Southern France

A Parisian girl in Berlin told me that southern France was somewhere everyone has to go. "It's not as good as Paris, of course, and people there are a little conservative and backwards, a little racist, but you must visit."

My introduction to southern France was getting picked up by a French woman who brought me to her holiday villa on the top of a hill in the middle of the countryside, close only to a village of about 2,000 people. Her mother had dinner waiting on the patio next to the pool when I arrived. We sang karaoke in the village, drank local wine, and I lounged through the next day by the pool, eating freshly cooked food before Audrey brought me to Avignon.

Turns out that in Avignon, there was a massive performance arts festival happening. For three weeks every year, the city gets mobbed by dancers, jugglers, musicians, puppeteers, bands, breakdancers, magicians, actors, etc. etc. There are street performers everywhere you turn, in the main square, on the avenues, down the side streets and in the alleys. It's almost enough to distract you from the main events, which are performances in various venues throughout the city. It was quite a stunning atmosphere to blindly wander into. The place doesn't quiet down for three weeks, the intensity is stunning. I stayed two days in Avignon before moving out to the countryside to crash with my buddy who was working in the area guiding bicycle tours.



Stephane lives in a house in the countryside with his sister and brother-in-law. It was a full house, with cousins and their kids visiting, but they let me crash on the couch. Luckily, Stephane had the whole week off of work, his first since starting to guide rich tourists through the wine country and boutique, 300 Euro a night hotels. Day one, he brought me on a bike ride towards the world's largest standing aqueduct, but we turned back after about 10 miles because it was windy as hell with le mistral in full effect, and I was seriously out of shape and struggling. It's a 40 mile round trip.



We did the ride the next day in the afternoon. I was slow, but made it. The pont du gard is built over a beautiful river. There were a bunch of tourists, but not as many as I would've though. Then again, we did arrive at like six PM on a weekday. We drank a celebratory halfway beer and spent a couple hours lounging by the water, diving, and reading. It was like hanging out in a postcard. The aqueduct functioned for about 900 years and was built without mortar.




The rest of my time in southern France was spent relaxing in the shade, drinking pastis and playing petanque, eating elaborate meals, and drinking wine. It made me not want to leave. My last night, I went to meet some of the guides and people that Stephane works with. In a nearby town, his company has a house built right in front of a stony hill for their guides to stay in when they're in the area. The place is sheltered from the street and focused on overgrown terraced gardens that climb up the hill, with a patio made for dining and wide open doors that basically make the whole first floor open air. We dined with two other Americans guides, an English guide, and a gorgeous Italian woman who ran the office. The sun set over the villa roofs in Orange, the town we were in, and from up on the hillside, climbing through the overgrown vines, the view was stunning.

On one hand, the Parisian girl knew what she was talking about: southern France must be visited. On the other hand, I don't see how Paris could be any better of a place to live, though I suppose at some point paradise gets boring, just ask Adam and Eve. And speaking of that story and eating fruit, southern France had some amazing fruit growing all over the place too, and if a tree grows over the fence line of a property, it automatically becomes fair game for public picking. Mmmm, fresh fruit...