Provence
Recently, my father came out for a visit. Although he was not able to stay long (he felt compelled to return to San Diego so as not to have more than one unexcused absence at his community college Latin class), I was able to take some time off of work and the two of us were able to take a very enjoyable and interesting trip to southern France. We spent a little less than a week visiting Arles, Nîmes, and elsewhere in Provence. We decided on these towns for a couple of reasons: first, it was early April and we were hoping that the further south we went the better the weather would be, and second, that region of France has a significant number of important Roman ruins that have survived the last two thousand years in excellent condition. Although the weather was not particularly great, the ruins were certainly impressive and the trip was a resounding success. Here are some photos, with commentary:
We rented a car in Lausanne, then with the assistance of a GPS borrowed from Jens, drove to Arles. Driving in France is expensive: from Geneva to Valence -- a distance of about 250 km (150 mi) -- there is a toll of 29.50 Euro ($40). After that, you get a series of smaller but more frequent tolls, the end result being that you pay about twice in tolls what you pay in gas. Anyway, once we got to Arles, we were totally at the mercy of the GPS as we only had a street address and no idea how to actually get to our hotel. Pretty quickly, we found ourselves driving through the medieval center of the town, driving on roads not significantly wider than our car. At some point, you had to just trust that the GPS knew what it was doing and that -- despite all appearances -- the "roads" we were on were actually meant for cars and that we were not cruising along on sidewalks. The above photo shows one of the "roads" we ended up on. To make a left turn off of that street, which was necessary to get to the hotel, you had to do it in two parts, i.e. turn left, then back up a bit, then complete the turn. Ultimately, everything worked out OK as we found our hotel, parked the car, and didn't drive the wrong way down any one way streets, but I would definitely put it in my top ten most stressful driving experiences list.
Arles is a really ancient city, and evidence of this fact is literally everywhere, as shown in the above photo. Most of the building (not pictured) was fairly modern looking -- maybe a hundred or two hundred years old -- yet for some reason, they had retained this very ancient looking marble column as part of the building. But, instead of building it into the newer building, they just sort of left it leaning against the corner almost as an afterthought. Pretty much the entire city looks like this: bits from this century, that century, this millennium, that millennium, etc.
One of the big attractions in Arles is the largely-still-intact Roman amphitheatre. This is a view from the top of the amphitheatre, looking across the city into the stormy weather that seemed to follow us around Provence.
Very interestingly, the reason why the amphitheatre in Arles (and the amphiteatre in Nîmes, and the theatre in Orange and many other Roman buildings) survived for so long was that it was in essentially constant use since it was built. After the fall of the Roman empire, the amphitheatre lost its original purpose of housing sporting and gladiatorial events and by the middle ages, it became a sort of walled city within a city, complete with defensive towers on the outside and churches and markets on the inside. I can't remember the exact numbers, but there were something like 150 houses inside the amphitheatre when, in the 19th century, it was decided to clear out the amphitheatre and return it to its classical condition.
The other well-preserved Roman site in Arles is the theatre, not far from the amphitheatre. Nowadays, both it and the amphitheatre are used for public events.
Although this time around our rental car was a VW Golf, I know exactly what to ask for next time.
Our next stop was in beautiful Nîmes, which was once an important Roman city and thus contains an incredible Roman amphiteatre, pictured above (next to my Dad). The helpful audioguide mentioned that, impressive as this amphiteatre is, it was probably only one of the top twenty largest ones built by the Romans. One of the top twenty! I'm not sure why, but I really find it almost impossible to imagine that the Roman Empire was so large and so powerful and so wealthy that they built roughly twenty amphitheatres this large! Incredible.
The interior of the amphitheatre. Like the one in Arles, the amphitheatre housed a mini city for most of the middle ages and now that the dark ages are over, it is used as a place to bloodily and gruesomely slaughter helpless animals. Isn't progress great?
The top of the amphiteatre in Nîmes.
The official symbol of the city, since ancient times, is a crocodile chained to a palm tree. The history behind this is pretty cool (see the wikipedia link above) and the end result is even cooler: there are crocodiles and or palm trees decorating most of the streets downtown and most of the public places.
Nowadays, Nîmes is probably most famous for two things: being the source of the word denim and being nearby the absolutely incredible Pont du Gard. The Pont du Gard is part of an ancient aqueduct that was built to bring water from Uzès to Nîmes (a distance of more than 30 miles) and is an absolute marvel of engineering. The water flows "downhill" from Uzès but the gradient is so slight that it is impossible to see with the naked eye -- over the entire 31 miles, it drops only 55 ft. This corresponds to 1 ft of descent for every 3000 ft of travel. Awesome.
