On Thursday, 23rd November, 2017, I gathered along with Cllr Linda Symes, Cllr Frank Jonas, Cllr Matthew Winnington, Cllr Stephen Morgan MP for Portsmouth South, The Lord Mayor of Portsmouth Cllr Ken Ellcombe and the Lady Mayoress Mrs Jo Ellcombe in the terminal building at Portsmouth's International Port to board that night's crossing for Caen-Ouistreham.
All of us had sorted our own travel tickets, taxis, cabins on the ferry, none of us took any money from the City Council's coffers for this trip, at which much work was done promoting the city of Portsmouth and encouraging people from our twin town to come visit us and put money into our local economy.
I thank Christopher Jones, Communications Manager of Brittany Ferries and member of the Caen Portsmouth Friendship Group for helping me organise my crossings to be at this event.
I will write about this three day event in three different blog posts. This post will be about the Friday, with its official visits of some of Caen's new municipal facilities.
We arrived early in the morning at Ouistreham, where we were met by a Caen Council employee who drove us into Caen to offload our luggage at the hotel. We had breakfast with M. Patrick Nicolle, Caen City Councillor and Mme Véronique Mauger, who works for Caen City Council and with whom I work closely planning visits from Caen to Portsmouth.
We were then taken on an official visit to the brand new central library of Caen, 'La Bibliothèque Alexis de Tocqueville', which replaced the much older central library opposite the city hall, which had become far too small and cramped for today's library needs.
This library is state of the art, with very unusual architecture. Its design is based on the cross of St Andrew and it has a lot of space for many different functions as well as being a place to come and borrow books.
This gallery of images were taken by myself, Cllr Stephen Morgan MP, the Lady Mayoress of Portsmouth and Mme Véronique Mauger of Caen city council.
We were then taken to a retirement home, that had just been open for a year for a traditional Norman lunch and a tour of the facility including a couple of the residents' own rooms, with an afternoon quiz and tea in their day room.
Some of the delegation were a bit dubious about the more traditional fare we were served at lunch. In particular the main meal for lunch, which including Andouillette sausage and a whole baked apple. The Norman cider was enjoyed, as was the cheese and the dessert 'La Teurgoule' was generally appreciated.
Images from the retirement home taken by The Lady Mayoress and myself.
In the late afternoon we were whisked off to 'La place du théâtre' in the centre of Caen, where the city had a Food Festival called 'Novembre Gourmand' in place. Part of this festival was an event for the period of our visit called 'Croq' British'. This event was a promotion of our city and many things British. It included a stand ably manned by Mme. Claudine Cerisier (my French twin) and her team of volunteers forming Caen's version of the twinning committee, most of whom I have met many times by now.
Demonstrations of British food recipes were available along with food stands selling various British fare, this food was being tried out and going quite some way to allaying the fears the French have about our food being 'terrible'...
There we were met Mme Catherine Pradal-Chazarenc, who is Caen's Deputy Mayor number 1 and the Mayor of Caen himself M. Joël Bruneau.
In France the mayor is a very powerful person and is the one in charge of the city, responsible for making many decisions. The mayor can be in position for up to 7 years before needing to stand for re-election and can stand many times. The Lord Mayor of Portsmouth is a ceremonial role and lasts for one year, although a Lord Mayor of our city can be nominated and elected by the councillors as mayor more than once.
A short amount of free time, where I caught up on the day's main events in the news about Cairo and the scare in Oxford Circus, London. Before we went to dinner at a small local restaurant to the standard hotel we were staying in.
Dinner's main event consisted of 'Gigot d'Agneau' which was generally much more preferred than the Andouillette by the British Councillors. We were accompanied at dinner by M. Patrick Nicolle and M. Morgan Taillebosq (a good friend of mine since I have been in charge of twinning) from Caen.
Following dinner, even though we were all quite tired, we thought it would be rude not to take Mssrs. Taillebosq and Nicolle up on their offer of a chance to sample Caen's nightlife. M. Taillebosq took us to one of his favourite haunts in the city. 'L'Hydropathe' is according to TripAdvisor the number one place in Caen for a night out. It seems this might be true, being Friday night, it was packed full of locals. We managed to have a chat with many of them. One young lady, 'Sophie' in particular was a huge anglophile and a bit of a fan of Caen's Mayor, so she said, although her boyfriend was not so keen on him.
After a very long day, the entire delegation retired back to the hotel where they all slept like the proverbial logs.