So if we’re facebook friends, you’ll have seen that I’ve been busy lately. The last voyage I blogged was Strasbourg, one month ago today. And I have done quite a bit of traveling since then…
March 8th-9th.
An American friend from school and I took a train west to a town called Montpellier to see M83. If you haven’t heard of them, though they are French, they’re famous internationally and have this recent hit song. So after hopping on a train late that afternoon and arriving early evening, we got lost for a while trying to find out hostel walking in every direction except the correct one. But we got there eventually, and the concert was absolutely amazing. They hadn’t played in the south of France in five or six years, and you could see on the lead singer’s face how excited he was to be able to speak French to the audience in between songs and to just be playing a show in France. The next day we woke up, had two hours to wander around the city, and then catch a train back to Aix. Montpellier was a really lovely city. Not that much larger than Aix in terms of space, but it was definitely more urban and less “cute-provençal-town”.
March 9th-10th.
The international organization at my university organized an overnight trip west to the cities of Toulouse and Carcassonne. It was so simple—I give them 50€ and they give me a hostel room with friends, all transportation, and they showed us around both places. It was a great time with friends seeing a new corner of the country. We wandered around Toulouse most of Saturday and then some more Sunday morning. If that city rings a bell, it’s because it was in the news a week or so after I was there. But I saw none of that. I just saw some pretty buildings, pretty parks, and ate some delicious regional food. Sunday afternoon we stopped at Carcassonne. I was there at the end of February with one of my friends before I knew this trip was happening, but it was fun to visit again. Carcassonne is a town a few hours west of Aix that has an old medieval city from like the 12th century. It used to be on the Franco-Spanish border, but then the border got moved at some point so the castle lost significance. But this medieval city was full of toy stores selling princess and knight outfits. It’s kind of funny how Americans take their kids to Ren Fairs and Europeans can just take their kids to a real castle.
March 24th.
This semester, my American program organized two trips for us that are paid for out of the tuition dollars I pay them. This first one was to a region just a bit north of Aix called “Luberon”. We visited four small villages, a nature park, and an abbey. The villages were all very cute, and most of them were perched on top of hills so that once upon a time when they were built, they could be easily defended from attacking persons. But the best village was Roussillon, where the nature park was. Randomly in the middle of this area, there’s this little blop of colorful soil. There are a total of 17 shades ranging from browns, to reds, to yellows and oranges and they’re used for a bunch of stuff (pharmaceuticals, paints, dyes, etc). They’re really picky with what it’s used for now to protect it, and part of it is now this nature park. It was easily one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. The last place we visited was this abbey in a valley. It was kind of depressing because if you run a google image search of the name (Abbeye Senanque), almost all results show it in the middle of a blooming lavender field. Beautiful, no? I was just a tad bitter because the lavender booms two months out of the year here…June and July. Literally, those are the only two months that I’m not in France and I don’t get to see the one thing that Provence is absolutely known for. So it was slightly insulting for me to see a field of dead lavender that will bloom as soon as my plane takes off. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. It was a really, really lovely trip. I’ll just have to use this as motivation to save money when I get home so I can come back here someday at the right time of the year.
March 25th.
So I was looking at my map of France and marked off all the places I’ve been, and noticed a gap within my immediate vicinity. So I planned a day trip to Toulon, which is the next major city along the Mediterranean east of Marseille. It has a big port with ferries to Corsica/Italy/Africa, ship building, and it’s where France keeps most of their Navy. Their aircraft carrier wasn’t in town that day, but I hear it’s impressive. So three friends and I hopped on a train for about an hour and ended up in Toulon. We walked inland farther to find our first activity…a cable car to the top of a small mountain (2,000ft). Mount Faron is right next to Toulon, so we were essentially on the outskirts of town when we caught the cable car up. Up top, apart from the amazing views, there was a zoo that specialized in the breeding of endangered cats. Obviously, we went there first. It was a bit sad because the cages were all small and I felt sorry for the kitties, but everyone was happily asleep in the sun…like cats do. It’s sunny over 300 days a year here…so it’s a pretty nice place to be a cat. Or a panther/puma/lion/tiger/etc. We saw the pair of tiger cubs born here 10 months ago staring at a random donkey that was wandering through the back part maintenance area of the zoo like they wanted to go eat it. Super cute. After the zoo, we walked around the park up top some more, taking in the views, and then moved on to the WWII memorial. They turned an old fort into a museum to commemorate the Allied landings in Provence in August 1944 and the liberation of Toulon. After Allied troops landed up in Normandy the previous June, they did the same thing all along the south of France. It was super cool actually seeing stuff like that where it happened, as opposed to watching a film or seeing a similar exhibit set up at an American museum. After that, we took the cable car back down the mountain, wandered around the center of Toulon for a bit, and then came home.
