Spring Break 2007: Caen Peace Museum

To clarify, we went to France with a student group from Memorial Composite High School (Stony Plain). Normally, a sane person would shy away from toodling around France/Belgium with 20 teenagers, but this trip was a special tour to Canadian war memorials/battlefield, plus we would be there with mom and dad, so it made sense to go. Even if we should be thinking about a mortgage instead...

Rather than get into the boring details of every thing we did ('cause isn't that a lot like going into the details of the last video game we played or our drive to Moosejaw?) we'll just make a few notes on the highlights... the moments we'd tell you about over dinner should you ask about what we liked most about France.

Still, I've been known to have a long-winded moment or two.

In 1999, I did a similar school trip and one of our stops was the Caen Peace Museum. I was really struck by a museum dedicated to the idea of peace rather than war.
Much of the museum looks at the reasons for war and the conditions of soldiers during WWI and WWII. On that trip in '99, I saw a French propoganda poster that I've always wanted to try and get a copy of, but have never been able to find since.

When I found out that Caen would be one of our first destinations in '07, I knew that I had to see that poster again. Along with the rest of the museum, which is pretty great, there was the poster and this time I took a photo.
It's not much and the lighting's not great, but I appreciate its simplicity of message and design. It's easy to imagine it as a distributed poster hung on cellar walls during the French resistance.

It was also cool to toodle around the Canadian garden at the Museum.