First Day of Classes/War Memorial

Hey guys! Hope all is well back in the States!

Today was our first day of classes for our study abroad. I won't elaborate too much on them, but they should be really interesting.

Main Entrance of the museum.

The highlight of the day was our trip to the War Memorial museum in the city. It's basically a WWII/Cold War Museum along with a gallery of the Nobel Peace Prize. It's a huge building (parts of it are even underground). Since my focus is on Military History (primarily WWII) this was a awesome place to visit!

A lot of the building is designed for symbolism. The main entrance (see picture <-) is a smooth wall split in the middle by a rough and rugged gash (the period of peace shattered by the chaos of war)

Allied Ground-Attack Fighter in the
 main room

              
 Once we entered, we went to the WWII exhibit. It begins with the end of the First World War then follows a spiral walkway down underground to the outbreak of WWII in Poland (Europe spiraling down into the abyss of war)

A lot of the war exhibit is underground. It starts in 1939, then moves along through the war years till the end of the war, where you take the stairs back up to the main room. I took so many pictures and could go on forever about it but to keep this from turing into 20 pages I wont.

After the WWII exhibit we made our way to the Cold War exhibit. Again, lots of symbolism and pictures but for time sake I wont go into a whole lot of detail. But really a neat and well designed museum. The section on the Berlin Wall was probably my favorite part and the details and design of it made it really sink in.

Peace Garden

Memorial fountain at the American garden

Following the Cold War exhibit, we made our way outside to the Peace Gardens. Basically it is one large park divided up with memorials to the Allies. We visited the Canadian and American gardens (not sure if there was one for the British).

They were actually really peaceful (no pun intended). You didn't really hear any traffic from the street and everything was really green and quiet. It would have been an excellent field for football or ultimate Frisbee but I think that would have defeated the purpose haha.

There are plenty of other pictures from today on Facebook so check them out!


Everything else is going well! We left the museum around 4, took the tram back to campus, and have just been hanging out here all afternoon. We have gotten into some pretty intense games of Ping-Pong (since there is no tv and you can only be on Facebook for so long before you get bored). Tomorrow is a free day so I think we may go explore more of Caen.

Well, thats all for now!