No matter where you live in the world, it’s easy to get caught up in your immediate surroundings, to fall into habits of staying local, revisiting the same over, dining at your favourite restaurant, un café at the bar where the waiter can order for you before you’ve had a chance to straddle your coat over the back of the chair, such a creature of habit so many of us become at some time or another.

Life abroad doesn’t eliminate the entrapment of habits, not even in a place as beautiful as France. So when it does, you have to break out, explore, touch, open your eyes and rediscover.

I’ve spent a lot of time this past year ‘rediscovering’ this Gallic land and visiting new destinations for an injection of different accents, food, and architectural styles.

Once place I discovered outside of my regular stomping ground is Rouen.  When new visitors come to town and we’ve done the required sightseeing in Paris, Versailles and nearby,  we head north to cross into Normandy.  Home of the burning stake to which Jeanne d’Arc was attached, and burial place of Richard of Lionheart who is tucked away quietly under cold stone in the back of the Cathedral, Rouen has charm yet a steely sense of eeriness.

The first time we visited, we noticed there were no children, and the more we noticed, the fewer children there seemed to be. It felt like a scene from a Ken Hughes movie. Old buildings and doors with shutters that closed, people stared as we stolled by with our two on their trottinettes.

On our subsequent visits we’ve realized that really there are children, (there were just none that day) there are equal amounts of elderly, and both those numbers are matched by a crazy amount of macaron shops with multi-level cakes costing in the hundreds of euros.

One last stop? The fantastic school of arts, a visit worth while just for the deathly faces that stare back from the wooden walls.

Sounds fun, huh!

Easily accessible by train from Paris.  Speaking of Paris, I’m over at BonjourParis this week with photos of the Chanel/Lagerfeld themed windows at Printemps.