The apartment search continues, as the place we found on Tuesday wanted an unreasonable four months deposit plus one month’s agency fee… It blows my mind how difficult it is to find a place to live in Rouen. I feel like back home, even in the SF housing boom, you just looked online, called up […]
The apartment search continues, as the place we found on Tuesday wanted an unreasonable four months deposit plus one month’s agency fee… It blows my mind how difficult it is to find a place to live in Rouen. I feel like back home, even in the SF housing boom, you just looked online, called up a dozen places, went to see five, and chose one, and it’s done and over with within a day’s time. Here, it’s like we’re searching for the lost city of gold.
My elbow remains tender, which is to say it hurts only when I try to accelerate a baseball forward. This is discouraging, but the worst thing to do would be to come back too early only to make matters worse. In the meantime, I’ll be icing, running, and taking my anti-inflammatories, and hoping for the best. The good news is that my bat is coming around. I feel like I’ve been a little too tense at the plate lately, trying to do too much. A friend back home gave me the advice to “try easy,” so in BP I tried relaxing a little bit and just trying to let the bat do the work. In a situational hitting drill, where I was just trying to elevate the ball a little to score a runner from third with less than two out, I started hitting some pretty good shots, including one that scraped the wall in left and another that crashed through the trees in left center. Whether I can carry that relaxation into a game situation remains to be seen, but we’ll see. This Sunday we travel to St. Lo, the team that earned promotion to the elite division last year by winning the second division. Typically you’d expect that such a team would be a doormat, particularly given the fact that this is their first year playing with wood bats, but they took both Rouen and Savigny to 10 innings before falling, so they can’t be too bad.
Last Monday Matt, Eric, and I went to Dieppe, the site of the first Canadian/English raid on German-controlled France in 1942. It was one of those unique opportunities, as Eric, a French Canadian fluent in both English and French, wrote his PhD on the Dieppe raid, and in so doing managed to be the first historian to get access to and compare the recently declassified English and French files on the raid. Moreover, his unit in the Canadian military participated in the raid, so he had unique access to internal documents. Essentially, we were visiting this enormously important WWII battle site with possibly the most qualified person in the world as our tour guide, sort of like getting a lecture on macroeconomics from Alan Greenspan. The raid was more or less a total disaster, and Eric’s thesis was that it was due largely to failed reconnaissance. Apparently the Germans got wind of the raid and instead of replacing the division on watch there according to a normal rotation, they kept them in Dieppe and doubled up with the new division that would usually take their place. In the picture below, you can see the main landing point, one of six beaches on which the Candian forces landed. Of the 6,000 who landed on the beach on the far left, six- yes, 6, a basketball team and a sub- made it to the church, the tallest building on the far right.
We then checked out two nearby German Bunkers that were built after the ’42 raid. I can’t imagine a year or two spent inside one of these things, waiting for the inevitable allied assault.
After the bunker, Eric took us to the Canadian cemetery that commemorates the raid. Check out the inscription on the last picture. If you can look at something like that and not be moved, you’re a harder man than I.
Finally, we headed home, but not before stopping at an enormous castle just outside town. Unfortunately, it’s sealed off to the public on account of safety, but we walked around the moat and busted drawbridge.
More updates next week as we’ll hopefully be at an apartment in Rouen!
Editor’s Note: Cheers to Marques Colston, AKA The Quiet Storm, who was drafted 252nd by the New Orleans Saints. May his first months as a professional proceed more smoothly than my own, may he prove to be the Lynn Swann to Reggie Bush’s Franco Harris, and may I one day turn to my son some twenty years hence and say “see that guy, #81, who just scored the touchdown? Yeah. Your old man was faster than him for about a week…”
