North of Paris - Honfleur

So everyone i know who has been to France will tell me to check out the south of France, and so when my host in France, Weichin, wanted our passport particulars, I naturally assumed that we are going out of France, to the South more likely.

By the title, you'll know this to be untrue. We found out upon arrival to France that we are indeed travelling but it's to the North. Weichin explained that her hubby, Iceman, would rather travel to a new part of France and so NORTH we went!!!!

We took a train out of Paris and two hours later, we arrived in Deauville (not Honfleur yet) and then boarded a bus. Half hour later, we took our first steps in HONFLEUR!! I must say it's a beautiful place, quaint fishing village with probably about 7 streets of shops to walk around. I guess walking will be more pleasuable if the rain would stop coming!

Any-O, we arrived cold and hungry and we surveyed all the menus that were displayed outside the many restaurants and we picked one with a nice set meal offer. 29.90 euros for a starter, a main meal, a dessert and coffee. The only drawback was that this restaurant was empty - hope the food's gonna be nice.

So we entered this small restaurant of many tables and plonked ourselves at a nice corner. Hungry Iceman ordered a bowl of mussels and a plate of escargots to share(even before our individual starters)!! Yummy!!!!!!!!!! The food turned out to be great!!! I have very seldom eaten till the point that I can't eat anymore, but that was that day. My starter of home-made soupe de poisson (fish) and main course of saute scallops knocked me out boy. I couldn't stuff all my dessert in - it was chilled sliced pear on double scoop of vanilla ice cream, topped with hot chocolate. I was dying by the end of the meal but a happy dying woman... ;)

After all that food, we walked out of the restaurant and realised that the whole of France was fund-raising for the wheel-chaired bound folks, the event called Telethon. It was quite amazing as the whole of France was participating. Honfleur had their own celebration and one of them was this flying-fox station where you zip over the harbour to the other side. I couldn't resist the opportunity, nevermind I'm stuffed with food, nevermind it's in winter and if I fall into the water, I'm likely to die, nevermind I have never done flying-fox before in my life... and so I gave my donation of 10 euros and in exchange, they gave a 4 mini sausages, 2 empty ballons and a good pat on the back.

It was damn damn cold up there on the platform and when I was released, my pulleys were kinda stuck. Damn I thought again, it had to be me lor, all the hundreds of people zipping down no problem but it had to be me. So the nice official pulled me in and pushed, one big push as I zipped over the harbour so fast that I thought now I really die, I'm going to knock over the other official who catches all those who zipped over. Heng that official very experienced and caught me legs so I don't bashed into the at-least-500-years-old rock walk. The Telethon that day raised over 50 million euros (we watched the charity show mah). After that highlight of my life, I figured I'll take things slow and just do normal walking around the town.

We walked into this super old church called St Catherine and the top of the church looked like they overturned 2 big long boats and used that for roofs. :) They had these nice candles to light for your own devotions at the different parts of the church but we wanted to buy them for our church-mates back home in Singapore. So I counted that Darth Binkyand I have to buy about 12 candles at 2 euros each. As we put in our monies and counted out the candles, we realised then that we got no plastic bags, this is not a shopping mall lor. So we overturned our hats and carted the many candles back to our hotel room before people think we are candle thieves, no receipt for our purchase, remember? :)

The next day was Sunday, and we had our Sunday mass in St Catherine. I dozed off during the homily as it was in French and to say the least, I wasn't really following... hee... After mass, we checked out of our hotel and also got ready to leave Honfleur. But we couldn't leave Honfleur without wacking another big meal of mussels again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!