One evening, we had dinner at the house of a friend of the family. The above photo is a French minitel that I found in the house. The minitel is a small phone/computer terminal first used in the early 1980s as a sort of proto-internet: people could look up phone numbers, check train schedules, buy movie tickets, and do other Compuserve-esque things. The minitel above is a pretty late model, probably from the 90s, I'm guessing. For me, this was a big deal as I had never seen one in the wild. I remember that my high school French book had a small article about how awesome minitels were and how they were so much better than anything we had in the US and how it was proof that France was just a much more connected place than the US could ever dream of being. Of course, nowadays, most minitels (this one included) sit in the corner and gather dust, only being used as a phone as they have been made redundant by the ubiquity of the modern PC. Anyway, I thought it was cool.
Not far from Arles is Les Baux de Provence, a one-time medieval stronghold that is now a bunch of awesome ruins on the top of some decaying limestone cliffs. Les Baux is a fascinating place and totally worth a visit for anyone in the neighborhood, the above photo is of one of the instructional posters around the site. I guess the poster is trying to illustrate the idea that this point was the ideal place for the residents of Les Baux to discard unwanted guests, but I'd like to think of it as an illustration of the world's earliest extreme athlete. Can't you just imagine him screaming out "Do the Dew"!?
One more aqueduct. This one, though, is not particularly famous. It is ancient and Roman and used to serve Arles, but other than that, it's not particularly famous. It doesn't have any (surviving) huge spans or anything -- it's not more than 15 or 20 ft tall -- and what's left of it just sort of rambles along the countryside. I thought that it was pretty cool that you could actually buy a house that was right next to ruins that are nearly 2000 years old!!! Also, as far as I could tell, there were a lot of small signs leading to this aqueduct (just saying "aqueduct," oddly enough), yet for the life of us we couldn't find a parking lot or a little information center or anything and ended up just pulling our car over on the shoulder of the road and hopping out to look around. To me, this is something almost impossible to imagine. I mean, there are so many awesome, 2000-year-old things in France that they cannot be bothered to make parking lots or signs for all of them. Like, only the important 2000-year-old things have signs. Crazy.
After France, we headed back to Switzerland for a couple days of hanging out and such (there will be another blog post about this, and it will rule -ed).
Always thinking ahead, my father remembered to bring both of our baseball gloves with him in his luggage so that we could partake in that most American of traditions, playing catch. A note about vocabulary here: in the movie Field of Dreams, in a very poignant scene at the end of the film, Kevin Costner asks his Dad -- well the ghost sort of thing of his Dad, at least -- if he wants to play catch. Since the movie was written and directed by people who had only vaguely heard of baseball (this is evident throughout), Costner asks his Dad if he "would like to have a catch." This is wrong, wrong, wrong. It is so wrong, in fact, that since that movie came out, my father and I have jokingly referred to playing catch as "having a catch" just to emphasize how stupid the phrase is and also to enjoy our own private joke. Anyway, as part of a tradition that goes all the way back to the Boboli Gardens in Florence in 2000, my father and I had a catch in the Parc de Valancy in Lausanne. The above photo was taken afterwords, which explains why you don't see all the Swiss girls who were totally checking us out and being intrigued by our strange foreign customs.
Finally, here we are at Parc Montbenon, near my apartment, wearing our matching hats. Yes, we had matching hats. I know -- we rule.
Arles is a really ancient city, and evidence of this fact is literally everywhere, as shown in the above photo. Most of the building (not pictured) was fairly modern looking -- maybe a hundred or two hundred years old -- yet for some reason, they had retained this very ancient looking marble column as part of the building. But, instead of building it into the newer building, they just sort of left it leaning against the corner almost as an afterthought. Pretty much the entire city looks like this: bits from this century, that century, this millennium, that millennium, etc.
One of the big attractions in Arles is the largely-still-intact Roman amphitheatre. This is a view from the top of the amphitheatre, looking across the city into the stormy weather that seemed to follow us around Provence.
Very interestingly, the reason why the amphitheatre in Arles (and the amphiteatre in Nîmes, and the theatre in Orange and many other Roman buildings) survived for so long was that it was in essentially constant use since it was built. After the fall of the Roman empire, the amphitheatre lost its original purpose of housing sporting and gladiatorial events and by the middle ages, it became a sort of walled city within a city, complete with defensive towers on the outside and churches and markets on the inside. I can't remember the exact numbers, but there were something like 150 houses inside the amphitheatre when, in the 19th century, it was decided to clear out the amphitheatre and return it to its classical condition.
The other well-preserved Roman site in Arles is the theatre, not far from the amphitheatre. Nowadays, both it and the amphitheatre are used for public events.
Although this time around our rental car was a VW Golf, I know exactly what to ask for next time.
