Marseille: first visit

Marseille (week 11)

David chose Marseille as his city destination of choice on the weekend.  Marseille is the second-largest city in France and, having been founded by Greeks as the city of Massalia in 600 BC, the oldest.  Therefore it was no surprise that we had a little trouble finding parking.  The city does look a little old and "used", at least compared to Nice (the 5th-largest city in France).  However, on a Sunday afternoon the traffic was not bad.

As a specific destination, Craig picked a museum he thought would appeal to the boys: the Natural History Museum.  It is housed in one wing of a palace built by Napoleon III - the palace "symbolizes the excess of the Second Empire," according to the guide book.  The other wing of the Palais Longchamps is the Musée des baux arts.  The field (champ) of the palace's name is now a classical public garden laid out behind the building.

Only having one afternoon, we stuck with just the Natural History Museum, which had a temporary exhibit on Man and the Sea, plus the permanent exhibits on natural history (as the name of the museum suggests!), with dozens (hundreds!) of stuffed specimens of various fauna from around the world.  As an added bonus, admission was free, and so was the street parking (because it was Sunday).

Montagne Sainte-Victoire: first hike

Puyloubier (week 11)

View from just below L'ermitage de Saint-Ser

nestled in the mountainside!

Yolanda and Craig finally got the chance to take a hike.  They went while the kids were in school, so didn't have a lot of time.  Therefore they chose one of the shortest destinations, not all the way up Mont. Ste.-Victoire, but instead just to a chapel located on the hillside, L'ermitage de Saint-Ser.  The chapel was originally consecrated in 1001, although little remains of that original structure.  The path was not difficult, about 35 minutes for us (including picture-taking) to walk up, although there is little shade and the temperature was in the high 20s - unlike what we'd be used to in mountain hikes in the Rockies or around Thunder Bay!  The chapel is cute, although not really "used" - you can't light a candle and put it on the alter, for example.

Mary Magdalene

Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume (week 10)

Provinçal legend holds that the Three Marys (Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Mary Clopas), along with other followers of Jesus, were forced to flee the holy land and ended up near Marseille, where they worked to convert the locals to Christianity.  When Mary Magdelene died, St. Maximinus created a crypt for her, containing a variety of relics.  This crypt was re-discovered in 1279 by King Charles II of Naples, who commissioned a cathedral and abbey (including a residence for pilgrims) to be built on the site.  This cathedral is in the modern-day town of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, which is about a 10-minute drive down the road from Puyloubier.

Mary Magdalene's skull

As you can see from the picture, the cathedral is in dire need of restoration.  What you can't see is that the restoration is underway, starting from the alter area (at the opposite end from the entrance shown in the picture).  Mary Magdelene's sarcophagus is also much the worse for the wear, as pilgrims tended to break off pieces as souvenirs.  Her skull is encased in a gold and glass vessel on display above the sarcophagus.  According to one guide book, this is the third-most important tomb in Christianity, after Jesus's and Peter's.  You wouldn't know it based on the condition of the building or the lack of promotion.

If we may offer an editorial comment: this particular holy relic very creepy.

Promenading on the Riviera

THE hotel in Nice (l); looking west along the Promenade des Anglais (r)

Nice (week 10)

We decided to spend the weekend in Nice, figuring we should go when it was still warm enough to get the Riviera effect, but past the August tourist rush.  The hotel we stayed in did, in fact, have a sign "complèt" on the door, so the tourists are still around, but it wasn't so busy to be annoying (certainly less crowded than the Lakeshore area of Toronto when the temperature exceeds 25C).  The signs in our hotel (the Locarno) were helpfully posted in French and Russian - apparently the two nationalities that created Nice as a vacation spot were the English and the Russians.  The hotel was a ways west of the the Vieux Ville, but only a block inland from the seafront Promenade des Anglais.

Nice is a strange place.  It has a high level of sophistication (it is the 5th-largest city in France) - art museums abound, and most of them are free entry.  Then there's the beaches - really quite poor for sunbathing (but it doesn't stop the locals) because they are hard-packed dirt or rock, but the swimming is excellent because it gets deep very quickly.  However, trying to find a child-friendly place to eat was very difficult at night: everything along the beach closed by 6pm (the sun is up until 9pm), everything else was closed by 8pm, except the fancier places that had plats starting at €50.  We eventually had to settle for a shawarma place on Friday night!

