Still in love with France!!

Wednesday is market day in Cassis – what a treat! We spent the morning walking through the stalls of fresh produce, linens, and beautiful Italian clothes for about 1/10th the price you’d pay at home. I could’ve spent hours but the size of our bags, our wallets, and the ability of the other 3 members of my family to peruse for long kept me from spending the day there. The girls each got a new dress and I got a skirt and we all bought some beautiful strawberries, peaches, raspberries, cheese and ($20 worth!) of amazing olives. I want to bring it all home!! It just feels so real, not fake and cold like shopping at Safeway – so unconnected to the food you’re buying.
Our plan for the rest of the day is beach, read a book, eat some cheese… relax. After yesterday’s intensity we need a little rest. (Sorry, you’ll have to read to the end to find out about yesterday!)
Until next time…


Monday, July 27, 2009
It feels strange writing already because I only posted a few hours ago while we had lunch in that great Wi-Fi spot. We ordered huge 3 course meals to justify the amount of time we were spending there (we both wanted to use the computer!) and it took me hours to digest all that food! Not that I complained when I finally reached the crème caramel and café crème…
We spent the morning at the beach with the rocks – I swear the girls are future geologists because they are so fascinated by them and want to bring them all home. We have limited them to one a day and it must be smaller than the palm of their hand. At the end of the week we’re hoping they’ll narrow it down to their one favourite… seems like a tough choice at this point. After the (previously mentioned) lunch we got in the car and decided to check out the magnificent calanques in the area. Cassis is famous for the giant cliffs surrounding it – we drove to the top of the largest one (which I am currently looking at out of our large living room window) which has a height of 555m (1850 ft). You can literally walk right up to the edge of it – nothing stopping you from just continuing over the edge! Chloe remarked that luckily it’s water underneath so at least if you fell it would be soft…. We tried to explain that because of surface tension and hydrogen bonds in fact it wouldn’t feel remotely soft but she just couldn’t grasp the concept. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed around here it’s that it’s a ‘live at your own risk’ type of place. Definitely Darwin’s survival of the fittest… if you walk off the edge of a giant cliff or drive off the side of the road (with no side rails, very narrow, 500m drop below) then perhaps you shouldn’t have been there in the first place. It’s a little shocking at first having been raised with high fences, lots of signs, and clearly the thought that we aren’t smart enough to know our own limits… kind of enlightening actually. (The family picture is us perched on the edge - photo taken by a Dutch man of a Canadian family on a cliff in France!)

We continued on to the small Medieval town of Castellet. What a cute, quaint little place! The town is exactly as you’d imagine it to be – tall walls surrounding it and lots of little narrow streets inside. Above the doors the dates all are around the early 1600’s and the stonework is that traditional masonry with a lot of perfectly fitting stones, most without mortar. I honestly can’t figure out how they did that back then when I wouldn’t be able to do that now with all the help of Home Depot on my side. And to make it last for almost 400 years… wow. The town had a lot of soap shops which pleased Chloe to no end – for some reason that kid loves soap! She dropped one on the ground and kind of broke its corner so we bought it – thankfully it was only 1.50 euro and it smelled really nice so now we have a nice little souvenir from that place.
During our trip out to Castellet we were pleasantly surprised by the efficiency of the French Autoroute… a toll road that cost 1.20 euro (almost $2 Cdn) but allowed you to go 130 km/hr on 3 or 4 lanes. Of course this was heaven for Jeff and we thought these people to be very civilized!
PS – Although the name Cassis makes one think of Kir de Cassis (shout out to Andrew!) or crème de Cassis we haven’t once noticed these things on a menu. You can order Kir but not Kir de Cassis. Perhaps this is like not being able to order “Canadian Bacon” in Canada? Or Salisbury Steak in Salisbury? (This is another story for another time, but caused Jeff quite a bit of disappointment in Salisbury many moons ago…)
PPS – I am now adding something at the end of the day… we just returned from dinner and another rock scaling expedition. The lack of playgrounds mean that the kids have had to make do with the things around them. For instance, instead of monkey bars they use the hand railings up and down the steep staircases to flip themselves around, and the giant rocks by the lighthouse as climbing apparatuses (apparati?). Even though they’ve supposedly burned off tons of energy they have somehow managed to arrive back here at the apartment super hyper and literally bouncing off of the walls. Perhaps we shouldn’t have stopped at the bonbon cart??

