Scheduling

One of the hardest things about traveling is maintaining a schedule: no matter how much time you have allocated  for your travels, at some point you need to leave one place, and continue to the next: sometimes this works out well, sometimes not. Today was a good example of the 'not' category.

I went on an excursion with my school to Mont Saint-Michel. We left at 8:15, which I thought would give me plenty of time there, before taking the 3:45 bus to Saint Malo. Unfortunately, because this was a school group, we needed to wait until everyone was assembled, then drive for a while, stop for snacks, wait until everyone was assembled again, arrive, assemble, discuss bus parking with the attendants, walk to the destination (slowly), go to a restaurant for lunch, wait for appetizers, wait for lunch, wait for lunch, wait for lunch, wait for dessert, walk to the abbey, then wait, wait, wait for tickets for everyone, audio guides for everyone, informational brochures for everyone, and by the time we entered the abbey it was 2:40 - giving me just 20 minutes to sprint around taking photos before rushing back to catch my bus. I got large numbers of very stern looks from the abbesses, but I successfully took photos of the entire abbey, and I'm looking forward to getting a chance to see what it looked like when I get back.

Anyway, after all that, I missed my bus - I had asked a half dozen people where the bus to Saint Malo was, and they all gave me the same wrong answer (I kept asking because they all seemed to be telling me something different from what I had seen on the bus website). Fortunately, though, they gave me the wrong answer for the right reason - the spot they directed me to had another bus that went to a train station from which I could get a train to Saint Malo, so it all worked out fine, and I ended out getting in just 30 minutes later than I would have otherwise (ahh, civilized public transportation...).

This officially ends phase 1 of my trip. I didn't create any detailed plans in advance of this trip, other than spending the first two weeks at a school in Rouen, but I sketched out two broad scenarios:

Scenario A: I'd have a fantastic time at the school in Rouen, wouldn't want to leave, and would extend my stay there for another couple of weeks.

Scenario B: I'd have a miserable time at the school in Rouen, and would want to leave at the first opportunity to take a whirlwind tour of the continent.

What I didn't plan for was scenario C: I'd have a fantastic time at the school in Rouen, and would want to continue doing the same thing, but elsewhere. Going to morning French classes actually works out extremely well: it helps me improve my French, it gives me a chance to meet and hang out with students from around the world, it gives me a base of operations to explore the neighboring area, it means meals and lodging are provided for, and it helps structure my time (much as I like museums, I wouldn't really want to spend all day at a museum; spending half a day in classes and half a day going to museums gives me more of a variety of things to do each day). All that being said, I also didn't really want to come all the way to Europe and then spend the entire month in one town; I've pretty much seen all the museums in Rouen at this point.

So, I decided to do the same thing elsewhere: I've scheduled a week of classes in Brest, in western Brittany, to continue my studies while exploring a different region - classes start on Monday.

In other news, I'm starting to run out of space on my camera, which I had always thought of previously as holding an effectively infinite number of pictures, and I've had to start deleting photos and lowering the resolution with which I take certain shots, to keep from running out of room.