Rouen in summer

Ten years ago, when Walt and I came to live in France, we arrived at the airport and drove directly up to Rouen, in Normandy, to spend a few days with friends there. They lived in the center of town near the old marketplace and the cathedral, and they had a studio apartment they let us stay in. The pictures in this post are ones I took on June 3, 2003. It was my second stay in Rouen that year. I've been posting about the first one for a few days now.

One of the symbols of the city of Rouen is this old clock
in a tower over one of the main streets.

You can click on the pictures to see them at a larger size.

In 2003, the great Canicule — the deadly European heatwave — had already started, but we didn't know it yet. The Normandy climate is essentially damp and cool, but by early June ten years ago the weather was already hot and strangely sunny, even in Rouen.

Buildings around Rouen's Vieux Marché — the old market square.
The one in the middle all decked out in red flowers is La Couronne,
the restaurant where Julia Child had her first meal in France.

The reason we were in Rouen was that our friends who gave us use of the studio apartment were going to lend us some sheets, towels, and other essentials that we could take with us to Saint-Aignan, where we would move into an otherwise empty house. Those things would tide us over until our container of furniture and other possessions arrived in July — we had shipped it from California a month earlier.

Walt and 11-year-old Collette in front of
the Eglise Saint-Ouen in Rouen

Rouen is a magnificent old city with one of the most impressive cathedrals in France, two other fine churches, and the old tower where Joan of Arc was supposedly held prisoner before she was burned at the stake in the city's old marketplace in 1431. Historically, Rouen was considered the capital of Normandy. Victor Hugo called it « la ville aux cent clochers » — the city of 100 church towers. The novelist Stendhal called Rouen “the Athens of the Gothic era” for its great architectural treasures.

The city of Rouen is an open-air, living architecture museum.

The historic center of Rouen is on the right bank of the Seine. On the left bank is a newer urban area, and the whole metropolitan area has a population of half a million. There's a new tramway that runs underground through the old part of the city. Rouen less than 90 minutes from Paris by train.

Here's a view of Rouen from a high viewpoint on the edge of the city. The cathedral is in the
middle of the picture with the Seine on the left and the Église St-Maclou on the right.

I haven't spent nearly as much time in Rouen over the past ten years, since moving to Saint-Aignan, as I did back in the 1990s. Walt and I went to Rouen to visit other friends there in August 2006 — I posted about it here. A few years ago I did a series of four topics about Rouen and the time I spent there in the early 1970s. It starts here, and there's a link at the bottom of each topic to take you to the next one. And CHM and I made a quick stop in the city a couple of summers ago, posted here.

Rouen, 7 years ago

Seven years ago, when Walt and I came to live in France, we first drove up to Rouen, in Normandy, to spend a few days with friends there. They lived in the center of town near the old marketplace and the cathedral, and they had a studio apartment they let us stay in. The pictures in this post are ones I took on June 3, 2003.

I lived in Rouen for a year in the early 1970s. I was 24 years old and I had a job as an English teacher in the illustrious Lycée Corneille — formerly called Le Collège Royal — there. It was a part-time job, and my purpose for being there was to improve my French. I made good friends and my French was pretty much fluent by the time I went back the the States.

One of the symbols of the city of Rouen is this old clock
in a tower over one of the main streets.

In 2003, the great Canicule — the weird European heatwave — had already started, but we didn't know it yet. The Normandy climate is essentially damp and cool, but by early June seven years ago the weather was already hot and strangely sunny.

Buildings around Rouen's Vieux Marché — the old market.
The one in the middle all decked out in red flowers is La Couronne,
the restaurant where Julia Child had her first meal in France.

The reason we were in Rouen was that our friends who had the studio apartment were going to lend us some sheets, towels, and other essentials that we could take with us to Saint-Aignan. Those things would tide us over until our container arrived in July, with the furniture and other belongings we had shipped from California. I thought we might buy a car there too, but we ended up driving the rental car down to the Loire Valley.

Walt and 11-year-old Collette in front of
the Eglise Saint-Ouen in Rouen

Rouen is a magnificent old city with one of the most impressive cathedrals in France, two other fine churches, and the old tower where Joan of Arc was supposedly held prisoner before she was burned at the stake in the city's old marketplace in 1431. Historically, Rouen was considered the capital of Normandy. Victor Hugo called it « la ville aux cent clochers » — the city of 100 church towers. The novelist Stendhal called Rouen “the Athens of the Gothic era” for its great architectural treasures.

