arles

27/2-1/3

This weekend we had a trip with our entire Maryland group, all paid for and everything! We even had “permission” (meaning Mme Letzter just told us to skip) to miss our Friday class. So we met Friday morning at the gare and took a train to Arles, which took about 3-4 hours. When we arrived in Arles, we walked to the hotel and got to put our stuff in our room. It was a cute little hotel, with a courtyard and a castle-like tower. We had what was dubbed a “secret room” because there were these little stairs that lead up to it. Really, it was just a normal room, though, but we had our own beds (rare) and a flat screen TV with French, German and Italian channels! I took advantage of that later to watch Italian game shows (for some reason we have just about every channel but an Italian channel in Nice). After a break for lunch we left to meet at the office de tourisme to start our guided tour. On the map it looked really far away; in fact it was on the other side of the town. So we left adequate time, but ended getting there way early. Arles, it turns out, is way small. So while we were used to seeing things on a map of nice and knowing that it’s far, in Arles, the farthest thing was like 15 minutes away. On our walk we passed the Van Gogh café, famous as the subject for one of his paintings, and walked through little squares, narrow alleys, and by some roman baths. The big things in Arles are Van Gogh and roman everything. The town was founded by Romans forever ago, so there’s tons of that stuff everywhere (where weren’t the Romans? Needless to say, after a semester in Italy next to Rome, I’m a little roman’ed out). Van Gogh used to live in Arles and the inspirations for his paintings were everywhere. Little plaques with replica paintings were at the locations so you could see how it compared, however there are no Van Gogh paintings in Arles whatsoever. And I think there is only even like one in France. So our 3 hour Van Gogh-centric walking tour basically just walked us around the city to the little plaques, though we did get to see the arena, like a mini coliseum as well. We walked around, literally the entire city, saw some roman walls that used to surround it, a van Gogh site here and there, including his house location, which is now an ugly BNP (why would they do that?), walked along the Rhone, went into a courtyard that showed that under Arles its basically roman ruins everywhere and then ended in some place called espace van Gogh, where I think they have art classes or events or something like that. Then we had a couple of hours to go back to the hotel and sit (no more walking!) before dinner. We met as a group and left to go to the Italian restaurant for our really good dinner that was all paid for! We got a big pizza all to ourselves, salad, bread, a drink, and a lemon torte desert. And it was good pizza too, just like in Italy. I noticed that the woman taking our order sounded like she was speaking French with an Italian accent, so I mentioned it to Lindsay, and on our way out, we decided to ask if she spoke Italian. Turns out she does, because she was Italian and we had a brief little convo in Italian with her, which was fun! After that we went back to the hotel and then went out and hung out by the water, hoping to see the starry night depicted in the van Gogh painting, with no luck. Instead it was just cold and windy (mistral!). The next day we had the morning free so we just walked around Arles (all the same streets.. again, seriously its not that big), and ended up at the market, which was huge! You could buy anything and everything there; it reminded me of the Viterbo market, except way bigger. I took that opportunity to get a good slice of pizza to eat for lunch later. After a couple of hours we met at the bus and headed out to la Camargue area. We stopped in a place called Pont de Gau, where a bird park was, and spent some (way too much) time there. We all walked around the park, looked at all the birds, and mainly looked at the flamingos. Also on the way there we saw bulls, another native animal to the region (I’m guessing). After the park, we headed to Aigues Mortes, which is an actual city surrounded by a wall, and had actual things to see, except we didn’t have the time to see them since we had spent so much time in the bird park. So we had 20 minutes off the bus there, and just walked to the center of the town, saw some wedding photos being taken (the bride had a green dress) and then went and got gelato. Then it was back on the bus where we drove around the walls of Aigues Mortes and then headed back to Arles. That night we were on our own for dinner, which sucked because even though it was a Saturday night, NOTHING was open. Arles is like a ghost town. I think we ended up just getting snacks from a gas station. The next morning we were up early to check out of the hotel and go to the Arles antique museum. There we had a guided tour with our same guide from before, and she loves to talk. So we had another 3ish hour tour with more roman stuff, statues, artifacts, mosaics all in a very modern building that resembled an Ikea. Then it was off to find lunch/snacks (on a Sunday – and in Arles- this is always a challenge) and then we walked to the train station to wait for our train. The train back had a connection in Marseille, so we left the train station for a minute and went outside to see the view. She said we could walk down the (approximately) million stairs to the bottom of the hill, but then we would have to walk back up and I didn’t want to do that. So we just chilled in the train station then got on the next train and made it back to Nice. That night was the last night of carnaval and we went and watched the parade on the prom and the burning of the king statue followed by fireworks on the beach!