Almost too pretty

 

The last two weeks have been pretty sprinkled with even more pretty.

We took off from Paris to visit Normandy and we have now seen untold numbers of romantic villages and towns filled with pastel-colored half-timbered houses garnered with hollyhocks.

After having lived in Paris close to Porte de Stalingrad with its graffiti-tagged concrete facades, its elevated metro tracks, and its many drug addicts and heavily armored policemen, it has been almost a culture shock to be surrounded by all this niceness.

Our base has been in Rouen, which we before we came to visit, knew almost nothing about - except it being the town, where Jeanne d'Arc was burned at the stake almost six hundred years ago.

We did pass the last remaining, forbidden tower from the castle, where Jeanne was held prisoned, and interrogated - and we walked across the Place du Vieux-Marché, where she was burned - only 19 years old. 

But, in contrast to its dark past, Rouen turned out to be an absolutely lovely town.

We mainly saw rows upon rows of lovely crooked half-timbered houses, of small, flowery squares with cafés and lots of Aperols, and of course - most dominantly: The gothic spires of the Rouen cathedral and the Saint-Maclou, and Saint-Ouen churches.

They stretch towards the sky, carved with myriads of sculptures, like huge towers of intricate merengues made by mad confectioners.

They ARE pretty, but as all of Rouen: Almost too pretty. 

Where are the misfit kids of Rouen, the urban street culture? We met just one group of black-dressed skater boys, hanging out at a downtown street corner. The boom box belted out Joe  Dassin!

PS

We had a few surprising encounters when we started walking the city:

Inside the cathedral, we came to stand close to the actual heart of  Richard the Lionheart. It is lying in a small lead box buried below the sharp-nosed effigy of the legendary English king. Perhaps fitting that the ever-warring Richard, who actually only lived in England for a couple of months during his whole reign, left his heart in Normandy.

Another strange sight, at least for a Dane: Inside the beautiful, lush Jardins de l'Hôtel de Ville, we were surprised to pass an exact replica of the fabled Jelling stone - the massive, carved runic stone set by the Danish king Harald Bluetooth in Jutland almost 1100 years ago and which mentions the word Denmark for the very first time in history.

The original stone in Denmark is sealed inside a glass cage, but here you can actually let your fingers run over the rune carvings, questioning yourself why a copy of Harald's stone is standing in Rouen?

Just next to the stone is a statue of Rollo, the Viking warrior, who became the first ruler of Normandy. We wonder if he had the answer to the question.