Europe Day 49: Tapestry and Naps

I rolled out of bed this morning and got ready to see a tapestry.  Yep, I was not very excited about the prospect.  Then I found out that it is seventy meters, or two hundred and thirty-one feet long.  Suddenly the venture became much more interesting!

The Bayeaux Tapestry, as it is called, describes the story of William the Duke of Normandy who goes to the Battle of Hastings, defeats Harold, and takes the throne of England and is known henceforth as William the Lionheart.  Bishop Odo, William's brother, ordered the tapestry to be made.  As they say, history is written by the winners, and the losers never wrote about what happened, so we simply have to trust that the Bishop told the truth. 

To gain a complete picture of what the tapestry illustrates, we were given audio guides to walk us through the scenes.  I was exceptionally gratefull for that.  Before today, I knew nothing of the battle of hastings.  I would have slowly walked past that colorful tapestry, seen beautiful horses, ornate ships, and lots of soldiers fighting without a clue what was happening.  It actually made for an interesting story, and I rather enjoyed it.

I was the last person on the bus to leave.  There was a second floor to the museum with a plethora of plaques to read about life under King William.  I was all alone and without a watch.  Luckily, Freddy, our beloved bus driver, was washing the windshield of the bus so we had to wait a little after I climbed aboard anyway.

When we returned to the hotel, a group of us went for lunch at the kebab place next door. Afterwards, Kayla and I went shopping.  I bought a black and white polk-a-dot dress.  It's nothing fancy, but I feel that I could wear it to work this summer, so that would be good.

We trudged back to the hotel and I took a nap. It took me a while to fall asleep, but I happily laid there anyway.  Who cared that I had summaries to do, a book to read, journal entries to write, and a cahier to decorate?  Not me! I did not get out of bed until it was time to get dinner. It was fantastic.

For dinner we returned once more to the crepe place.  Tyler was convinced it would not fill him up, so we stopped at a grocery store where he bought some fruit as an appitizer.  Then, Josh, Casey, Kayla, Rachel T., Madame B. and I returned to the crepe place once more.  I enjoyed a crepe with eggs, potato, ham and cheese for dinner, with a carmel crepe for dessert.  The carmel was good, but nothing shall replace a butter and sugar crepe, folded into a triangle, slid into a paper pocker and eaten by the Seine.  That shall always be my favorite crepe.

Upon returning to the hotel late in the evening, I worked on my cahier while we watched Chuck.  Unfortunately, some one else has the disc of Big Bang Theory that our group is on, so we had to switch TV shows for a while. But that's okay, I love Chuck.  And, as it turns out, I love working on my cahier!  This assignment was origionally to take a cahier-a particular sort of notebook sold in France and Italy-and write information and draw pictures about all of the places we visisted.  I tend to write sloppy after a while and hate drawing so I had been putting it off for as long as possible. As luck would have it, Madame B. told us we could make it on the computer instead.  This opened up a whole new world of oppurtunities for me!  Last quarter I took a class about designing pages for newspapers, magazines, etc. on the computer.  Suddenly, I'm supposed to do it for thirty pages of information!  It is so much fun!  I have never been more pleased to procrastinate in my life!