In May 2022, I took a trip to Saint-Malo. It’s a city in Brittany, a region in the North-West of France.
It’s also a region that shares the same name as the country to the north of the English Channel. In French, ‘La Bretagne’ refers to Brittany, and ‘La Grande Bretagne’ to Great Britain, with the ‘Great’ adjective being used to distinguish the larger territory from the smaller one.
Saint-Malo was actually a recommendation of a work colleague.
It was a long weekend and I had been hoping to just go somewhere.
Having spent the last three months working overtime and endless weekends, I needed a break.
Aside from a week off at Christmas, I hadn’t had a holiday in almost a year.
I just needed to get away from it all.
As the Bretons, the inhabitants of Brittany originally came over from Wales and Cornwall in Great Britain, they share a Celtic connection.
That may partly explain why the architecture felt so British. The buildings wouldn’t have looked out of place in (Great) Britain. And the same could be said for the weather.
After exploring a beach, I went to a tea and crêperie restaurant that a friend had recommended me and ordered a galette, a savoury crêpe made from buckwheat. It was without doubt the best galette I had ever tasted.
The green tea was also perfect because I was suffering my daily green tea withdrawal symptoms. For some reason, if I don’t have a cup of green tea, I start to get a sidesplitting headache. An acute throbbing begins to terrorise my frontal cortex, making it hard to think about anything other than the discomfort I’m feeling and the tea I can drink to alleviate it.
It’s a weirdly low-key debilitating condition that I’ve had for over a decade. And no tea works but green tea. I’ve tried every kind of tea and only the green variety does the trick.
Saint-Malo is known as a maritime city, and it shows. You can find evidence of its sea-faring legacy in the main cathedral.
As a matter of fact, one of my colleagues is the direct descendent of Jacques Cartier, the French explorer from Saint-Malo and first European to discover Canada.
After walking around the cathedral, I explored some of the streets.
I’ve never been to Edinburgh before but I imagine it would look something like this.
As a matter of fact, corny as it sounds, I could imagine Hogwarts looking something like this.
It’s probably no coincidence then that there was a Harry Potter store in the city.
As beautiful as the city is, I couldn’t help but notice that pretty much everyone was a tourist.
Like Venice, Saint-Malo seemed to suffer from its own success: the beauty of the citadel seemed to attract visitors from all over France, and from further abroad.
But that also meant that if you were to visit it, you’d feel like one of a million other tourists.
This also meant that whenever you went inside a shop, you couldn’t help but feel that the shop was designed primarily for tourists.
While taking a photo of a dog in the street, a guy in the street asked me what I was doing.
I explained that I just liked taking photos of animals.
He later told me that he was from Montpellier, but that he’d recently relocated to Saint-Malo with his wife.
They liked the beauty of the city but did say it was rather expensive.
He also told me to avoid the restaurants in the historic area.
Because apparently, they triple the price of their langoustine, or scampi, during the tourist season.
He also told me that his daughter was studying International Relations and Mandarin at Science-Po and had gone to study abroad in China.
I went to a nearby island accessible via the beach.
There was a castle on it — a lookout point for the city.
As Saint-Malo had a maritime history, it also had a lot of pirates.
So I suppose the lookout tower was made to warn inhabitants of danger.
Nowadays, it seems the outsiders had taken the city captive.
As the city was right on the coast, it was decidedly more humid than Paris.
As a matter of fact, I felt strangely at home.
My hometown of Auckland is also wet and humid, with unpredictable rainfall.
It’s weird to think that humidity reminds me of home, but it does.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Brittany felt weirdly similar to Auckland.
That is, if you leave aside things like people, culture, language, geography, history and all that minor stuff.
As night was approaching, I decided to check out another island. The sky was turning grey and dark clouds were approaching. The island was completely empty as everyone seemed to have sought shelter from a potential rainfall. But I didn’t care; I went there anyway.
As luck would have it, it began to rain — and badly. As I left the island in search of shelter, I had to cross the bridge, which by now was being assaulted by waves on either side.
I then had to walk about 5 km through torrential rainfall. By the time I made it back to my hotel, I was soaked from head to toe. My shoes, too, were as wet as the English Channel. And they were the only pair I had brought with me.
Tomorrow was going to be interesting.
