Provence Redux

When I was in France as a young woman of 22, there was a popular song which contained the words “Paris n’est pas la France” (Paris isn’t France). The idea was that if you go to Paris, and think you have visited France, you have not had the entire experience. Building on that concept, I can say “Avignon n’est pas Provence.”

Traveling to Avignon is something many tourists do, as the city is one of the main historical and tourist sites of Provence. The university program of which my daughter was a part organized a field trip for the kids, which took them to Avignon. However, they never made it past the most widely publicized sites into what I would consider the Real Provence.

By Real Provence, I mean the part that is off the beaten track – the Provence of small villages surrounded by vineyards and olive groves. When you are in a large city like Nice, Avignon, or Marseille, where the residents are accustomed to dealing with high volumes of tourists, and especially if you are an Anglophone who is attempting to speak French, the inhabitants tend to respond to you in English, both as a courtesy and as a time-saving device. In the back roads and villages of Provence, the conversation, however, continues en français.

The Provençal territory the closest to my heart is that bit of land around my dear village of Le Barroux – the landscape dominated by le Mont Ventoux or les Dentelles de Montmiraille. This is the area that Sarah and I visited the day after our stay in Le Barroux.

We rose early in the morning, and after breakfast at Les Géraniums, headed toward Vaison-la-Romaine. Vaison has two parts, a lower city, on one side of the Ouvèze River which consists of excavated Roman ruins; and an upper city, which consists in large part of a preserved Medieval upper town.

Our visit concentrated on the Roman ruins. These included part of a preserved aqueduct; house foundations, a statue of Tiberius, and some wonderfully preserved mosaics.

We left Vaison, and headed for a couple of local villages known for their fine wines. The first was Gigondas. Before sampling their wines, we climbed to the top of the town, where there was a stairway ascending to a lovely 14th century church. Along the way was a collection of local sculpture. At the top, we asked (in French) a woman if she would take a picture of the two of us, with the valley in the background. She responded by asking if we would please just speak English, because she was Swedish, and spoke not a word of French (quelle surprise!) From the area in front of the church, we could see les Dentelles de Montmiraille.

After talking to a lady in the main part of the village, and selecting a couple of bottles of the local vintage, we then went to Beaumes de Venise. During my own stay in Le Barroux, the local wine cooperative was located in Beaumes. Sarah and I arrived in this lovely village at about lunch time, and decided to eat at the café in the middle of town. We ordered the house rosé, which was wonderful. Our objective in this village was to purchase some bottles of Muscat de Beaumes de Venise, which is a desert wine I recalled as being synonymous with "nectar of the gods". Our waiter suggested that we go to a wine shop across the main plaza in town, which would open after the lunch-time siesta, and was run, he said, by “un vieillard très sympathique” or a very nice old man.

Having a little time to kill, we first found a public toilet. This was a common sort of public facility which, after each use would automatically seal itself and hose its own interior down with a combination of water and disinfectant. From a public health standpoint, this was commendable, but from a practical standpoint a bit disconcerting, since it left the floor and the commode wet and a little slippery. Having taken care of The Necessary, we then wandered about the local streets admiring the beauty of the village.

At about 2:00, we ventured back to the wine shop, to find the vieillard in residence. He was indeed a very nice gentleman, who was curious about Sarah and her studies in Nice, as well as my own history with Provence. After a chat with him, we completed our purchases, and reluctantly started on our way back to Nice.

Le Barroux

I have procrastinated months in writing down my thoughts of my visit to my old village in Provence. There is almost a reluctance to do so, as if by putting the words down, I will bring to an end the almost dreamlike experience of revisiting the spot on this earth that is the most beautiful. For over 30 years, I have remembered this place, and talked about it to almost everyone who knows me. The small village on the Provençal hill, topped by a castle. So many times I have dreamed of it, and spoken to others, that it had taken on the unreal quality of a legend.

There have been many times in my life when I fondly remembered a place or experience as being idyllic and perfect, only to return and find it tawdry and lackluster. I halfway expected a repeat performance upon visiting Le Barroux. Certainly the village would be in disrepair, with half-ruined stone buildings, and the reek of rotten food in the alleyways.