March 31st.
A while back I was looking through a list of “the most beautiful places in France” and saw that one of them, the French Grand Canyon, was located relatively close to where I am. A few girls and I were talking about renting a car to go spend the day there, but then we discovered that this company in town that plans 25€ day trips to all sorts of neat places was organizing a trip so we decided to just do that. Next to the canyon, which is either called the Gorge du Verdon or seriously Grand Canyon du Verdon, is a man-made lake that is the prettiest shade of green. They don’t allow any gas motors on it, only electric and canoes/kayaks/paddleboats, and it’s a reservoir so there’s no gross stuff draining into it. The trip organizers told us that the water would probably be too cold for swimming, but I wore my suit anyways. A former swimmer friend and I decided to go in anyways, since it couldn’t be any worse than an early morning swim practice. It was…because we couldn’t properly swim with our faces in the water and I think my lungs went into a bit of shock the first two minutes because it was hard for me to talk. But we warmed up a bit, and swam from the beach we were at out to the bridge nearby and beached ourselves like sunning seals on some rocks on the other side. We contemplated jumping off all dramatic-like, but our legs were too cold to ensure that we’d be able to safely leap far enough out. So instead we just played with the mud that covered the bottom of this lake. It was all goopy and pure and made our skin all soft. Then we swam back, played with some more mud, and dried off. There were probably 60 people on this trip,and a few dozen more along the shores of other parts of this lake…but my friend and I were literally the only ones swimming. I don’t think I’ll ever swim in a lake that naturally pure again or have a lake to myself. It was pretty much the coolest thing ever. After that, they drove us through the canyon to see it from up higher/up close and take some picutes. I’ve never been to the American Grand Canyon…but I’m pretty sure it’s hard to compare the two. Either way, the French one was so pretty. The last stop was a small village near the canyon where we saw villagey things and climbed up to a little chapel way up high. It was a great day and I got so many good pictures.
And now for some photos:
An American friend from school and I took a train west to a town called Montpellier to see M83. If you haven’t heard of them, though they are French, they’re famous internationally and have this recent hit song. So after hopping on a train late that afternoon and arriving early evening, we got lost for a while trying to find out hostel walking in every direction except the correct one. But we got there eventually, and the concert was absolutely amazing. They hadn’t played in the south of France in five or six years, and you could see on the lead singer’s face how excited he was to be able to speak French to the audience in between songs and to just be playing a show in France. The next day we woke up, had two hours to wander around the city, and then catch a train back to Aix. Montpellier was a really lovely city. Not that much larger than Aix in terms of space, but it was definitely more urban and less “cute-provençal-town”.
March 9th-10th.
The international organization at my university organized an overnight trip west to the cities of Toulouse and Carcassonne. It was so simple—I give them 50€ and they give me a hostel room with friends, all transportation, and they showed us around both places. It was a great time with friends seeing a new corner of the country. We wandered around Toulouse most of Saturday and then some more Sunday morning. If that city rings a bell, it’s because it was in the news a week or so after I was there. But I saw none of that. I just saw some pretty buildings, pretty parks, and ate some delicious regional food. Sunday afternoon we stopped at Carcassonne. I was there at the end of February with one of my friends before I knew this trip was happening, but it was fun to visit again. Carcassonne is a town a few hours west of Aix that has an old medieval city from like the 12th century. It used to be on the Franco-Spanish border, but then the border got moved at some point so the castle lost significance. But this medieval city was full of toy stores selling princess and knight outfits. It’s kind of funny how Americans take their kids to Ren Fairs and Europeans can just take their kids to a real castle.
March 24th.
This semester, my American program organized two trips for us that are paid for out of the tuition dollars I pay them. This first one was to a region just a bit north of Aix called “Luberon”. We visited four small villages, a nature park, and an abbey. The villages were all very cute, and most of them were perched on top of hills so that once upon a time when they were built, they could be easily defended from attacking persons. But the best village was Roussillon, where the nature park was. Randomly in the middle of this area, there’s this little blop of colorful soil. There are a total of 17 shades ranging from browns, to reds, to yellows and oranges and they’re used for a bunch of stuff (pharmaceuticals, paints, dyes, etc). They’re really picky with what it’s used for now to protect it, and part of it is now this nature park. It was easily one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. The last place we visited was this abbey in a valley. It was kind of depressing because if you run a google image search of the name (Abbeye Senanque), almost all results show it in the middle of a blooming lavender field. Beautiful, no? I was just a tad bitter because the lavender booms two months out of the year here…June and July. Literally, those are the only two months that I’m not in France and I don’t get to see the one thing that Provence is absolutely known for. So it was slightly insulting for me to see a field of dead lavender that will bloom as soon as my plane takes off. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. It was a really, really lovely trip. I’ll just have to use this as motivation to save money when I get home so I can come back here someday at the right time of the year.
