that wanted so desperately to be hip and had a late dinner. This was Sunday, I should add, which in France means that absolutely nothing is open, including supermarkets. We had barely eaten all day. So naturally we gorged ourselves on pesto penne and profiteroles.

Up for the market the next day and had breakfast on the beach, then got back into the Panda and hit the road for Carnac, our southernmost stop. There are hundreds of ancient menhirs — Stonehenge-type rocks placed inexplicably in straight lines — in and around the town, so we wandered through them before making our way to our hotel, which had been inexplicably changed from more modest accommodations to a room in what was more like a mixture of a castle and a spa. It was awesome. We spent the night in, feasting on our bounty we’d bought from the OPEN supermarché earlier that afternoon. We shared two bottles of cider and a bottle of white wine, which provided an interesting intelligence test of sorts to open since we didn’t have a corkscrew. We ended up digging out half the cork with a nail file and shoving the rest into the bottle with the handle-end of a toothbrush, splattering wine all over Kiely, the bed, and the wall. We got the wine, but I’m pretty sure the intelligence test was an epic fail. Oh well!

The next morning we went down to the beaches and combed the sand for cool rocks and shells. Kiely accidentally slaughtered a few crustaceans by bringing them back with us on the 3-hour return drive to Brest, but they are now happily in a flowerpot somewhere in the city. We saw the Social Network at the cinema last night, ate dinner at an omelette/crêpe/salad place, and went back to our tacky but cheap hotel room to sleep away our final hours en Bretagne.

Now we’re on the train to Paris. Three hours into the ride, only one more to go. We’ve got a hostel reserved in Montmartre, the neighborhood where you’ll find the Moulin Rouge and tons of sex shops, and are meeting up with the one and only Dan Schneider-Weiler for three days and nights of Parisian shenanigans. I’m hoping the opportunity to shotgun a beer under the Eiffel Tower quickly presents itself. There’s nothing I love more than sharing my culture.