Is this real life?

Continuing the theme of “my life is way too cool right now”…last weekend was simply amazing. 

Saturday my program took us on an excursion to three nearby sites that all contained ancient Roman ruins. Back in the day, they settled in the area…so there’s still some stuff left from when they were here. First place we visited was a site called “Pont du Gard”. It’s an absolutely massive Roman aqueduct that has been updated a bit to make sure it stays intact for all to come and see, but it was really, really cool. The next stop was the nearby town of Arles, which I had already visited in January with a group from my university, to see their Roman constructed stadium, theater, and other things. A friend and I wandered around the theater, and there were literally just chunks of intricately carved roman ruin things just laying everywhere. Like they were normal rocks and not really cool man sculpted rocks. And the last spot was a site called Glanum that they found on accident in the 20’s, that was actually full of gallo-roman ruins dating back to 600 BCE. Everything we saw was really interesting, and just the idea that I’m living in a place surrounded by settlements that old is absolutely mind blowing.

Sunday was a bit different. A few weeks back I had an idea for a pastry tasting picnic where everyone shows up with a few treats from the bakery, and then everyone gets to try a little bit of what everyone else brought. There are soooo many goodies in the windows at bakeries and pastry shops here, but you’d go broke and gain so much weight if you actually got around to trying them all. So this picnic was a good compromise. There were so many tasty treats and everyone left happy. I got back to my apartment and sat around the kitchen table with a few friends, who were discussing the apparent carnival that was taking place in town today. They had seen confetti all over the main street through town and an abundance of adorable French children in costumes. Intrigued, I pulled up the website of Aix’s tourist office to see the order of events for whatever this carnival was. We were in luck—from 4:30 to 5:30 there was a parade finale at the town’s main fountain/square and it was currently 4:15.

We walked into town not really knowing what to expect, but weren’t surprised by the copious amounts of adorable children and confetti we saw on our way to the location. But then things started to get a bit weird. The main fountain, which is massive, was turned off and the basin was full of silk pillows and decorated with ribbon. There were several highly decorated floats parked all around the roundabout with people dancing everywhere. A confetti cannon fired every few minutes. I thought that there might be a parade finishing here, or just going around the circle a few times, but I was wrong. I soon noticed some arena sized confetti blowers were placed around the fountain, along with some sacks of feathers nearly the size of twin mattresses. Several minutes later, they proceeded to pump billions of feathers into the air for 10-15 minutes. It looked like it was snowing. If I count every feather I see on every bird for the rest of my life, I will still have seen more feathers on Sunday. For something that my friends and I literally just happened upon, I could not have asked for more. It was way too cool, and I have no idea how they cleaned up all those feathers. It now being Wednesday, there are still a few floating around town but the vast majority were cleaned up by Monday.

We still have no idea exactly what this carnival was for, if it’s every year, or why they were using feathers, but I’m not asking too many questions. I’ll just accept it as one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

Me hanging out at the aqueduct.

Soooo many pastriesss

The aftermath of feather time.