The city of Rouen is an open-air, living architecture museum.

Rouen is also a big port city. Ocean-going ships come up the Seine from Le Havre to unload their cargo. The historic center is on the right bank of the Seine. On the left bank is a newer urban area, and the whole metropolitan area has a population of half a million. There's a new tramway that runs underground through the old part of the city. Rouen less than 90 minutes from Paris by train.

But Rouen in not just a museum — there are many
nice cafés and restaurants to enjoy too.

I haven't spent nearly as much time in Rouen over the past seven years, since moving to Saint-Aignan, as I did back in the 1990s. But I'll go back there this summer, if everything works out. CHM and I are planning a trip for the end of July. Walt and I went to Rouen to visit friends in August 2006 — I posted about it here. A few years ago I did a series of four topics about Rouen and the time I spent there in the early 1970s. It starts here, and there's a link at the bottom of each topic to take you to the next one.

Rouen, Joan, and me

We were in Rouen, one of the two biggest cities in Normandy (not to neglect Caen), on July 22. After lunch with Marie, my English-teacher friend, our mission was to arrive at the Musée des Beaux Arts by 14h00— 2:00 p.m. — to meet with the curator. CHM was taking him a few drawings his grandfather had done about 110 years ago — drawings of scenes from the life of Joan of Arc.

You see, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in the city of Rouen by the English, after having been turned over to those perfidious Anglo-Saxon enemies by the Burgundians, many centuries ago. In 1431, to be exact, during the Hundred Years War. There is a Joan of Arc church in Rouen, but it is a modern structure. When I lived there in 1972-73, that church had not yet been built.

A stained-glass window, on display in the Tour Jeanne d'Arc
in Rouen, shows a scene from Joan of Arc's life.

There is also a Joan of Arc tower — La Tour Jeanne-d'Arc. That has existed for many centuries. It is billed as the tower where Joan was held prisoner for a while, before she was burned alive. I've been up to the top of the tower several times. CHM and I walked up there on July 22, along with the curator of the Beaux Arts museum. The reason: one of CHM's grandfather's paintings is on display there now. His grandfather was a painter named Charles-Henri Michel, and he died in 1905 at the age of 88.

CHM's grandfather's painting, also
on display in the Tour Jeanne d'Arc

Getting up to the second level of the tower to see the painting meant climbing up at least 100 steps, on an ancient spiral stone staircase with a big heavy rope as the only handrail. But we did it. CHM was quite happy to be able to climb so far, and to be able to see his grandfather's painting again. He had last laid eyes on it more than 50 years ago, he said.

Typical Rouen houses, downtown

As I've said, Rouen was the setting for my first real initiation into French life and language. True, I had spent six months as a student in Aix-en-Provence a year earlier. In fact, when I arrived in Rouen in September 1972, in my mind I imagined I was returning to Aix. How wrong I was! The climate is entirely different (damp and gray as opposed to dry, windy, and sunny), the food is entirely different (based on cream, butter, and cheese as opposed to olive oil, tomatoes, and garlic), and the language is different too (a Northern French accent as opposed to a Southern French accent, l'accent du Midi).

The Eglise Saint-Maclou in Rouen

It was my first authentic experience in France because I wasn't part of a group of American students. I had to find my own housing rather than depend on the director of an American study-abroad program to find me a room or a family. I found a little apartment that didn't have a bathroom! And I had to work for a living, as an English-language teaching assistant in a French lycée (high school).

A Rouen street scene — an ad for the cookie called Le Petit-Beurre

I had to interact with a lot of French people beyond the teachers I had spoken French with in Aix. Those teachers were used to talking to foreign students who were just beginning to learn the language. They made linguistic concessions and accommodations. In Rouen, many of the people I needed to communicate with might never have met more than two or three foreigners in their lives. They didn't realize it was possible to be in France and not know how to speak French. I had to sink or swim.

This is a café restaurant called Le Drugstore in Rouen. I remember
going there to eat banana splits and ice cream sundaes
nearly 40 years ago. It hasn't changed.

