Rouen!

Yesterday Megan, Maria and I took a day trip to Rouen, a city about an hour's train ride from Paris, in Normandy. It is not only the capital of Normandy but the place where Joan of Arc was tried and burned at the stake.
We got there at about 10:30 am, and spent a little time orienting ourselves. The old part of Rouen is pretty small, so it wasn't hard to walk around. The first thing we saw was the Gros-Horloge, or "large clock," a huge and beautiful clock in the middle of a windy Rouennais street. Rouen features a lot of half-timbered houses, painted in bright colors and absolutely gorgeous. So typically French, haha.
Next, we found the Cathédrale de Rouen, which is famous because Monet did several paintings studying effects of light there. It's incredibly beautiful, the architectural detail is really amazing. We spent a little time walking around the cathedral and taking pictures from different sides...the spire is the tallest in France!
We kept walking and then found the Place du Vieux-Marché, where Jeanne d'Arc met her untimely fate. They have a garden at the actual site where she was burned, and the rest of the square is made up of the foundations of the church that was there at the time of her death, and the new, modern church that was built to honor her after she was canonized (the Eglise Jeanne d'Arc). We found a Tex-Mex place to eat lunch, and to hide out from the intermittent rain showers!
After lunch, we walked around a lot, since everything in Rouen closes between 12 and 2. After a lot of walking and another church or two, we found le Musée des Antiquités, a museum of Normandy artifacts dating from Gallo-Roman times all the way to the Renaissance. Normandy is an area that jumped back and forth between British and French control a lot, so that was pretty interesting to see. After that, we walked back to the Place du Vieux-Marché and saw the Musée de Jeanne d'Arc, part artifacts and part wax museum. The wax museum part was pretty funny/creepy, actually. I took lots of pictures, lol. Then we visited our third and final museum. Gustav Flaubert, the writer of Madame Bovary, was born in Rouen. There's a museum partially about his life and partially about medical history, and since Megan had really wanted to see a medical history museum in Lille that had been closed, we decided to go. It was kind of gross...the things on display included a calcified fetus, a skeleton of an 8-months fetus, old medical tools and drugs, childbirth diagrams, and dentistry stuff. But just weird enough to be funny!
Oh, and then we ate macaroons! Macaroons are a very big deal in Normandy but they are very different from home...they're actually ten times better, I think. They aren't coconut, they're more like sugary wafers with all different flavors. They were awesome!
Our train left at 8 so we went searching for a place to eat dinner. However, people in Rouen have very specific hours for food, and at 5:30 we could not find anywhere to eat. We wandered around for quite a while, had a hot chocolate in the train station restaurant, went into a few shops, but still couldn't find anywhere that opened before 7. So we ended up back in the train station restaurant, drinking red wine (to ward off Megan's and my colds) and eating pizza.
I just uploaded all the Rouen pictures online, so check them out! I took a lot of pictures considering we weren't even there 12 hours...
http://picasaweb.google.com/amandamarz