March 25th.
So I was looking at my map of France and marked off all the places I’ve been, and noticed a gap within my immediate vicinity. So I planned a day trip to Toulon, which is the next major city along the Mediterranean east of Marseille. It has a big port with ferries to Corsica/Italy/Africa, ship building, and it’s where France keeps most of their Navy. Their aircraft carrier wasn’t in town that day, but I hear it’s impressive. So three friends and I hopped on a train for about an hour and ended up in Toulon. We walked inland farther to find our first activity…a cable car to the top of a small mountain (2,000ft). Mount Faron is right next to Toulon, so we were essentially on the outskirts of town when we caught the cable car up. Up top, apart from the amazing views, there was a zoo that specialized in the breeding of endangered cats. Obviously, we went there first. It was a bit sad because the cages were all small and I felt sorry for the kitties, but everyone was happily asleep in the sun…like cats do. It’s sunny over 300 days a year here…so it’s a pretty nice place to be a cat. Or a panther/puma/lion/tiger/etc. We saw the pair of tiger cubs born here 10 months ago staring at a random donkey that was wandering through the back part maintenance area of the zoo like they wanted to go eat it. Super cute. After the zoo, we walked around the park up top some more, taking in the views, and then moved on to the WWII memorial. They turned an old fort into a museum to commemorate the Allied landings in Provence in August 1944 and the liberation of Toulon. After Allied troops landed up in Normandy the previous June, they did the same thing all along the south of France. It was super cool actually seeing stuff like that where it happened, as opposed to watching a film or seeing a similar exhibit set up at an American museum. After that, we took the cable car back down the mountain, wandered around the center of Toulon for a bit, and then came home.
March 31st.
A while back I was looking through a list of “the most beautiful places in France” and saw that one of them, the French Grand Canyon, was located relatively close to where I am. A few girls and I were talking about renting a car to go spend the day there, but then we discovered that this company in town that plans 25€ day trips to all sorts of neat places was organizing a trip so we decided to just do that. Next to the canyon, which is either called the Gorge du Verdon or seriously Grand Canyon du Verdon, is a man-made lake that is the prettiest shade of green. They don’t allow any gas motors on it, only electric and canoes/kayaks/paddleboats, and it’s a reservoir so there’s no gross stuff draining into it. The trip organizers told us that the water would probably be too cold for swimming, but I wore my suit anyways. A former swimmer friend and I decided to go in anyways, since it couldn’t be any worse than an early morning swim practice. It was…because we couldn’t properly swim with our faces in the water and I think my lungs went into a bit of shock the first two minutes because it was hard for me to talk. But we warmed up a bit, and swam from the beach we were at out to the bridge nearby and beached ourselves like sunning seals on some rocks on the other side. We contemplated jumping off all dramatic-like, but our legs were too cold to ensure that we’d be able to safely leap far enough out. So instead we just played with the mud that covered the bottom of this lake. It was all goopy and pure and made our skin all soft. Then we swam back, played with some more mud, and dried off. There were probably 60 people on this trip,and a few dozen more along the shores of other parts of this lake…but my friend and I were literally the only ones swimming. I don’t think I’ll ever swim in a lake that naturally pure again or have a lake to myself. It was pretty much the coolest thing ever. After that, they drove us through the canyon to see it from up higher/up close and take some picutes. I’ve never been to the American Grand Canyon…but I’m pretty sure it’s hard to compare the two. Either way, the French one was so pretty. The last stop was a small village near the canyon where we saw villagey things and climbed up to a little chapel way up high. It was a great day and I got so many good pictures.
And now for some photos:
Cassoulet, traditional dish from Toulouse.
Tinted soil at Roussillon.
Final notes:
-If you'd like to see more of a geographic representation of where I've been, I've been mapping it on Google. Click here for the map, and you can zoom in and click on each bubble to see what city it is.
-If you'd like to see pictures, this album contains everything I've done since the end of February for the most and it's visible to people without facebook accounts.
-If you'd like to see pictures, this album contains everything I've done since the end of February for the most and it's visible to people without facebook accounts.
No comments:
Post a Comment