It was the best of years. It was the worst of years. The so-called teaching position was frustrating. Many of the teachers in the lycée — les professeurs — didn't quite know what to make of a young American, or what to have me do. They didn't think much of my American accent. They preferred British English — that's what they had all learned. Some of them actually made fun of my pronunciation — my English pronunciation, not my French! Some of them told their students not to sign up for my classes because I would contaminate them, linguistically.

The old clock called Le Gros Horloge
is one of Rouen's major landmarks.

I made good friends in Rouen, in spite of it all. I got to know three families whose sons were students in my classes. Did I mention that the lycée was a very snooty boarding school for boys only? It's co-ed these days, but it was not co-ed back then. One of the families became a kind of family for me, and they were the people who helped me the most with my French. I spent many evenings and weekends at their house and out sightseeing. I made amazing progress that year, both linguistically and culturally.

I probably had a better experience of Rouen than Joan did, overall.

Rouen, February 1, 2003

Ten years ago today, I was spending some time in the Normandy city of Rouen. I had friends there who let me stay in a little apartment in their building that they owned but didn't use much. Walt and I had been in Saint-Aignan a couple of months earlier and had signed what is called the promesse de vente (shouldn't it be called the promesse d'achat?) on the house we live in now. We'd already sent in the down payment.

Rouen and Normandy were clearly a different world compared to San Francisco and California.

Walt still had a job in California, and he stayed back there to continue getting our San Francisco house ready for showings and eventual sale. I came to France to work out some details of the real estate transaction with the notaire in Montrichard. To give myself time to get over jet lag before arriving here, I stopped to see my friends in Rouen.

That February 1, I wandered the streets of Rouen with my camera. Since I was staying
in an apartment with an equipped kitchen, I could visit the shops
to buy food I remembered enjoying 30 years earlier.

As you can see, it was snowy in Rouen that winter. Snow there is not entirely unusual, but it doesn't happen as often as you'd think, considering how far north Normandy is compared to the U.S. Rouen is farther north than Quebec City, but it, like France overall and the British Isles, benefits from a maritime climate warmed by the Gulf Stream. Well, "warmed" is an exaggeration. "Moderated" might be a better term.

The sidewalks were treacherous but the town was picturesque and inviting.

As I was thinking about February 1, 2003, and looking at old photos on my computer this morning, it dawned on me that I was also in Rouen 40 years ago today, on February 1, 1973. My 24th birthday was rapidly approaching, and I was spending the year working as an English-language teaching assistant in the Lycée Corneille in Rouen. Back then in Rouen was the stay in France when I realized I had become pretty much fluent in the language.

The narrow streets of the old town are essentially alleyways. This is near the

Eglise Saint-Maclou, behind the grandiose Cathédrale de Rouen.

In 1972-73, I lived in a little apartment with no bathroom except a toilet that was in a tiny (water) closet on a stair landing. I had to share the WC with other tenants of the building. My apartment was near the train station, a 15-minute walk from the school where I worked. I don't remember snow that year, but I do remember a lot of rain. What they told me then was: A Rouen, il ne pleut pas beaucoup. Mais il pleut souvent.

Visiting Rouen

Old Rouen, or what we Americans might call "downtown" Rouen, is full of old half-timbered houses, called maisons à colombage in French. Colombage is related to the word "column" — you can see the wood framing or columns of the walls. In recent years, people have taken to painting them in all different colors.

Just a sample of Rouen's many maisons à colombage

Rouen, which is on the Seine about halfway between Paris and the sea (the English Channel, in this case, is a major port city, with ocean-going ships coming up the river to load and unload goods. The city itself is only about 100,000 people, but the urbanized area counts half a million.

A signboard for a luthier — a maker of stringed musical instruments — in old Rouen

The city was founded two thousand years ago and was named Rotomago something similar in Latin. The name slowly "eroded" phonetically over the centuries to become today's Rouen, pronounced approximately [roo-WÃ] or even just [RWÃ] — [Ã] represents the French nasal [A] vowel. It was conquered by the Vikings — Norsemen or Normans, where the name of the province of Normandy comes from —  more than a thousand years ago.

