Most Appropriate Remembrance Day Ever

So I tutor a couple of little dudes who are just beginning to learn English at school, and I've become a giant fan of their whole family. I might even start parading outside of their house with a big foam finger and a placard that says "Lille's Most Awesome Bunch Of Folks Inside." Yesterday, for example, they fed me a massive, soul-boosting meal and took me on a road trip to the Canadian Memorial at Vimy Ridge.

On the road leading to the memorial:


And me with my Little Dudes!

Patronizing Little History Lesson: Vimy Ridge was the site of a WWI battle in which Canadian troops spent three days facing down the German army and, astonishingly (because other Allies had tried and failed), capturing an important stretch of land. As we drove towards the ridge, we could see, high up and in the far distance, the outline of the gigantic stone pillars that form the official monument, designed by a Canadian in 1936. It's the largest of Canada's war monuments and, well, it's impressive.


I tried to capture it in the above picture and failed, but try to imagine a rainbow reaching across the sky and seeming to end right at the foot of the monument. I mean, uh, wow.

The monument was breathtaking, of course, but what really knocked on my skull and said "Hello? There was a WORLD WAR HERE" was the actual landscape.

Which is full of massive craters.

I noticed Anne, the mother in this family, giving the Little Dudes an extra-long hug as we all stood at the edge and stared down, trying to contort our brains around the statistics.

More than 3,500 dead and that, of course, is only the beginning. It's incredible how benign it all seems now.

Of course, that sense of the benign can't last long in a place like Vimy. This sign, for example, tells people to keep back because of undetonated explosives buried in the ground.

Interesting aside: in the picture below you can see two small peaks in the distance, which are in fact huge piles of residue left over from the days when Lille was a mining town.

They are everywhere outside the city, and the ones that have been sitting abandoned for ages have been almost completely reclaimed by trees and wildlife. Anne told me that you can even find apple trees growing from some of them, which is odd for this area, apparently. The story is that miners would toss their apple cores onto the ground before their descent, and eventually all those cores produced trees.

Totally unrelated conclusion: TWO MORE SLEEPS UNTIL 50 POUNDS OF GUILT-FREE ICE CREAM AND OTHER BIRTHDAY SHENANIGANS!!!