Our next stop was in beautiful Nîmes, which was once an important Roman city and thus contains an incredible Roman amphiteatre, pictured above (next to my Dad). The helpful audioguide mentioned that, impressive as this amphiteatre is, it was probably only one of the top twenty largest ones built by the Romans. One of the top twenty! I'm not sure why, but I really find it almost impossible to imagine that the Roman Empire was so large and so powerful and so wealthy that they built roughly twenty amphitheatres this large! Incredible.
The interior of the amphitheatre. Like the one in Arles, the amphitheatre housed a mini city for most of the middle ages and now that the dark ages are over, it is used as a place to bloodily and gruesomely slaughter helpless animals. Isn't progress great?
The top of the amphiteatre in Nîmes.
The official symbol of the city, since ancient times, is a crocodile chained to a palm tree. The history behind this is pretty cool (see the wikipedia link above) and the end result is even cooler: there are crocodiles and or palm trees decorating most of the streets downtown and most of the public places.
Nowadays, Nîmes is probably most famous for two things: being the source of the word denim and being nearby the absolutely incredible Pont du Gard. The Pont du Gard is part of an ancient aqueduct that was built to bring water from Uzès to Nîmes (a distance of more than 30 miles) and is an absolute marvel of engineering. The water flows "downhill" from Uzès but the gradient is so slight that it is impossible to see with the naked eye -- over the entire 31 miles, it drops only 55 ft. This corresponds to 1 ft of descent for every 3000 ft of travel. Awesome.
One evening, we had dinner at the house of a friend of the family. The above photo is a French minitel that I found in the house. The minitel is a small phone/computer terminal first used in the early 1980s as a sort of proto-internet: people could look up phone numbers, check train schedules, buy movie tickets, and do other Compuserve-esque things. The minitel above is a pretty late model, probably from the 90s, I'm guessing. For me, this was a big deal as I had never seen one in the wild. I remember that my high school French book had a small article about how awesome minitels were and how they were so much better than anything we had in the US and how it was proof that France was just a much more connected place than the US could ever dream of being. Of course, nowadays, most minitels (this one included) sit in the corner and gather dust, only being used as a phone as they have been made redundant by the ubiquity of the modern PC. Anyway, I thought it was cool.
Not far from Arles is Les Baux de Provence, a one-time medieval stronghold that is now a bunch of awesome ruins on the top of some decaying limestone cliffs. Les Baux is a fascinating place and totally worth a visit for anyone in the neighborhood, the above photo is of one of the instructional posters around the site. I guess the poster is trying to illustrate the idea that this point was the ideal place for the residents of Les Baux to discard unwanted guests, but I'd like to think of it as an illustration of the world's earliest extreme athlete. Can't you just imagine him screaming out "Do the Dew"!?
One more aqueduct. This one, though, is not particularly famous. It is ancient and Roman and used to serve Arles, but other than that, it's not particularly famous. It doesn't have any (surviving) huge spans or anything -- it's not more than 15 or 20 ft tall -- and what's left of it just sort of rambles along the countryside. I thought that it was pretty cool that you could actually buy a house that was right next to ruins that are nearly 2000 years old!!! Also, as far as I could tell, there were a lot of small signs leading to this aqueduct (just saying "aqueduct," oddly enough), yet for the life of us we couldn't find a parking lot or a little information center or anything and ended up just pulling our car over on the shoulder of the road and hopping out to look around. To me, this is something almost impossible to imagine. I mean, there are so many awesome, 2000-year-old things in France that they cannot be bothered to make parking lots or signs for all of them. Like, only the important 2000-year-old things have signs. Crazy.After France, we headed back to Switzerland for a couple days of hanging out and such (there will be another blog post about this, and it will rule -ed).
Always thinking ahead, my father remembered to bring both of our baseball gloves with him in his luggage so that we could partake in that most American of traditions, playing catch. A note about vocabulary here: in the movie Field of Dreams, in a very poignant scene at the end of the film, Kevin Costner asks his Dad -- well the ghost sort of thing of his Dad, at least -- if he wants to play catch. Since the movie was written and directed by people who had only vaguely heard of baseball (this is evident throughout), Costner asks his Dad if he "would like to have a catch." This is wrong, wrong, wrong. It is so wrong, in fact, that since that movie came out, my father and I have jokingly referred to playing catch as "having a catch" just to emphasize how stupid the phrase is and also to enjoy our own private joke. Anyway, as part of a tradition that goes all the way back to the Boboli Gardens in Florence in 2000, my father and I had a catch in the Parc de Valancy in Lausanne. The above photo was taken afterwords, which explains why you don't see all the Swiss girls who were totally checking us out and being intrigued by our strange foreign customs.
Finally, here we are at Parc Montbenon, near my apartment, wearing our matching hats. Yes, we had matching hats. I know -- we rule.
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