In order to get to Le Barroux from Avignon, one must go through Carpentras. I had remembered it as being fairly straightforward. However, we circled the town helplessly for 3 or 4 times, trying to find either the center of town, or the road that led out of town, towards Le Barroux. In the first case, I had intended to stop the car, and give Sarah a look at the middle of Carpentras, which allegedly (and in memory) holds a wonderful marketplace, as well as a large church which used to have the status of a cathedral. Not to mention a synagogue (the area has historically had a large Jewish population). However, the center of town was impenetrable, and the streets around the outside were indecipherable. Finally we admitted defeat, and made our way toward Le Barroux, in a cold sweat.

The countryside was wonderful, as we drove through a plain filled with grapevines and olive groves, and once we had cleared the surroundings of Carpentras, we met very few other vehicles. I saw a sign for Le Barroux when we were about two kilometers out, then suddenly coming around a curve about one kilometer away from the village, we caught our first glimpse of it. It was an apparition from a fairy tale; a song from a medieval troubadour. Sarah’s first reaction was very gratifying. She insisted that we stop the car that very moment, so that she could get out and take multiple pictures.

We made our way up the hill and to Les Geraniums, where we had our hotel reservation. Checking in and stowing our bags hurriedly, we were set on making the most of what was left of the afternoon to explore the village.

We walked up the street past the house where my friend Marie-Ange had lived, toward the church, and the plaza in the middle of town. We met no one in the streets, and all the houses were shuttered. It was as if we were the only ones in town, save the guests at the hotel. The plaza was as I had remembered it, with the same fountain at which I had taken a picture of Gretl (the little girl I had looked after while I had been there in 1974). Gretl must be a woman of almost 40 now, and I certainly hope that she turned out better than the girl she had been. I snapped a shot of Sarah sitting at the fountain. That particular little girl had turned out well.

The church in the middle of town (Saint Jean Baptiste) was closed up, but I related to Sarah the story that I had heard – that inside the church was a tunnel that led down the hill, to an obscure location, which had been used during WWII by the Resistance, to escape the Germans.

Just off of the plaza was a street that held two houses of note to me. One had been the “upper house” where we had lived briefly. Ann, the American professor for whom I had worked, had created a furor in the town by painting the door with a deep red lacquer. Heaven knows what the color denoted to the people of the town at that time – perhaps a house of prostitution? Then – and now – all the doors in town were a dark brown, and the shutters were subdued shades of powder blue, violet, and off-white.

At the end of the street, on the corner, was the house I remembered as belonging to one Cristophe. He earned his livelihood by producing arts and crafts, which he sold to the tourists. Rumor had it that he was an escapee from a mental institution in Switzerland, who had taken refuge in this remote area of France. His affliction had been lycanthropy, which means that he thought he was a werewolf. I was never sure what happened to him during full moons, but I had a tendency to avoid taking solitary walks at night when I lived there.

The way to the castle was from that street. Walking through the beautiful maze of houses, I was in a dreamlike state, because everything was exactly as it had been years ago. The only thing that told me for sure I wasn’t dreaming was the fact that I was out of breath from walking up and down the streets of the town. There are no horizontal surfaces in Le Barroux, save the Place in the middle of town, as all the streets run up to the castle.

When we finally made it to the castle, we were at the chapel – Chapelle Nôtre Dame la Brune – which holds a noted black Madonna. The signage outside explains that there are about 20 black Madonnas in southern France, and their origin is rooted in Celtic tradition, and Greco-Roman mythology. Although the advent of Christianity in the region transformed these ladies into the Virgin Mary, previously these figures had represented fertility. When the Protestants (Huguenots) took Le Barroux in the 1500s, they cast the figure into the flames. But miraculously, she did not burn.

Walking around the chapel, we finally came to the overlook in front of the castle. This was where I had spent many hours looking down over the Plaine du Comtat in the evenings. It was a rare evening that I did not make my pilgrimage to the Castle, where I would look over the Plaine, up to Mt. Ventoux. Oftentimes I would feel just a bit homesick for my family back in the states, as it was the first time I had been away from home.

The rooftops of the village are the typical tile, which looks like it has been made from half of a clay pipe. Although the tiles are flared at bit, not perfectly cylindrical. Legend has it that the first of these tiles were molded on the thigh of a young woman. Oh, la la! Isn’t it just like the French to have a story like that?

Although on a fine, hot day, it is hard to believe that the severely cold wind known as the Mistral exists, it does wreak havoc on the countryside. Periodically it will blow from the north (off of the Alps), and rumor has it that it always blows in multiples of three days. During the time that I spent in Provence years ago, I found this to be true. Because of the Mistral, many free-standing houses to not have windows on the north side, especially if they are “mas de campagne,” or country houses, standing alone in the fields. Here in the village, it was not that much of a concern, but many roofs had stones on the tiles along the edges, to keep them from being blown away by the wind.