Two views of the cathedral towers in Rouen

The city has a major cathedral and two other famous churches, Saint-Ouen and Saint-Maclou. The first cathedral of Rouen was built in the fourth century A.D. A second cathedral replaced it in about the year 1000, and construction of the current cathedral building dates back to the year 1200, after the second one was destroyed by fire.

Rouen's Eglise Saint-Ouen and the surrounding neighborhood

The smaller Eglise Saint-Maclou was built in the 1400s. Like the cathedral, Saint-Maclou suffered considerable damage from bombardments during World War II. Restoration and repair work has been ongoing ever since.

A charcutier is a butcher who specializes in pork products, and the charcuterie is a kind of

French delicatessen selling sausages, cured and fresh meats, salads, and cooked dishes.

Besides its great monuments, old-town Rouen also has scores of shops, restaurants, and cafés. It's a living city where buildings have shops and storefronts at street level with apartments above. If you are going to be in Paris for a week or more, a side trip to Rouen by train is easy and rewarding. It takes less than 90 minutes to get there from the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris.

Rouen : maisons à pans de bois

Rouen was first a Gaulish city, then a Roman (or Gallo-Roman) city, then a Norman city, and at one point an English city (or possession), before becoming a French city. Today, it's one of the two administrative capitals of the Normandy region (Caen is the other). It's also an important port city, with ship traffic coming up the Seine river from Le Havre and the English Channel to load or unload on the northern edge of Rouen. Bombings during World War II caused great destruction in the city, especially along the river and in the port district. The cathedral was heavily damaged but then restored after the war.

Translating from the French Wikipedia article about the housing stock of Rouen:

"The city is remarkable for the diversity and richness of its urban fabric There are houses of many eras, from the 13th century to the contemporary period. Rouen is one of the most diverse cities in France from an architectural perspective. There are buildings of many styles and built of many materials, including half-timbered structures and stone, brick, and concrete houses and apartment buildings of all kinds of shapes and colors...."

"Despite extensive damage inflicted by wartime bombardments in the 1940s, the city still has more than two thousand half-timbered houses (maisons à pans de bois) out of the four thousand that existed in 1939. The streets around the Vieux Marché, the Gros Horloge and the cathedral, as well as in the Eau de Robec, Damiette, Saint-Vivien, and Beauvoisine neighborhoods, are well worth a visit."

Wandering the streets of the old part of Rouen...
Some of the houses look like they might be ready to topple over into the narrow streets.

The old city is on the right bank of the Seine. Rouen has been known as la ville au cent clochers (the city of a hundred steeples) and la ville-musée (a museum of a city). A 1981-vintage Michelin Green Guide that I have says that its stock of half-timbered houses, "be they tall or squat, standing up straight or leaning precariously, elegant or modest, these houses are the soul of Rouen. Light-weight and easy to work with, oak — once plentiful in the region — became the ideal local building material, guaranteeing solidity."

The photos in this post are ones I took in May 1998 with a 1996-vintage digital camera. I had earlier spent the 1972-73 school year in Rouen. I turned 24 in 1973.

Rouen is also known as le pot de chambre de la Normandie — the chamber pot of Normandy — because it rains so much there. I remember the principal (proviseur) of the Lycée Corneille telling me about the local climate back in 1972. "They say it rains a lot in Rouen," he said, "but it's not true. It doesn't rain much — but it rains all the time." The rain is often just a fine mist that's still heavy enough to keep you and everything around you wet. As I've always said, you don't move to France for the weather. For the long history, the beautiful landscapes, the delicious food, yes... but not sunny weather.

Rouen reminiscences

My '72-'73 Rouen adventure was my second stay in France. Earlier, I had lived in Aix-en-Provence, way down south, where I was a student for 6 months in the winter and spring of 1970. When I got a chance to go back to France and spend a year in Rouen as a teaching assistant, I didn't hesitate. I was 23 years old. In my naïve mind, I thought I was going back to Aix, with its sunshine, wind, and dry climate. I was in for a big surprise.

Shopping in 2003 on the rue Cauchoise in Rouen, near the Vieux Marché, in 2003

I don't know why I thought the weather in Normandy would be like the weather in Provence. It wasn't a conscious thing, and I didn't realize I had that expectation until after I arrived in Rouen in September 1972 and experienced the gray and damp days of the northern maritime climate. I had spent two weeks in Paris in March or April 1970, and it had been gray, rainy, and even snowy there. But I guess I wasn't in Paris long enough to really get a feel for the variety of French climate zones.

