(Rouen, Normandy, France)
There are more than 2,000 half-timbered houses here…and sometimes one wonders how they remain standing. The one below is right in the middle of the old town but nobody seems to be worried about it.
After quick visits to the (free) ceramics and ironworks museums, it was time for a big event: the World Cup quarter-final match between France and Uruguay. We claimed a table in a bar and assumed it would be like a big game in Canada: noisy, occasionally, but still restrained. We were wrong!
Although there were only about 20 people in the room (this was a multilevel bar), it seemed like many more were actually there. The intensity of emotion was astonishing and the amount of noise when France scored was deafening. We had never seen anything like it, except perhaps when we saw a Feyenoord game in Rotterdam in 2014. It will only get crazier, as France won 2-0 and advanced to the semi-final against Belgium. I’m sure we’ll be watching that game too…I can’t imagine what it will be like if France makes it to the final on July 15!
As much as we loved the galettes here, we agreed that we should have something different for dinner. My research uncovered a Senegalese restaurant just a few blocks from our hotel, so we decided to give it a try.
I chose chicken yassa and my wife ordered a vegetarian “XL samossa”. It certainly was extra-large for a samosa: it was filled with cheese, mixed vegetables, and an egg. I wasn’t entirely sure what I had ordered but it turned out to be grilled chicken in a relatively sweet sauce. However, the most interesting components of dinner were the sauces.
We were given some miniature samosas as an appetizer, with a very rich and flavourful tomato-based sauce. However, the friendly proprietor offered me a spicier sauce, along with a warning that it was “medium strong”. I appreciated the warning: if this was only “medium strong”, the “strong” must be impossibly incendiary! I was glad that I had ordered a ginger-scented pineapple juice to soothe the (still enjoyable) burn.
It was also nice to have Senegalese music playing throughout dinner. I had picked up an unusual Youssou N’Dour record the day before, so music from Senegal was kind of a secondary theme for our stay in Rouen. Who knew that N’Dour had covered the 1970s soul classic “Rubberband Man”? You just never know what you will find while on holiday.
We really enjoyed our stay in Rouen and look forward to returning some day. After such a nice introduction to France, I suppose it was inevitable that we would run into a classic France problem upon trying to leave: a train strike! At the time of writing, it looks like it will only cause a three-hour delay for us.