La famille à Pertuis
Stephanie’s paternal grandmother and other extended family members live in Pertuis, a small town north of Aix-en-Provence. We rented a car in Arles for a day and started on our way east. Thankfully Stephanie drove (she has a French driver’s license), and I assisted with navigation.
Along the way we stopped in Baux-en-Provence, a historic and scenic mountain-top village. Pretty cool, eh?
Much of the scenery as we made our way from Baux to Pertuis reminded Stephanie of home. Rows of short olive-green olive trees, white limestone hills covered with a dense, dark green vegetation (known in French as garrigue), trees planted along both sides of the road, and vineyards.
This is the route we took:
We arrived in the early evening and were greeted by Stephanie’s grandmother, Mamie, and her Aunt Chantal. All of the conversation was in French, a lot of details about her grandmother’s health, and the neighbors. I tried as best I could to follow along—but that meant only catching a familiar noun or two so I could at least follow the gist of the conversation. Later Stephanie’s cousin Severine and young son Theo arrived, and we all sat down to a couscous dinner they brought from a nearby restaurant.
After eating we huddled around the table and Theo showed us “Brain Age” on his Nintendo DS, a game of mental acuity challenges (like memorizing words, doing math equations) and based on your performance, it computes the “age” of your brain. Poor performance = brain age of 80, good performance = an age of 20. I think I got in the 30s, though I had a lot of help recalling French words from a list of about 30 that I was shown for 2 minutes. It was a fun activity that cut across our language barriers.
Friday morning we had bread (whenever I say bread, think: baguette, usually artisanal Provence-style with tips at the ends), butter, jam, and tea for breakfast. It felt (to me) very French—especially the worn down wooden grate over a trivet-sized cutting surface in order to catch bread crumbs. These are people who love bread.
We got going towards Cannes around 10:30 to have lunch with Stephanie’s mom and eventually drop off the rental car. I can’t seem to get enough sleep this trip, so I dozed off as Stephanie zoomed along on the autoroute at 130km/hr.
Note: in real life, we’ll be flying home to San Francisco tomorrow (Sunday) morning. I can’t believe we’re leaving.
Dejeuner en Arles
The Mistral winds were still blowing on Thursday (March 23 in blogtime). And we were starting to get a little tired of traveling, especially being at odds with the weather.
In spite of the wind, we wandered around Arles looking at Roman and Medieval ruins, old fortifications, aqueducts, stone walls, arenas, colorfully painted provencal doors and shutters, and a French cemetery that looked a lot like the cemeteries in New Orleans. Here’s a view overlooking Arles’ red clay roof tiles.
I particularly liked this drain built right into the steps.
For lunch we stopped at a local brasserie because their menu looked good. In France a menu is a fixed price combination of an entrée (an appetizer), a plat (an entree), and possibly a dessert and/or café (coffee)—which is always espresso. At some brasseries, the menu may be the only food option for lunch (dejeuner).
As I recall, the price was probably around 12€. Oh man everything was delicious. Tomato torte (think: rustic pizza), roast chicken leg grilled guinea fowl (pintade) with mushroom sauce (called something that started with a G, I’d ask Stephanie but she’s asleep) and roast endive, and for desert: cheese, creme Catalan, and espresso. This is what eating has been like in France. 3 and 4 course affairs, for lunch even.
The obligatory food porn:
As an aside: lately I’ve had this idea that it’d be fun to open a restaurant where I make only one thing every night. It changes day to day, but on a given night, everyone eats the same thing. And then I realized that France already invented that, in the form of the brasserie menu. I still might do it though.
Stephanie and I talked a lot about what a brasserie is and how it differs from a café or a restaurant in France (since the lines are blurry), and whether or not the US has anything comparable.
In short a brasserie serves coffee and has tables outside like a café, but it also has a full bar (which a café may not) and usually offers a selection of traditional/simple French dishes (steak frites, steak au poivre, croque monsieur) usually at limited times of day. A restaurant on the other hand is much like a restaurant in the US. Seating usually indoors, people come for more than just a drink, and the menu is more diverse, often changes, and uses fresher ingredients.
