Archive for December, 2006

A warm welcome to our newest and youngest reporter, Hatty. It will be interesting to see how living in Normandy is viewed by younger eyes.

Hello I'm Hatty and I am new here, well it is my very 1st article and it's going to be about my trip to Êtretat on 26th November with my class. It was a trip about Guy de Maupassant, a famous French author. He used to live there during his childhood. Then later when he lived in Paris, he went there for his holidays. He wrote several stories about the place.
    The first thing in the morning: everybody got on the coach, it was so cold and dark but we were all very excited! (I think a lot of them were happy because we didn't have lessons on that day). Everybody bought along their camera and their Mp3 players too.
    It was a long way, my Lycée is at Caen, and it took a long time to get there, nearly about 2 hours on the coach. It was quite noisy on the coach, our teacher for French kept telling everyone to be quiet, well there is a lot of girls in my class!
    It was so windy and cold when we all arrived. A guide welcomed us and showed us the famous cliffs, everybody was taking photos while she was talking about them. She told us that a longtime ago, one evening, a rich lord was having fun in the little town, in a bar, then he met two young women, he took them up to one of the cliffs and killed them both by pushing them off ... I think she told us that to show us that is dangerous to be on the edge ... Well anyway it was so amazingly beautiful, I was happy. There was nobody in the town, only a couple of fishermen on the beach. The guide told us that it is very busy in summer.
    Once we arrived down to the beach, she told a story written by Maupassant about the beach. It was about when the rich people who live in Paris came to the beach for their holiday. Young women never liked going in the water because they were always worried that men would look at them when they come out the water, they would be wet and the men would be able to see their bodies.
    After that we went to see Maupassant's old holiday house. We couldn't look inside because it's now private property. He used to have lots of parties there.