Tuesday, July 28, 2009
What a day! We had set aside Tuesday to drive east to the many cities and sights that Jeff and I were interested in visiting. We left right after breakfast and headed to Arles – the city that inspired Vincent Van Gogh. We parked our car and within a minute found a delightful flower garden that caught our attention; Julia quickly took the camera and snapped about 20 different pictures of the flowers and fountain. As we were leaving the garden Jeff noticed a bunch of Van Gogh cards and pictures for sale and being a true detective soon determined that this was the setting for one of Van Gogh’s famous paintings of the Arles Sanitorium. It looks exactly the same! As we continued walking we also came across the café that he pained at night – sorry for all of you fans but I can’t recall the exact name of the painting. Something like ‘Café at Night’ and it too looks just like the painting, I actually recognized it right away before I even saw the signs. Arles is also well known for Les Arenes – an amphitheatre built in 90 AD which could seat 20 000 people. (Picture the Roman Colliseum but on a smaller scale.) It was impressive and interesting and we soaked up the atmosphere by eating lunch in it’s shadow. The picture above is one of the upper walkways of the Arene - Julia striking a serious pose!

Then back into the car and onto the autoroute! We drove past Nimes (home of denim – the cloth ‘ de Nimes’) and on to the Pont de Gard. Talk about huge and amazing! This aqueduct was 30 miles long and built to carry water from the nearest spring to the city of Nimes (which had a huge arena they would fill with water for naval battles!). This stop involved a lot of walking in very hot, intense sun. We had brought our bathing suits and the kids put them to good use in the river underneath the bridge – they swam like the Romans did! When we finally returned to the car we discovered why we were so hot – the temperature was 39 C with very little shade… thank goodness for the gelato stand.

Onwards we went to Avignon which is famous for it’s 14th century papal palace. Pope Clement V fled Rome and set up house in Avignon where for the next 70 years the papacy was based. It also has a bridge that goes nowhere – the Pont d’Avignon was built in 1185, had 22 arches and spanned half a mile. It was abandoned in the 1600’s (apparently the people didn’t feel like paying the toll anymore) so now it has just a few arches and looks strange! We also happened to visit Avignon during a theatre festival and it was a crazy, wild, fun place! At first we thought that maybe the inhabitants were just kooky and wore strange clothes but after seeing too many clowns, fake nuns, camouflaged soldiers and Charlie Chaplins we knew that something else must be at play. There were many little plays being performed so to get you to go to them the actors would do crazy things and then give you a little flyer saying when their show was. We grabbed an outside table at a café and just watched the craziness! Like the magician who did the easiest tricks but pretended they were hard – like hiding a rubber chicken in his cape and magically making it appear simply by pulling it out. He was so funny that I was literally crying! Or the 8 piece band that played fabulous music but had the strangest clothes on… what an adventure! The kids would want me to mention the giant 2 storey carousel they rode on in the main square – that was definitely the highlight of their time in Avignon.

At this point we were considering heading back – it was 7 pm and we were all a little hungry but couldn’t find a restaurant that appealed to us. It was very hot and crowded and nothing seemed very relaxing so we got back into the car and headed south – to Aix en Provence. That turned out to be a great spot to stop for dinner and we enjoyed a great meal in a calm, quiet (albeit very busy!) restaurant. The waiter was great and gave the girls glow bracelets when it became dark – and it was definitely dark because we didn’t even start eating until 9:30 pm. We finally made it back to our apartment, had the kids wash the roman dirt off their feet before collapsing into bed just before midnight. Perfectly tired and content!

PS - By the end of our journey we'd paid approximately $30 in tolls - we saved hours by travelling on the toll roads and never would've been able to cover that distance without it. Well worth the price!