| Synopsis: |
Bumping About Brittany is a guidebook with a difference, a series of excursions into the cultural, physical and emotional heartland of Brittany that can be followed up on the ground or simply consumed in the comfort of your own home as a good read. Taken together, the twenty-five essays of which the book is composed, amount to a portrait of the region, of its history, it's landscape, its people, and the way they relate to one another and France as a whole. It is an introduction for visitors and new residents to the Brittany most tourists never see, not simply a litany of classic tourist attractions, but a celebration of the happenstance of travel, the chance encounters and oddities that crop up when we're wandering around, not quite aimlessly, but ready to enjoy whatever we find, even if it wasn't precisely what we were looking for in the first place. If you want to know where the theme parks are, you'll probably be disappointed.But if you want to know what the Bretons think of France and vice-versa, if you want to know how to climb an imaginary mountain, if you want to know why the slippers look a little peculiar, if you want to know what city invented International Non-Diet Day, how to be rude to a Parisian, where to search for little green men, which shellfish should go on the sex offenders register, why the pope provoked a scandal, who brews the best beer, where the President buys his cider, how to find the way to hell and back, the approved technique for nicking a garden gnome, and the correct word for suggesting something is a lot of old cobblers, then this might be the book for you. |