After spending some time exploring the castle and its surroundings, we made our way back down to the hotel to change for dinner. Les Geraniums, in changing management, had also morphed into a high-class restaurant. Previously, it had been a little inn, with a bar/restaurant that catered to the locals. The paysans would wander in after a day in the fields for their glass of pastis before going home for dinner. Now it draws its clientele from the surrounding countryside. It has an excellent wine list, and serves a very fine cuisine.

After dinner, we called it a night, and promised ourselves to explore the rest of the town the following morning, before proceeding to our other stops in the region. I fell asleep that night with a sense of closure, because I had come home. After years of talking to my family and friends about this marvelous place, I had at last managed to show it to one daughter, who had shared my sense of awe.

Provence

After a couple of days of being shown the sights of Nice by Sarah, and then a day or so on my own to explore, I was ready for what in my mind was the main event of my trip – our two-day excursion to Provence.

When I was younger, and just out of college, I had the opportunity to live in Provence for seven months. A professor of mine had a friend who was going there on a Fellowship to write a book about Chaucer. This professor had an 8-year-old daughter who needed looking after and tutoring, so that was my ticket to France, so to speak. I had a three-month stint in that job, followed by picking grapes for a month for a local farmer, followed by yet another job as an au pair for a French family. The first four months I lived in a little village in the Vaucluse called Le Barroux, and my job as an au pair relocated me to Avignon.

Sarah and I left her apartment early in the morning, taking the bus to the airport to pick up our rental car. The drive west from Nice was uneventful and pleasant, taking us away from the coastline, and palm trees of the resort area into the austere and rocky countryside.

NOTE: I have to mention here that traveling by car in France, on toll roads is not cheap! Gasoline is expensive (about $10 per gallon), and traveling on the Autoroute du Sud between Nice and Avignon probably cost us a total of about 20 Euros (approximately $30) one way. At least they drive on the right side of the road, unlike our white-knuckle experiences of the previous summer in Scotland!

We got off the autoroute in Avignon, and headed for the train station, because I had heard that there was free parking there. We didn’t find the free parking lot, but it was inexpensive enough. I wanted to make my way into the city via the route I remembered - the Rue de la République (does any French town NOT have a street by this name?) – which ends at the Place de l’Horloge (Plaza of the Clock). I remembered this place from 30+ years ago as being very open, and surrounded by restaurants. It was still full of wonderful restaurants, but all of them had covered seating in front of the restaurants as well, which gave an appearance of clutter to the Plaza.

Sarah and I found one that offered regional food at a decent price, so we passed an hour or so having a nice lunch, and watching other tourists walk by. Then we proceeded on to the Palais des Papes.

The Palais, of course, hadn’t changed in the 34 years since I had been there. Come to think of it, it probably hasn’t changed since the 14th century. The grounds of the nearby park had added a little snack pavilion, which detracted from the overall atmosphere, as divinity’s nod to tourism. From the nearby overlook, there is a view of the Rhône River, from whence one can see the Pont St. Bénézet, the famous bridge that has been immortalized in the children’s song. This was a familiar view; when I worked here au pair, I used to bring the children there. Looking across the river, one can see Villeneuve-les-Avignon, and the tower that used to be the endpoint of the Pont St. Bénézet before most of the bridge was swept away by the swift current of the Rhône. There is also a ruined castle, which from my perspective still looked very romantic – it was hard to tell that it was a ruin from that distance.

I had one other objective while in Avignon – to take a walk past the building where I had lived for three months while working au pair. The building is a protected historic building (The Hotel de Crillon).

Since the endpoint of our day’s journey was Le Barroux, we headed back to our car, took one last admiring glance at the walls of the old city, drove a couple of times in a circle to orient ourselves (the technique of carrier pigeons), and headed off toward Carpentras, and thence to Le Barroux.

Nice

Note: the following series of notes were written after my visit to France in the spring of 2008, during my daughter's semester abroad.

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Since Nice was our center of operations, I got to know it pretty well – at least the parts of it that were close to Sarah’s apartment. Sarah lives on Boulevard Gambetta, which is one of the larger streets running from the Promenade des Anglais, into town. The “Prom” is kind of like a boardwalk (but not made of boards), and it runs along the beach (or Baie des Anges – the Bay of Angels). People are not only promenading, but there are cyclists, joggers, and in-line skaters, who use a designated painted lane.