Stephanie felt there was not really a category of places in the US like the French brasseries where one could come for just a coffee or have a simple, but complete meal prepared—and I was inclined to agree. Of course I thought about it for a while and eventually realized that the American diner is probably the closest US equivalent. Different definitely, and not as ubiquitous as the French brasserie, but occupying a similar culinary space nonetheless.
Le Palais des Papes
So why did we go all the way down to the south of France only to stop in Avignon? Good question. Actually I didn’t even quite know the answer until we got there, other than having heard from Stephanie that it was cute and old and a place she’s wanted to see. Good enough.
After we finished our pizza, I learned that the primary reason for going to Avignon is the Palais des Papes (palace of the popes, or Pope Castle 1309, as I liked to think of it).
It turns out in the 12th century, things were not to hot in Rome for the pope, so Pope Clement V decided to move the papacy (the center of all Christendom, as my audio tour device liked to call it), to Avignon, from March 9, 1309 till January, 13 1377. Seven popes resided there during that 68 year period. Who knew? So for a few hours Tuesday afternoon (March 20th) we walked around the palace, listening to audio excerpts from room to room.
At this point let me turn you over to the Wikipedia article on the Avignon Papacy, in case you’re curious to know more. Here though, are a few pictures I took along the tour.
Looking across the Cour d’Honneur (Court of Honor)
View from within the palace looking through some interesting warped/refracted stained glass.
Complete view through another stained glass window
And finally the obligatory upskirt shot, inside the Palais des Papes’ Grande Chapelle
La pizza Française
We’d purchased TGV tickets to Avignon for 10am Tuesday morning, back when we were planning the trip, based on the assumption we’d have three solid days in Paris, not a day and a half. But our hotel only had rooms with twin beds available for the night, and purchasing new TGV tickets for the following day cost around 75€ each, compared to the 30 we’d already paid (and would be throwing away to leave later).
So… we decided to suck it up and get to the Gare de Lyon on Tuesday morning after a very short time in Paris. I was a little exhausted from being up early and out late the night before, so I dozed off shortly after the train reached top speed. Vacations are hard work!
Two and a half hours later we were in Avignon, with two minutes to get off the train and let the new passengers on. First thoughts: the soil beneath the grass was limestone white like in Texas. And it was very windy! We took a bus from the TGV Gare d’Avignon outside the city, to the historic city center, and quickly decided on a nearby hotel.
After a brief respite, we went out in search of food, which turned out to be pizza at a place I think was called Brasserie des Arts. I was very excited about eating French pizza in France, having attempted a rendition based on Stephanie’s memory on several occasions.
I learned that most French pizzerias offer a standard selection of pizzas with the same names (and similar toppings) from place to place. So I had the La Reine, which had ham and mushrooms and Stephanie had the 4 Saisons (seasons), which had artichoke hearts, mushrooms, and olives. They were excellent, even better with a few drops of hot pepper olive oil.
Paris après-midi
The rain we saw approaching from the Eiffel Tower continued on its way, so Stephanie and I did likewise, taking the Metro up to Montmartre, a northern neighborhood of Paris featured in Amélie and highly recommended by Stephanie’s sister. We got off the metro and walked to the base of the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur, and saw several hundred (more!) steps in front of us. Why not?
This is what we saw when we got to the top:
At this point I was positively on the lookout for things I could point my camera straight up at, and I did so in the entrance to the Sacré Cœur—and took a picture I quite like.
My feet and legs were pretty sore from all these stairs, so after the obligatory church walk-through we ambled down through the cobblestone streets of Montmartre when we came upon a surprisingly familiar sight. Can you guess what this reminded us of?
Got our first Parisian panini (finally!), I believe it was 4 fromages, and stopped to rest our feet.
We saw the Moulin Rouge from across the street, sort of waved ‘hi’, and then took the Metro back to the hotel to chill before going out to dinner at La Bocca with Stephanie’s friend from Nice, Servane. Which is when I discovered, It’s Tires! The Metro runs on tires!
Note: in blogtime, this took place on Monday, March 19, 2007.
La Tour Eiffel
After a long time-zone adjusting sleep Sunday night, we headed in the direction of the Musee Rodin late Monday morning. Where we discovered that museums are closed on Mondays. Ok. Cross the museums off our list. What’s next? La Tour Eiffel.
