Dateline: Rouen, France. We are docked near the cathedral in Rouen, and it is amazing. The tower is an iron basketwork and supposedly the tallest cathedral tower in France. This city is all about St. Joan of Arc, probably because this is where she was burned at the stake. They have Rue St. Joan, St. Joan church, St. Joan prison, you get the idea. Her story is sort of pathetic and very political, I’ll not repeat it here.
Rouen is the largest city in Normandy. Without the efforts of St Joan, this region perhaps would have remained British. Frankly, it might have been better off. France does a nice job of maintaining its infrastructure – good highways, bridges, ports, etc. On the other hand, those good highways and bridges are mostly tollways.
It is humorous to see the ways in which the French go out of their way to tell Americans how their culture differs from ours and, by inference, that of the Brits. They are proud of being rebellious and being on strike much of the time. Proud of their 35 hour week and 45 week work year, too. It is sort of like being proud of having acne and being unemployed.
Our guide talked about the youth rioting about unemployment without mentioning that those “youth” are largely Muslim immigrant kids from North and Central Africa. They do love to burn cars, probably because they have little or no chance of acquiring one legally. France is doing a particularly poor job of acculturating its colonial immigrants, of getting them to “feel and act French.”
