Aix-en-Provence was one of the first
places that we visited on our trip. It
was a quiet Sunday morning and we were some of the first visitors to hit the
city. The main street that is notoriously
wide for streets in Europe and lined with the most beautiful trees. We wound through older neighborhoods and
enjoyed encountering fountain after fountain as we went. A poet once said of Aix-en-Provence that a
blind man walking it’s streets would assume that it is always raining because
no matter where you are you can always here the sound of a fountain near
by.
One of the first stops on our
tour was an old church built in three different centuries. Is was quite pretty inside and I loved taking
pictures. I love the way that light
filters in through old churches. There
is a peaceful and reflective quality to it, also I love the quiet that you find
in a churches. I’m not very religious
but I still find a peace in being in a place where people have come before me
for hundreds of years and contemplated their lives. It makes you feel connected to them in a very
odd way.
Then I got yelled at by a priest
in French. Think that it was for taking
pictures of the organ but I’m not sure and our whole tour group got kicked out
of the church. It is however, far more pleasant and less embarrassing to be
yelled at in a language one does not understand.
Outside the church we wondered a central
town square and their local farmers market. It was enjoyable to see how similar
the farmers markets here are to the ones at home. I liked the similarities and differences that
made up so much of the trip. I find
those kinds of things fascinating. It is
one of the things I like best about traveling.
Like lampposts, everywhere we go I take pictures of lampposts, I love
how they are everywhere, but in each place they are also a little different.
Finally we wondered through some
of the older residential streets and courtyards. They were peaceful in the early morning. We bought some local candy flavored with
lemons and some with figs. We stopped in
a local market and bought a baguette which we ate sitting on a park bench and
feeding pigeons. We also bought a crape
with nutella and lavender flavored gelato.
( We stopped a bought gelato almost everywhere we went but the lavender
gelato on the main street in Aix-en-Provence was some of the best.)