Here was our first glimpse, as we walked in that direction.
Even closer yet, I realized that the tower is light brown in color, not the dark gray/black in my memory.
And then finally we were there, though too close to fit the tower into a single shot.
After taking umpteen beautiful but ordinary pictures of the whole tower, I started trying to take some more interesting shots. This is one of my favorites, especially for the old man who happened to be sitting on one of the benches, and the symmetry of the tower and the Palais de Chaillot in the background.
Continuing with my theme this trip of taking ground-up pictures, Stephanie and I both simultaneously had the idea to lean over into the camera’s field of view. Voila, la Tour Eiffel, upskirt, avec Justin et Stephanie.
The east piler (pilier est) from under the Eiffel Tower.
And here’s looking down on the east piler from the first floor of the tower, 95 meters up. This is probably one of my favorite photos. I love how small the people are and how the benches cast fuzzy little shadows.
The view looking east over Paris.
Looking through the tower across the Parc du Champs de Mars.
700 steps later, I made it to the second level of the Eiffel tower, probably about 200 meters off the ground. I left Stephanie behind at around step 500—the wind was blowing very hard and she started to feel a little vertigo.
Not so far in the distance a dark storm cloud was approaching, so I jogged down the steps to meet Stephanie on the first level, and we continued down together after watching a short educational video about the tower’s 18th(!) coat of paint. There were no words, so I didn’t find out anything about the color of paint chosen this go-around.
Notre Dame sans bossu
After lunch, we walked towards the Ile de la Cite, one of two large islands in the Seine, in the center of Paris.
We wandered over Le Pont Neuf (the new bridge, built in 1607), taking pictures as we went. The somewhat overcast clouds parted as the sun began to set, creating some dramatic cloudscapes. We walked through a flower market with parakeets and canaries for sale. There seemed to be quite literally a cafe on every corner.
Before we knew it, there was Notre Dame. Which I know next to nothing about, other than something about a hunchback (le bossu). I did read the Macaulay book about building it (or a cathedral like it) a long time ago, but it almost surprised me to see it right there in the center of Paris (how did Notre Dame survive the French Revolution?). I would have guessed it was a little more remote, but no, there it was, giant, and yet hidden among all the other stately Parisian buildings. Oh, and there were all the tourists!
We tried to get a picture of the both of the us in front of Notre Dame—we look great, but where’s the cathedral?
How unusual to be a tourist in a church on Sunday. People were actually there for services, it seemed. I wonder what kind of people say, “I think I’m going to start attending services at Notre Dame”? Do they live nearby (“this is just my local Catholic Church”) or maybe metro in from all the way out in the burbs? Or maybe everyone in the pews were Christian cathedral tourists.
I walked around thinking about how to take cool picture in such low light without a tripod. How does one capture Notre Dame? And then I got this idea to just set my camera timer and lay it on the floor, facing the ceiling. Here was my first attempt.
This is one of the lower arched ceilings, to the left of the central colonnade. It was definitely a challenge waiting for an opening to set my camera on the floor with all the people milling about. Here was my second try, of a slightly higher ceiling (this would be a lot of fun with a wide angle lens).
On the way out I took a picture of the one of the doorways, densely packed with sculptures. Examining it just afterwards, I captured a gem of a detail, some dude holding his own head as his neighbors look on, unamused.
Lemon Cove
One of my favorite parts about choosing to visit arbitrary destinations spontaneously are all the little unexpected things I discover along the way.
On the way home from Sequoia National Park last Monday we drove through the aptly named town of Lemon Cove, and found ourselves surrounded by rows upon rows of navel orange and lemon trees. I kind of forget that California is a major citrus producer, and that we’d actually traveled south getting to Sequoia.
The trees came right up to the road and were ripe with fruit. I wanted to stop the car and pick oranges right there, but instead we stopped at a fruit stand up the road and bought a dozen navel oranges for $2. Further down the road I passed a sign for lemons, turned around, and followed the sign to a table on someone’s driveway with two tubs of big lemons, a jar with a slit in the top, and a sign that read “12 lemons $1″. Oh man they smelled good.
