Sunday, October 28, 2018

La Rochelle: the tour begins in earnest

As our walk along the waterside continued, we passed by some interesting graffiti, which Dom began to suspect had been placed there quite on purpose, and not just as an expression of the voices of the oppressed:


Above, "Les salauds dorment en paix" literally means, "The bastards sleep peacefully." To my mind, that is a cry against oppression, an overtly political statement, and in a country as left-leaning as France, not a surprising sentiment at all.

Below: some striking pictures of faces. But of whose faces?


What is probably un donjon in the distance:


Graffiti, as we move around the building's corner:


I do kind of like this artwork. It beats the milquetoast, unimaginative, Sailor Moon-ish crap graffiti you often see here in Seoul:


Le donjon, closer (and le bald spot, closer):


A lighthouse that strikes me as being too far inland and too short to do its job properly:


A view across the water:


About to go up the stairs:


The girls sit on a ledge while we old farts take their pics:


Mari et femme:


Véro warned us that we needed to tell her if she was to pause so we could take pics of any given site. "Sinon, je trace, hein?" she said: "Otherwise, I'm bookin'." As you see below, she tended to walk way ahead. The verb tracer, in this case, refers to the sport of parkour; parkourists are called traceurs in French. It was a very cool, windy day, and I don't think poor Véro wanted to be exposed to the elements any longer than she had to be, especially as she was still recovering from a 70-kilometer bike ride done only two days earlier.


I wouldn't have taken the next photo had Dom not pointed out the somewhat Dutch-ish-looking nature of these buildings in terms of design and color scheme:


Surely, this is a metaphor for something:


That square tower in the distance is the bell tower of a local church:


These structures, which guard the inlet to the marina, were referred to as "the two towers" by Dom's dad, who asked later on whether we'd had a chance to look seaward and see them:


It was at about this point that we began to move away from the water and into the city, which is when we got lost. Good times. Good times.



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