At intervals, there is a covered area with seats, where you can sit and look at the ocean, or the people on the beach. The beach is somewhat different from what we in the States expect, as it is covered with pebbles – not sand.

But back to the “Prom”… Jogging may be somewhat new in France. There are lots of people jogging, but not very many of them look like they know what they are doing. In terms of exercise, they are getting a lot of bang for the buck, but they are either running in a very awkward fashion, or are wearing clothing that no self-respecting jogger in the States would wear (such as cargo shorts). On the other hand, put a French person on a bicycle, and they look as if they were born there.

One of my favorite places to walk was the Rue de France. This is a street that runs parallel to the beach, but about a block in. If you follow it east, you will encounter many shops and cafes, and finally the “Zone Pietonne,” or Pedestrian Zone, which is a section of the street that has been blocked off from traffic. Eventually, Rue de France ends at Place Massena, which is a very large plaza. The new tram line runs through it, and on either side of the tram line is a row of about a dozen poles, each one topped with a statue of a man, which are lit at night. The color of the light shifts gradually through the spectrum.

Nice was founded in about 350 BC by the Greeks, who named the city after the goddess Nikaia, the goddess of victory (as in Nike sportswear).

Nice has gone back and forth between various political entities, and hasn’t always been a part of France. Italy is only about 30 minutes away by train, and there is a lot of Italian influence in the architecture of Nice.

Nice also has some of the best ice cream (gelato, actually) that I have ever tasted. If you ever go there, check out Fenocchio’s (not to be confused with Pinocchio’s, which is a chain).

At the east end of the Baie des Anges is a large hill or mountain (depending on your perspective), that is called the Colline du Chateau. I’m not sure of the history of it, so I won’t even attempt to relate it, but going to the top of the Colline du Chateau gives a wonderful view of the entire Baie des Anges. It is an ideal place to have one’s picture taken, to prove that one has indeed been to Nice, because there is a vantage point where the Baie des Anges is in the background. I went up to the Chateau by myself one day, while Sarah was in class. She and all her young friends had hiked up to the top on foot. I discovered some little tourist trains on the Eastern end of the Promenade des Anglais, and for 4 Euros, rode to the top. Call me a cheater. On the way to the Colline du Chateau, the train wound through Vieux Nice.

7/21/07 – Edinburgh

Saturday dawned gray and it didn’t take long to start raining. We got the all-day bus pass, thinking we might want to ride into town, and out a couple of times. The bus dropped us on Princes Street, and we navigated by viewing the castle. Between the visible and distinctive spires and domes of castles and churches, plus my picture map, we did pretty well keeping ourselves oriented.

We went down into the castle gardens, and made our way over to a volleyball game that was going on, in a sand court. The group was none other than the Scottish Volleyball Association, and it was a playoff between a couple of co-ed teams. Eric took some pictures, because our eldest daughter had told us to find her a hot Scotsman. One that could play volleyball, we felt, would suit even better.

We worked our way around the castle, which is built high upon cliffs. During “the ’45,” the Scots chased the English as far as Edinburgh, where Cumberland holed up in the castle, so in a way, that fortress (and Charles Stuart’s greed) was the downfall of the Scotts.

Finding ourselves at the top of “The Royal Mile,” we started working our way through the shops. There is a lot of schlocky stuff in those shops, as well as some nice things, and we didn’t make it all the way down to Holyrood House, because our agenda was to try and navigate laterally to the Grassmarket, an area which had been recommended by Brown.

We did see a couple of pipers on the Royal Mile, which made my day. I would very much have liked to see a whole troop of them, but alas, it was not to be.

We cut over to the Grassmarket by way of the Cowsgate. The Grassmarket is a nice kind of plaza, filled with pubs. One of them was called Maggie Dickson’s. The Grassmarket has been a market area for centuries, but also was a place of execution (by hanging). Maggie was hanged for her part in a murder, and then revived when she was accidentally dropped after being taken down. She recovered fully, living our her life with the moniker of “Half-Hangit Maggie.”

The place we chose for lunch was “The Last Drop,” which, contrary to what one might think, doesn’t allude to drink, but the noose. The signs in the pub said that it still maintains its original layout and décor. At the end of lunch (haggis, with neeps and tatties), Steph stated that she had had enough sightseeing in the rain, and would go back to the hotel at the earliest opportunity. We got a recommendation from our waitress for a pub where local musicians come every night to play. It was called Sandy Bell’s.

