Tuesday 10.12.2010

Sunny Provence

We are back to full strength on our team and the sun has come out of hiding so all is right with the world this morning. For the first time in France we are skipping the patisserie this morning and having a bowl of fruit, glass of juice and a hard-boiled egg from our shopping yesterday. Yecchh! It's probably good for us.

We are finally on track to get our real exploratory day in Arles started. Arles (pronounced "Arl") has been here for a couple millenniums and became a major trading route hub between Italy and Spain when the first bridge across the Rhone River was built here. Caesar thought his retiring Legion officers ought to have a little perk in their dotage so he gave them this part of the world as a retirement bonus. They have had some good centuries and some bad centuries, but the town of 60,000 seems bustling today.


Our first order of business is to walk past the restaurants we tried to get into last night to see if we can make reservations for tonight. We score "Le 16" for 7:30. Almost next door is the forum which served the same purpose as the one in Rome. It was a gathering place for all the folks walking around in togas, sipping red wine and sharing big ideas about who should be conquered next. Even though this is Columbus Day, America was not on their radar. For a couple years in the late 1800's, Vincent Van Gogh hung out here, cranked out a few hundred paintings and lost an ear. There are concrete "easels" around the city with reproductions of some of his more famous paintings in the original locations. Here is the reproduction of the "Cafe at Night" scene with glowing yellow colors from the gas lamps offset by the dark (but starry) night. Our picture of this is slightly tainted in that this is the cafe where we ate last night.

We revisit St. Trophime Church with a better understanding today of what we are seeing. The stone carvings on the front of the church are an entire volume of biblical history combined with promises of salvation or damnation, depending on one's behavior. Inside we see dead people. There are scores of relics (bones and skulls) of local saints and tombs of church big shots from centuries past. This is also a stopping point on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Postello in Spain which we will visit later in the trip.


A couple right turns out of the church takes us past the outdoor theater we visited briefly on day one. This is a "BC" building so there really isn't much salvageable except the outside walls, but the restoration work continues with the goal of using this as an entertainment venue with seating for 3,000, down from the original 10,000.


We return to the Roman Arena just around the corner and John decides to pay the six euros to visit while the ladies each take off in separate directions to browse neighborhoods. The exterior walls of the arena, built in 70 AD, are still in pretty good shape and the repair work being done seems to match the original pretty well. The restorers think they have found the source of the original stone and are using that where necessary in the restoration. There are dozens of ingress and egress points around the arena and certainly a good model for today's stadiums. Most of the original interior seating is gone--the place was used as a fortress in the Middle Ages--so there are now bleachers all around and a fairly large rodeo-size dirt performance area. Originally they would squeeze 20,000 citizens in here to watch the gladiators kill some wild creature or vice versa, but now they hold "gentle" bullfights along with concerts and other outdoor events. John climbs to the top of the tower to get 50-mile views over the city and up the Rhone.


We meet on the steps of the Arena at 12:30 and continue out to the Rhone to find a couple more easels. Vincent used this point to paint his "Starry Night over the Rhone" (still not the other "starry night"), and right behind us is the site of his original home, also featured in one of his famous paintings. His original house was taken out by American Army bombers in WWII as they worked on blowing up the nearby Rhone bridge. A couple American pilots lost their lives here and the French put up a monument for them in the square in 2002. The fact that it took almost 60 years to build the monument might have something to do with bombing Vincent's house.


We find a nice outdoor restaurant with seats under huge trees on an active street and lunch feels very French. Mary and Pat have really good Croque Monsieurs with pomme frites and John has a nice Nicoisse salad. We spend the next hour just slowly working our way in the general direction of our house, poking into shops and peeking in windows when something catches our eye. We're home a bit after 3:00 and ready for a break.


Our dinner tonight is a much better experience. Mary and Pat both have the smoked chicken salad while John splurges on cauliflower soup and braised lamb shanks. Pat also has a mini-Heineken and J and M have their best bottle of wine in a while. For another splurge the three of us share two orders of Profiteroles, a warm flaky pastry filled with cold ice cream and covered with warm chocolate. That'll show that hard-boiled egg for breakfast.


We watch some Brit chef shows (Gordon Ramsey is much nicer here and they don't bleep him) and the beginning of the end of the miner ordeal in Chile.

Today's weather: Sunny and warm, low 62, high 72