Skip to main content

Our fourth wedding anniversary | Bonjour Brittany!

To celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary recently, we went for a long weekend across the channel to our favourite country France.  K and I love France, we really do.  And we love the french countryside, not so much of crowded Paris.

K planned this trip and decided that we should try taking the ferry over with our car, so we can drive around in the convenience of our own car.  Thing is, the ferry trip from Portsmouth to Saint Malo in Brittany takes 10h which is a very long time compared to the plane.  However his enthusiasm for the ferry rubbed off me and so we decided to give it a go.  Sweet hubby also attempted to make a few restaurant bookings in french lol.. the only French sentence he knows is "do you speak English?" (bless him) and he actually managed to get us booked in at a few places beforehand.  Very impressive!  My french however, has gone from rusty to dormant; in fact I struggled to dig out my vocabulary in this trip.  Thankfully most people speak English anyway so it was fine.  The only small problem we had was interpreting the french menus but we scraped through, either through me guessing the main words like chicken, salmon, fish or vegetables.. or getting the poor waiter to translate it for us.

That's our ferry!

We drove more than 2h from our home to Portsmouth (I know, thinking about it, if we had taken a flight we'd be in France by then haha).  From the port it was a very easy check in.  We drove up to the customs booth and then to the security booth where they did a thorough check on our car before ushering us to follow a certain road which leads us into the ferry.  Once we parked the car, we had to unload whatever we needed for our journey.  Thereafter we could not get access into the carpark.  As it was an overnight journey, K booked us a cabin to allow us to rest for the night before arriving in St Malo at 7.45am the next morning.

We got onto the ship which was pretty big and stable so you don't really feel the waves.  I say that, but when we tried to sleep we did feel it and I didn't sleep very well if I be honest.  That aside the cruise ship itself was pretty good in terms of facilities.  There was a restaurant on board and a self-serve cheaper option.  There was even a piano bar for you to have a drink or two; a club if you want to party on thru the night; two cinemas to watch movies (pretty current) and duty free shops.  There was even a nail spa for you to do your nails.  Pretty self-sufficient and entertaining right?

Being the party animals that we were, we visited the club at 1030pm, sat and listened to the live band.  Barely a song later, we decided it was bedtime!

At 630am a soft tune was played in our cabin which signalled our morning call.  Soon an announcement was made, in both French and English, to let us know we were arriving in St Malo in an hour's time.  Rise and shine, time to grab a croissant and a cup of tea/coffee for breakfast.

Sunlight was streaming in by the time we left our cabin, and people were busy shuffling about, getting breakfast and also getting ready by packing up their bags.

Soon we received the signal that we could go to our cars.  The ferry soon docked and cars were allowed to drive out one by one.  We drove towards the French customs officer, showed him our passports from the comfort of our car, and drove off.  Right into France.  With St Malo in the distance, we decided to pay an early visit that morning.  K kept raving about how convenient this was, without any airport fuss.. which is true I guess.

We were in St Malo just over four years ago, and that particular trip we planned our trip around Mont St Michel which is towards the east of where St Malo is.  We visited St Malo for half a day, and I remember it was the Easter break and I was still wearing my puffy jacket.

4 years ago


4 years ago in St Malo

St Malo at 8am was very quiet with very little activity in the streets.  Shops were still closed save a few bakeries and we could smell whiffs of fresh croissants and bread coming out of these shops.  K immediately regretted that breakfast he bought on the ferry.  It was nice to walk around whilst the town was still sleeping.

More pictures to come.. stay tuned

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Jubilee Weekend | Afternoon Tea Party

http://www.thediamondjubilee.org/ Today is the end of the Jubilee celebrations and how better to end it off than to have an afternoon tea party in the company of friends, while watching the celebrations on our TV.  It has been quite an emotional afternoon, in the good sense of course.  I don't think I've ever seen Queen Elizabeth on TV (and heard the national anthem God Save the Queen) more than these 3 days combined, but this Jubilee weekend has made me grew to love and admire this lady.  She is 86 and reminds me so much of my own granny, and her strength is amazing.  Imagine being sworn in as queen at the age of 26.  (I mean, what was I doing when I was 26?)  On Sunday when she and Prince Philip went onboard the Spirit of Chartwell boat to watch the River Pageant, it was cold and windy but they stood throughout the 3 hours event.  It was said she was offered some hot tea and a seat, which she both said no to.  I love my grandma but ...

Murder Mystery Dinner Party

Two Saturdays ago we were invited to the Kim's for a themed dinner, specifically a Murder Mystery dinner party.  What is that, you might ask.  It was our first time attending such a dinner too, and so how it works is: a group of people attend a dinner party.  Each is assigned a role and will be given a script to read that night.  The aim of the party is to identify a murderer in the midst of us by the end of the night.  The hosts would work off a dinner game set (they got it off Amazon) and it comes with proper invites, setting/ scene, table name cards, scripts and even a suggested menu.  Clearly RX is an Agatha Christie fan. Two weeks beforehand, we received our invites in the postbox, telling us what roles we each have been assigned and the suggested attire (and props if necessary).  Interesting yes? The dinner was to start at 7pm and we were to have 8 people that night.  It's all very mysterious… Our invitation cards assigned K the...

Cooking mee pok dry | bak chor and fishball noodles

When I touched down at Changi airport a few weeks ago, I was very hungry and K suggested grabbing a quick bite at the food court.  I immediately went for the queue at the bak chor (minced pork) noodles stall.  This one dish is very local and we simply can't find it here.  London's Chinatown has a few Malaysian restaurants with fried kway teow, chicken rice, laksa, etc but there is no authentic fishball noodles or minced pork noodles. When my friend Corinne shared this link last week, I was intrigued and I didn't know K was too.  He suggested going to the Asian supermarket on Sunday to get the necessary ingredients.  We found Dodo fishballs from Singapore here - what a win!  Unfortunately the mee pok (yellow, flat noodles) is of a darker shade here and tastes slightly different (maybe a different type of wheat?).  We found fishcakes too. http://delishar.com/2015/12/fishball-noodles-mee-pok-tah.html This is a healthier version of the hawker center'...