Posted by Harry
Well, my first weekend at Georgia Tech Lorraine came and passed, and I’ve already hit the ground running with my travels. Instead of hitting up Paris like most of the GTL students (disclaimer: no negative feelings towards those who went), some buddies of mine and I went up north to the quaint little town of Étretat in the Normandy region. How did we find this place? To be honest, I have no idea. It was somehow on my bucket list of places to see and I decided to take advantage it.
Words can’t really describe how pretty these cliffs are. From the bottom, you just look up and see an endless wall of rock stretching in both directions. If you take a closer look, you can pick out the layers of chalk and limestone that have built up these cliffs over thousands of years. The view is even better from the top: you can see for a couple of kilometers and watch the transformation from countryside, to town, to beach, and finally to the vast openness of the English Channel from 70 meters (230 feet) high. As an aside, don’t let my beach picture fool you into thinking it’s sand, because it is definitely not! It is actually a rock beach (which France has a lot of) and quite an interesting change from the sand that many us are used to.
I had a lot of travel jitters heading into the first weekend with the whole riding-multiple-trains-and-hopping-on-some-busses deal, but this place sure got rid of those.