David in the misting splashpad

We spent Saturday promenading from our hotel to Castle Hill.  There is virtually nothing left of the old Nice castle, but there is a nice park up there, and even an elevator to ride up to the summit.  The distance from our hotel was 2.5 km along the Promenade des Anglais, which the boys had no problem completing.  We ate at one of the hilltop cafés and admired the views.  We then went back along the Cours Saleya (we missed the world-famous flower market, which only runs in the morning), past Matisse's old house, past the former palace of the Dukes of Savoy (now a police station), then along the Promenade du Paillon, the broad park running diagonally through town.  The last was a highlight because part of the way along there are a couple of what we might call splashpads - of course they are sophisticated European splashpads, so everyone was walking through them, from businessmen to skateboarder 20-somethings to kids to bridesmaids (there were wedding parties everywhere on this Saturday afternoon).

With the many stops and snacks and splashing, that walk took pretty much the entire day.  We stayed over and Sunday had a dip and rock-collecting expedition to the beach, then back home.

We'll be comin' 'round the mountain when we come

Vauvenargues (week 9)

If you walked diagonally across Mont Ste.-Victoire on the GR9 hiking trail, you would come to Vauvenargues in 6.5 hours (as you can see by the signpost).  Since we had two young children, we thought it might take longer, and we'd still have to walk back, so we decided to do a vehicular circumnavigation of the montagne instead.

Picasso's shack with Mont Ste.-Victoire behind

The town is very small, but hosts two important sites.  For hikers, it is the location of the trail management site, the people in charge of determining when to close the trails (common for high winds and the concomitant chance of rapidly-spreading wildfires), as well as the forest firefighting HQ.  For the artistic community, it is the site of the Picasso family home, still owned by the Picassoes and the location of Pablo's burial site.  Because it is privately owned, it is closed to visitors and the gate sign reminds you that, "La musée est à Paris. N'insistez pas, merci."  I'm not sure why they don't send you to the much closer Picasso Museum in Antibes...  Nevertheless, the exterior of the château is impressive, a manor house built on the restored ruins of a medieval castle.  Apparently in the winter when the leaves are off the trees, it's possible to see the tomb from the top of the road, but we couldn't see into that part of the garden at this time of year.

As we've lived in the vicinity of Mont Ste.-Victoire, we are becoming more aware of its attraction to artists.  Cézanne, Picasso, and others have been fascinated by, as one guide book put it, "the ever-changing light".  In other words, depending on the time of day, cloud cover, etc. the mountain does look very different.  You might say it has a lot of character!  The photographs don't really show the subtleties very well, so I've only posted a couple here.  The lowest one demonstrates how the cloud cover can descend to almost the base of the mountain.

Festy Weekend

Puyloubier, Trets, and Pourrières (week 9)

Craig and Yolanda with their tasting glasses

According to the caretaker for our place, this is the last weekend before the grape harvest (he warned us to be on the lookout for tractors "everywhere").  Because of this, it's festival weekend throughout the region.  On Saturday we stumbled on Pourrières's club days, with judo and wrestling demonstrations (and probably others we didn't see), booths set up to recruit for the film club, model plane flying club, etc.

On Sunday, Trets had a food fair, with booths selling food and local wineries plying their fares.  For €3 you could buy a tasting glass, and go booth-to-booth for samples.  The food was from various restaurants in the area, including a few from Marseille and several from Aix, so it was higher quality than "fast food" (sort of like Fox-on-the-Run, for you Thunder Bay people). 

Craig's first bumpercar ride in 20-ish years

Meanwhile, starting Friday afternoon and continuing into the next week is the Puyloubier Fête.  It is basically what we would call an exhibition - with carnival rides, concerts each night, fireworks, and various vendors.  There are pétanque competitions (a type of lawn bowling - for those of you who've played Assassin's Creed III, it's that type); the entry fee is €450 per team of three, so you can see they take their boules seriously!  We went out Sunday night for the kids to play on the midway - we all played foosball, David tried his hand at the video arcade, David and Andrew played air hockey, and everyone but Andrew went on the bumpercars.  Unfortunately, the town is so small that the bumpercars only ran when a group of kids arrived together to use the ride.  Otherwise, we had to wait around until enough people arrived and go in with them.  We eventually got tired of waiting for the adult cars (David went on the kids cars with group of local kids) so Yolanda, Craig, and David went just the 3 of them.