I did manage to scrape together enough francs to have an infrequent dinner or an ice cream at the Drugstore in Rouen back in '72-'73 (it's a pizzeria now, but hamburgers, club sandwiches, and banana splits were its specialities back then). And I might have shopped at the Charcuterie Hardy on the place du Vieux Marché once in a while too. The photos are from 2003.

Anyway, I loved Rouen despite nearly dying of the flu at Christmastime and not having decent heat or a bathroom in my apartment. Central heat was being installed in the building when I moved in in September, but it didn't actually start working until mid-January. I had a little gas heater with a bottle of butane as fuel, and by January a bottle was lasting only about two weeks. To get a new one, I had to walk across town with the bottle on my shoulder and buy a new one.

The cathedral in Rouen is famous for having been painted so many times by Monet. And the modern
Eglise Jeanne d'Arc on the place du Vieux Marché didn't yet exist when I lived in Rouen.

The funny thing about that bouteille de butane is that I probably bought the replacements from the business owned and operated by my friend Marie's father. I didn't actually meet Marie until 2001, however (she comments here as Mary07 once in a while). Carrying that empty metal gas canister across town was a chore, but carrying a full one back through the slippery, dark steets to my apartment, and up the two flights of stairs was a Herculean task. It weighed a ton. It was not fun.

Restaurants like this one in old Rouen were out of my price range when I lived there.

My life that year revolved around the Lycée Corneille, of course, because I worked there and also went and took showers there in the boys' dormitory a few times a week, when the students were in class. And I spent a lot of time in Le Vieux Marché (the city's old market square), where I went shopping for food.

Rouen in Normandy, 01 February 2003

I didn't make enough money as a teaching assistant to be able to afford to eat in restaurants, so I was forced to develop my cooking skills. All the food in the shops looked so appetizing that I wanted to be able to prepare it properly. Luckily, by November 1972 I had been "adopted" by the family of one of my students — those were the friends who let me stay in their apartment in 2003. The student's mother showed me how to prepare a lot of the delicious food that came out of her kitchen.

Rouen promenade

Yesterday we made the four-hour drive to Rouen, in Normandy, to see friends. We drove over to Tours, where we caught the new autoroute that links Tours, Le Mans, Alençon, and Rouen. The drive was smooth and easy, even though it rained part of the time. We arrived at our friends' house at 1:00 p.m., in time for lunch.

Typical houses in the old city of Rouen

While there wasn't a lot of traffic, it was interesting to see that about 4 out of 5 cars on the autoroute were British. A lot of them were pulling camping trailers. When we stopped at a roadside service station/restaurant complex, again most of the people there seemed to be British. Summer vacation is over, and the Brits are returning home.

I like seeing these ghosts of advertising from the past.

Yesterday afternoon, we went for a nice walk around Rouen, which is a beautiful old city. It's called the city of a hundred steeples, and the museum city. It's the old capital of Normandy, and it's the place where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake by the ... English.

The façade of the Cathédrale de Rouen

There's an amazing cathedral in Rouen. It's the one Monet painted so many times. There are also two other fantastic churches too, called Saint-Ouen and Saint-Maclou.

L'église Saint-Ouen à Rouen

Back in the early 1970s, when I was about 24 years old, I spent a year as a teaching assistant in a lycée, a high school, in Rouen. I taught English (or American, as it's called here). It's nice to have friends in Rouen and to be able to come back from time to time.

The Palais de Justice in Rouen has recently been sandblasted and restored

When we were out walking around the old town, I saw this woman playing the accordeon for spare change. I dropped a coin in her basket and she let me take her picture.

L'accordéoniste

L'Eglise Saint-Ouen in Rouen

I spent last Thursday afternoon in Rouen. The mission was a visit to the curator of the Musée des Beaux Arts there with CHM, who was donating his grandfather's drawing of Jeanne d'Arc to the collections there.

A picture of the Eglise Saint-Ouen that I took when
Walt and I were in Rouen in June 2003.