We wandered down a couple more streets in Eric’s quest to find wind-up toys, but never found one. And it was pretty miserable in the rain, so after visiting one final schlock store in a mall, we got Steph headed back toward the bus, and attempted to find a pub with live music.

It seemed that Sandy Bell’s was about the only one, but it was a long walk from where we were, so we took a cab. It was a £5 well spent, being a short drive, but it would have been a long, wet walk for two already soggy people.

Sandy Bell’s was the highlight of our visit to Edinburgh. Another one of a kind place, it only serves drinks and “crisps” – no food. When we came in, a trio was playing, seated at a table near the back – a fiddle, mandolin, and bass. But as they were playing, a man wearing a kilt and carrying a guitar came in and struck up a conversation with another gentleman at the bar.

“Ye’re lookin’ fine today.”
“Aye, ye should try it sometime.”
“Och, ma legs’re too skinny.”

Eric asked the man in the kilt if he could take my picture with him, and the response was sure, and that he could take as many others as he wanted, while they were playing.

Brian (the kilt-wearing man) ended up playing with John (the fiddler) and Freddy, who had been playing bass with the previous group. We got to talk with them a lot, and found that only one of them (John) plays music professionally, and he travels around the world with it. His group has played at Wolf Trap before, and was coming back to the States that fall. We gave him our contact info, in hopes that we would hear from him.

We stayed there for quite a while, listening and visiting, having a couple of the local brews, and then buying the band a round, before finally leaving.

It was a long walk back to Prince’s Street and a late night, but time and effort well spent. We felt that we had ended our trip to Scotland on a good note (no pun intended).

7/20/07 – En Route to Edinburgh

There is not much to be said for Friday – just a lot of driving. We navigated through Inverness like champs, and the open road was no challenge. We stopped briefly at the same Highlands Welcome Center we had visited on the way up, where we took advantage of the cheap Internet connection to shoot off a quick email to assure everyone we were still alive. For one usually as connected via cyberspace and cell phone as myself, it has been strange (and wonderful) to suddenly drop off the face of the earth.

Hitting Edinburgh was a bad, bad experience, since we had not done our homework in regard to the location of our hotel. Since it was located on Glasgow Road, we thought “How difficult could that be to find?” Talk about famous last words! With Eric in a lather, we ended up in Leith (the port area). We strolled into the Holiday Inn and threw ourselves on the mercy of the people at the front desk. After navigating through Edinburgh with their directions, we found out that Glasgow Road was none other than the M8 – the very same road we had taken out of Glasgow at the beginning of our Scottish visit.

Eric and I had thought we would take the bus (£1) into town to check it out, but ran into a technical problem involving the outlets by our beds, which had a wacky configuration. It was kind of like a European plug, plus a ground, and no adaptor we had would fit it. The front desk finally scrounged an extension cord from the electrician, which solved our problem, as we stretched it across the room.

By the time this was over, the wind was out of our sails, and we just went to the bar for a drink, and retired.

7/19/07 – Oot and Aboot

Thursday was a low-key day for everyone to do whatever they wanted to do locally. None of us was up to making another long expedition to west coast isles. I had had a few tartan scarves put aside for the girls at Campbell’s tartan shop in Beauly. This shop, which was an absolutely beautiful storefront, was run by two sisters, and their brother, all named Fraser. Although the two ladies were quite charming, our host laughingly described them as looking like “two storks in tartan.” Ms. Fraser the younger helped me find three scarves in MacDonald (McBride), in three different versions of the plaid – dress, everyday, and the ancient colors and after making a few other purchases, we left. I have to observe that not only is the shop beautiful, but the ladies working there made us feel very welcome, and were happy to answer all our questions about Scottish dress and custom.

After we left the shop, Eric asked me if I wouldn’t like a sweater. So we turned back around and Ms. Fraser again helped us. Although everyone who knows me, knows how I hate winter, this lovely sweater will certainly make it easier for me to bear the approach of cold weather this year.

Eric and I then went out to Loch Ness and Urquhart Castle again. We saw a very good film at the Loch Ness Center about all the scientific research that has been done. In short, there are dozens of things that could happen on the Ness, which would look like body parts of a large creature surfacing. That being said, the presence of such a creature has not been totally ruled out, and therein lies the mystique.

After a final trip to the Castle, we headed back to Knockbain Schoolhouse. Fred and Page took the group out to a local inn for dinner, then we came back for our “wee dram” and turned in, knowing that we had to make an early start for Edinburgh the following morning.