June 4: The Dark and the Light

The Dark and the Light

June 4, 2008

Maya Land

Today started off quite early, especially for me since I live so far away from Tours. As usual, I spent an incredibly long time working on the alarm clock to make sure that I woke up at 5:45, but in all my efforts, it did not even go off and my host mother ended up waking me a bit past 6. Once safely on the bus in Tours (as always, my and Leah's car ride are a bit of a NASCAR race), we started our three hour bus ride to Oradour Sur Glane, a town south of Tours. I took a much needed nap on the bus, along with just about everyone else and was wide awake a ready for the day once we arrived.

Knowing nothing about where we were headed, the French history teacher who had joined us for our field trip explained to us a bit about where we were going before we arrived. Oradur Sur Glane was a town that in 1944, the Nazis brutally massacred 642 men, women and children. The Nazis decided to attack this village because they thought that many resistance fighters were hiding there, but it turned out the resistance was not there as the Nazis had thought. Unlike many other towns that were simply demolished and rebuilt, France decided to not reconstruct this village and leave the wreckage as a testimony to the atrocities that the Nazis inflicted on the French people.

We started in the museum with a guide who told us all about the events leading up to the massacre - in French, of course. Everything was in French, English and German, so I attempted everything in French first but usually fell back to good old English. Having a guide, a French history teacher, and Mr. Coven with us; we were treated to a complete history of just about the entirety of WWII in France. After the museum visit, we headed to the actual destroyed village. We have all studied the Holocaust and World War II in depth, but from afar. No actual fighting took place in the US, so to actually be walking where the SS officers walked and to see the burned out cars and huge church where the women and children were burned alive was very moving. What amazed me the most was seeing a single sewing machine that had survived that stood alone in the wreckage of what was once a house, some 60 years later.

After our heavy visit to Oradur Sur Glane, we headed to a much happier venue - Limoges, a town with a large porcelain factory. We took a tour of the factory and learned about all types of porcelain and how the molds are made. Interesting fact - the molds can only be used 48 times, because afterwards they become water resistant, meaning that they must go through hundreds of molds a day because there was sure a lot of china. There was one oven that was 35 meters long. We all then spent a long time trying to decide what piece of china we wanted to buy. It was amazing the price range - some tiny little saucers were 40 euro while big plates were only 18. It all depended on if it had color, gold trim, extra firing, etc... After we had all at last made our purchases, we headed back on the bus for our 3 hour ride home. This time no one really slept as we usually do on bus rides, but Bryan and I did come up with a large list of what our 10 top ultimate movies of all time were. We put down about 40, so we have a lot of cutting down to do to make it to 10. Good thing it’s another 3 hour ride to Paris on Saturday.