As a side benefit, the curator gave us passes to attend the current special Impressionist exhibit at the museum — it is dozens of impressionist paintings depicting the city of Rouen. They've been brought in from all over the world. It was very crowded, but worth the effort to see these paintings displayed together.

The Saint-Ouen church in Rouen (Normandy) has the
dimensions and proportions of the great Gothic cathedrals.

Afterward, we decided to go visit one of Rouen's great churches. There are three: the cathedral, painted many times in different seasons and at different times of day by Claude Monet; the Eglise Saint-Maclou, a flamboyant Gothic gem built between 1437 and 1517; and the Eglise Saint-Ouen, built starting in the early 1300s and as grand as many of France's cathedrals (even though it is not a cathedral). The last is the one we went to have a look at. Currently, there's an art exhibit in the Saint-Ouen church.

The Eglise Saint-Ouen in Rouen

Even after walking around with CHM in six or eight grand churches over the previous few days, including the cathedral in Amiens (one of France's largest, and an archetype of gothic architecture), Saint-Ouen was impressive. Maybe because there is almost no seating — no pews, just a few chairs — in the church now, it seems even bigger than it really is. You can see the scale of it in at least one of my pictures, because there are people standing next to the pillars that hold up the vaulted ceilings. They are dwarfed by the building.

The people in this picture give you a sense
of the scale of the building.

As I've said many times on this blog, I lived in Rouen in 1972-73, when I worked as an English-language teaching assistant in one of the city's high schools, the Lycée Corneille. It was a formative year for me — my second trip to France, and longer than the first one. It was the trip during which I made friends with several French students and their families, and during which I really started to become fluent in French.

The stained glass in the Saint-Ouen church dates back to the 1500s.

Rouen is called the Ville-Musée — the whole city, which is a lively port town with a vibrant street life, is an art and architecture museum. It's much smaller than Paris, but with a lot of major monuments, museums, restaurants, cafés, and markets crammed into a very small space. It's only an hour and a half by train from Paris, and it's really worth the journey. It's also been called "the town with 100 steeples" because it has so many old churches. It's history goes back to Roman times.

Eglise Saint-Ouen

I'm posting a few pictures here that I took inside the Eglise Saint-Ouen last week. Only the first photo is older than that. I've been lucky to be able to go back to Rouen and see its attractions and sights many times over the past 35 years. The city never disappoints me.

Rouen in June 2001

After our first week in Vouvray (Loire Valley) way back in 2001, I drove our friend Cheryl to Paris, where she wanted to spend the second week of her vacation. There I picked up another of our good friends, Charles-Henry (CHM), and we drove up to Rouen to see some friends there. I can't remember if we stayed for one or two nights, but I do remember that CHM had planned out an itinerary for our drive from Rouen to Vouvray. That would normally be a three- or four-hour drive. Well, with Charles-Henry navigating and picking out places he wanted to see, we spent at least 12 hours on the road that day.

Here are a few photos I took in Rouen that weekend. Rouen is a small city (pop. 110,000) surrounded by an extensive urban agglomeration (pop. 400,000). That makes a metro area of about half a million inhabitants. I lived in Rouen for a year (a school year) back in 1972-73 and made good friends there who I saw often on my other trips and stays in France. They had a little ground-floor apartment where I or Walt and I could stay when we visited. They lived in a much larger apartment upstairs in the building, which was within easy walking distance of all the city's historical monuments — the old market square where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in the early 15th century, the even older cathedral, two other major centuries-old churches, an ancient clock tower, and the restaurant where Julia Child had her first ever meal in France 60 or more years ago.

Another thing Rouen has is an extensive collection of old half-timbered house, as you can see in my photos. The city one of France's major ports, so seafood there is fantastic. The Normandy cheese, including Camembert, Pont-lÉvêque, Neufchâtel, make for decent eating too. Another thing striking about Rouen is the climate. It's rainy a gray much of the time. When I was working there 50 years ago, the principal of the school where I was working as a teaching assistant told me, as an introduction to life there: A Rouen, il ne pleut pas beaucoup, mais il pleut souvent. That wasn't really a joke, and I got used to the drizzle and mist after a while.

If you want to see more of my posts and photos of Rouen, click or tap this link and start scrolling down..