Fun in France

I've gotten a little behind in posting as we have some good friends visiting us and we have been busy, as you can probably imagine.  The first day they were here we went to the beach :) and then wandered a bit on the way home.    One of the places we went to was Aigues Mort (translates to 'dead water'.) This was a wonderful shopping spot and we all enjoyed walking around this medieval town.

To the right here you can see one of the signs that we saw posted on a door - it tells the reader to NOT URINATE here.  It appeared that not everyone obeyed the sign.

On the way home we stopped in St. Remy-de-Provence for dinner.  (Can you tell this has become our favorite haunt for dinner?) I finally got the pizza dinner I had been craving and it was wonderful!  We took the most beautiful road into town (see the road picture above).  It goes for miles lined on either side by huge plane trees - a relative of the sycamore, planted initially by Napoleon to provide shade for his troops while they marched about France.  As the sun gets low in the sky, they are a truly magnificant site.

The next day, Friday, we went back to Pont du Gard, the three story roman aquaduct we had been to before.  This time we experienced the movie (kind of silly) and the museum (incredibly impressive), as well as took in the aquaduct.

Then we drove down to Arles to see the town, especially the arena.  See the separate posting about the wonderful experience we had in the arena seeing bull 'fighting' Camargue style.

Arles was crowded and a big town, but not nearly as big as Aix-en-Provence where we went today. It is huge, trendy, very crowded and has way too many English speaking people for my taste. We had a lovely stroll around town and enjoyed the open-air markets (flea market, flower market and produce market). I purchased a good sized bundle of lavender for just 2 Euros ($2.60). It smells wonderful here at home on the table.

Aix-en-Provence doesn't have any major sites, but is a lovely city with many tall plane trees, wide boulevards and fountains, and wonderful buildings.  Nothing roman remains, although this was initially a roman city.  It is best known for being where Paul Cezanne lived and painted. 

One thing that we saw that was kind of cool was a driving school lesson in progress.  Now you need to understand that the French are amazing drivers - weaving in and out of traffic, motorcycles whizzing down the center of the road, and parking pretty much any where at all that you can manage to get your car in.  In tight spots they will park very, very, very close to a wall or building and then both people will scoot out of the driver's side door.   To the left is a picture of the driving school lesson on  parking.  I swear it took just one swift backing up to get the car within about an inch from the wall.  Incredible to witness.