Fireworks as seen from our terrace

On Saturday morning, the grand opening was a ceremony called "Awakening the Wolf".  It was never clear to us why someone would want to do this, but the kids sang the waking song louder and louder, and eventually the wolf mascot awakens and comes out of his cage, holding the key to the town (which was then given to one of the lucky singers).  The song was an old Provençal folk tune, in the Provençal (Occitan) language, so the kids had to be taught the words on the spot.  They also all got bandanas with the local town crest on them.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the noise bylaws are quite a bit less stringent in France - so the rock concert went blasting away until 2 am both Friday and Saturday nights .... then the workers clanked away another 2 hours tearing down the stage gear to prepare for the next day.  Luckily David and Andrew can sleep through anything, 2 am is Yolanda's normal bedtime, and Craig learned how to sleep through any volume of music having once lived on the 3rd floor of Cameron House.

The putrid fields

Pourrières (week 9)

In 102 BC, Caius Marius defeated a barbarian army on the plains at the foot of Mont Sainte-Victoire, in what became known as the campi putridi - the Putrid Fields.  To commemorate his victory, a pyramid monument was built along the Roman road.  Naturally, after the fall of Rome, the monument was mostly dismantled to provide building supplies for the local peasants.  However, a small amount remained, and the village of Pourrières (the name supposedly derived from campi putridi) collected the remaining blocks and built a fountain.  Thus, the blocks in this picture date from ~102 BC, but the structure itself is considerably younger.  (The information about the Font Caius Marius is from a neat book we found in our rental house, called Secret Provence)

One of the curious things about touring Provence is that you never know when you're going to stumble upon some Roman artifact.  There are numerous places along the roads where oddly square-shaped caves can be seen - but the regular shape and the size imply that these caves were made by the Romans for their aqueduct systems.  For example, as we were driving along the road we call the "forest road" to Aix (D17), we came across this remnant piece of what appears to be part of a Roman aqueduct beside the road.  Whether this is actually vintage Roman, I don't know; it's at least old and made in the Roman style.

1st day of school

Puyloubier (week 8)

Today is the first day of school.  Here is a picture of the school.  If you look carefully, you'll see it's vintage from a time when boys and girls were educated separately.  It has a nice fenced-in courtyard with a couple of plane trees in the front.  Oddly, you have to go outside to use the toilets (and the sinks are just open to the air) - it reminded me of some places in Hawai'i, actually.

Andrew's teacher was wearing orange shorts and a T-shirt that read "Dean and Joe's Garage".  I guess dress code is a little less formal here, although to be fair, the colour of the shorts did perfectly match the colour of the writing on the T-shirt.  The École Primaire schools have 5 grades, what we would call grades 1-5, or what are here called CP, CM-1, CM-2, CE-1, and CE-2.  What we call the primary or kindergarten grade(s) are at a separate school called the Maternelle.  Our school only has 4 classrooms, so there is an annex containing the 5th classroom and the administrative office.  As I mentioned before, class sizes are ~25.

Today marks the first day of the new French school week, which is:
M, Tu, Th 8:30-11:30, 13:30-16:00
W 8:30-11:30
F 8:30-11:30, 1:30-3:00
Lunch is €3 at the school cantine, otherwise they come home for lunch.  Since we need a medical certificate documenting David's allergy, we're foregoing lunch at school until we've got that.

As you can see, they have Wednesday morning class now (there was no school at all on Wed until this year), and a shortened Friday afternoon.  Overall instruction time is increased by 2 hours (3 more hours on Wed, one fewer hour on Fri).  So we'll still be able to travel on Wednesdays: in our August travels we rarely left before 10:30 anyways, and now that the tourists are gone, there will be fewer people to slow us down.

End of day update: They don't mess around here - Andrew had math and reading homework, and David had multiplication tables to work on.