Lille

Hi Everyone

Lille is beautiful, but my French is woeful!! I am having trouble understanding them and they cannot understand me, so there you go. I was still up to the lesson about the garcon's saut and fille tombe and as they do not come up in many conversations, I am screwed. Never mind I just need to find some parents of young kids and we can discuss boys jumping and girls falling to our hearts content..

The city is pretty, the French however are not so good on tourism, everything is only written in French, even at the tourist attractions, what?? Even in Australia we have multi lingual signs at our main tourist attractions. Yesterday I went to the zoo, all in French, but it was a nice zoo, only small, but the animals had nice enclosures, a pleasant hour was spent. I then took the tour of the city, no hop on hop off here, just round you go. I then went to Belgium for the afternoon, on a tour of the battlefields, that was interesting, they barely stop except at Tyne Cot, we got 45 minutes there, otherwise it was look out this window or that window for 4 hours. But I am glad I went, alas my camera battery gave up on the morning tour, so no pics of the graveyards or trenches. The trenches were amazing, very narrow and I kept thinking, I would not like my life depending on these. I wanted to see the places that my Great Uncles had written home from, so it was worth it just for that, to see what they had to endure while they were here, minus all the mud and blood and terror etc of course. I don't know how they did it, 2 minutes would have had me crying for my mother and insisting on taking the first boat home. Tyne Cot Cemetery was amazing, so many young men lost for nothing, what a waste of young life. It did make me proud though, our boys came over here and when they left Australia no one had any faith in them, they were told they would only be used at the back of the battle to do menial work as they would not be any good.. To know that they became a major part of the offensive is really heart swelling stuff, they were amazing. Right in the centre of the Tyne Cot cemetery is a large monument to the 3rd Australian division, as they taken the blockhouse that stood on the site and then turned it into a first aid station. There were so many unnamed graves, just "A soldier of the great war" "Known unto God" on the headstones, really sad. About 3000 of the 12000 graves there are unidentified, some have the country but not the name. It was very sad really, I couldn't stop my eyes welling up, it was very emotional.

I had a dinner at restaurant that had a sign saying, "English menu inside", so I thought good for you, and ate there. I like to sit outside and watch the locals go by, they are an amazing race the French... you see some strange sights!!

I am off to Amiens today, to see more of where Great Uncles Tot and Ash fought. I am really proud of my 5 great Uncles, they were way braver than me!!

I shall leave you with some pics I have taken, I hope you enjoy them

Cheers

Lones


This cool log carving was in the park outside the Lille Zoo. I had to merge photos to get it all in. I hope it comes out okay.


The stone carvings on the buildings are amazing, check this out..


The Charles de Gaulle momument, I would be a little disappointed if I was Charlie, there are way better monuments than this thing in Lille..


Yeah, pity I couldn't read any of it!!


These were lovely, there were also monkeys, meekats, tapirs, capyburas, a large cut out of a polar bear for some reason and a bird that looke suspiciously like an Emu from a distance, but really comes from South America.


See...