By bevvy2212
Since my roommate left me for the weekend to go travel with her mom, I was feeling quite lonely all by myself in Paris. Hard to imagine, right? Paris is great and everything, but sometimes it gets a little bit routine-ish. I think I’ve gotten quite lazy recently as the hype of being in Paris finally dissipated. Sure, it’s cool to visit Musée D’Orsay or the Louvre on a casual afternoon but they get old eventually. So on Friday night, I was on the phone with a friend and he suggested that we should go to Le Havre at 8am the next morning. It sounded crazy to me at the time, and super exciting.
So we took the train from Paris Saint-Lazzare station to Le Havre. Round trip was around 34 euros with my carte de jeune. It’s funny because the trains don’t have a physical barrier that bar passengers from entering the platform unless they have the tickets so it seemed totally possible for someone to just sneak on the train and not buy the ticket. As I was commenting about this loophole in the transportation system (because the previous times I have taken trains, no one checked my ticket), the conductor came around to do the ticket inspection. The guy sitting behind us actually didn’t have his ticket and he was fined.
It took approximately three hours to go from Paris to Le Havre. Le Havre used to be one of the biggest sea ports in France before tradings increased in the Mediterranean and Marseilles over took Le Havre’s importance.
After living in Paris for a while, Le Havre was a nice change because it was such a quiet, cute, little town. Sciences Po actually has a regional campus in Le Havre. I wondered if I made the right choice of going to the Paris campus as I was sitting on the beach, watching the sun set, because it was just so peaceful and the people there were so nice and genuine. But I think, at least for me, who grew up in the city, I’d be really bored in Le Havre if I’m actually studying here so, I guess we can’t always get what we wanted.
Most tourists come to Le Havre to visit étretat. They are a set of cliffs that are shaped like elephant trunks because of wind and sea erosions. Because we got to Le Havre around 12pm, we missed the bus that goes from Le Havre to Etretat at 10 in the morning. Make sure to check the bus schedule because buses to Etretat are rare during off-seasons (after summer). So we decided to go to Etretat on Sunday morning and go to Honfleur, a really small town nearby, instead.
To be honest Honfleur is the cutest French town I’ve seen by far. It felt like a typical European town with its old buildings and hanging flowers from the balcony. Honfleur used to be a sea port as well and it has the largest wooden church in France as well. It was my first time being inside a wooden church and I liked it a lot more than the usual stone churches because it was very quaint and also quite warm inside. (stone churches are usually colder because of the texture)
Another thing about Le Havre is that it’s in the Normandie Region and it’s known to be really rainy out there. Make sure to bring your umbrella and footgear that’s somewhat water proof because the rain and the cold does not make a good combination for traveling. We were lucky enough that Sunday was a sunny day, the only sunny day in fact, for the following week. I highly recommend going to Etretat because you can hike up the cliff and have an incredible view of the area, kinda like the Scottish highlands actually. After being cooped up in the city scene for a while, the cliffs, the sea shores, and the horizon were very liberating.
Also, AMAZING sea food! Especially the oysters (“huitres” in french) and whelks (“boulots”)!