Graveyard/​ghost town double expos­ures

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While I was in Paris I visited the famous Père Lachaise cemetery, and took a lot of photos both mono­chrome and colour, which I will post later. One roll, however, turned out to be half-used already and I ended up with double expos­ures. It turned out I’d already taken photos of a place called Domfront in Normandy with it. Domfront is a bit of a ghost town, which made me laugh to get double expos­ures of a liter­al grave­yard over a figur­at­ive one.

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Domfront is a really pretty histor­ic­al town in Orne in France, which is seem­ingly dead. I was visit­ing my mum in Mayenne not too far away. She’d seen the old city walls of Domfront while driv­ing past, and thought it might make a nice daytrip, being a histor­ic­al town in a nation­al forest. We walked around and looked at the impress­ive ruined Norman castle, and then tried to have some lunch. Everything was closed.

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There were signs that there had been a thriv­ing tour­ism industry that had given up the ghost in the early 2000s, but all the shops were aban­doned (often with strange things like loads of plastic combs left aban­doned in the windows), and there was no-one around on a sunny Saturday in the spring­time. It was really strange, because the town is really charm­ing, with cobbled streets and pretty old build­ings every­where, but seem­ingly unwanted.

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Even­tu­ally we found a galette place. Galettes de sarras­in are a local speci­al­ity, a whole­meal buck­wheat crepe folded up with melted cheese and whatever meat or veget­able fillings you want plus an option­al fried egg. There are a lot of small cafés selling them in that part of France, and they’re usually both cheap and deli­cious, and quickly prepared abso­lutely fresh.

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The galette shop had the local tradi­tion­al lace curtains every­where, framed posters from art exhib­i­tions in Paris from the 80s, and lots of paint­ings hung up every­where in random spots. It was eccent­ric look­ing, but in a cute way. I tried to order a ham and mush­room galette without the ham, because I’m veget­ari­an. The fact that the guy wouldn’t let me, and said I had to stick to the menu, should have got our alarm bells ringing about the qual­ity of the cuisine, because the whole point of galettes is that they put in whatever filling you want.

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In the end I ordered a potato and cheese one, and my mum got a ham one. While we were wait­ing for the food we heard the omin­ous ping of a microwave. A microwave is not required to fry a pancake and melt some cheese on it. My pota­toes were both rubbery and bitter, which I didn’t know pota­toes could be, and my mum’s ham was like a piece of old leath­er. We complained, and sent the food back, and the guy initially tried to give us a paint­ing off the wall rather than waive the bill. Or maybe he tried to sell us the paint­ing at a knock down price, it was kind of hard to tell. The paint­ing was bad anyway, and I think it was one of his. We left Domfront not having spent any money, but hungry and irrit­able and glad to go to the super­mar­ket. A real pity, because it’s such a pretty town, and I don’t know what happened to it. A case for Scooby Doo perhaps.

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