Marseilles and Les Baux

Hey! I’m so sorry that I haven’t written anything new lately, but I’ve been super busy! Let me forewarn you, this post is really long because I had to catch up in time! Ok here we go!

Last weekend we went to Les Baux de Provence which was just fantastic! Les Baux is a place with a huge Roman castle that’s all in ruins. It’s beautiful, and the feeling of walking on ancient grounds with huge fortresses all around was just awe-inspiring. We had been a little worried about the weather, because it had been raining earlier that day, but when we finally arrived at Les Baux, the sun was out and the weather was perfect! So we wandered around and climbed up on all the ruins as much as we could with the time we were allowed. The precarious part of all this fun was that the stairs up to the towers were horribly steep and crooked. The first time we looked at them, my roommate and I just turned to each other with expressions that totally said, “Are you serious?” I don’t know how the Romans did it, I’m hoping that these stairs were a result of the long time the ruins have been around. Otherwise, I don’t know how they could climb them everyday, and in bad shoes! Anyhow, it was worth the treacherous climb to the top just for the amazingly beautiful view from the top. After Les Baux, we got on our bus and headed for le Cloitre de St. Paul, the asylum where Van Gogh spent the last portion of his life. It was also an amazing place to spend some time. I would have liked to stay there longer, but we had to head out pretty quickly. After seeing the olive groves surrounding the asylum, I totally understood why Van Gogh admitted himself to the asylum. The surrounding gardens and olive groves are super peaceful, and I just wanted to grab my journal or a novel, and lie down and relax there for a few days! After St. Paul, we headed over the St. Remy, a small town really near to where we had been. My roommate and I decided we wanted to find the cemetery in town (generally there’s always someone cool buried in every French town, we’ve found), and we wanted to find a big cathedral we saw on the map. So after searching for about a half hour, and walking down many streets that existed only on the map, we finally found it! There wasn’t anyone exciting buried there, but it was a really pretty cemetery, and it was definitely worth all the fun random streets we went down. We also saw the cathedral which was unfortunately closed, but we enjoyed in nonetheless. The exterior was really pretty, and it was really enjoyable. We then boarded the bus and drove back to Aix with all the kids who had come with us.

Our program had set this excursion up so that the kids in our program from Paris had come down and seen all the same stuff with us, so we had befriended a bunch of the Paris kids. We all had dinner together, and it was really fun to hear how life is in the big city! After hearing about their lives, I am incredibly glad I chose to study here instead. Even though there’s a TON of study abroad kids here, it’s so nice to be able to walk down the street and generally see a few people you know. A few nights ago, my roommate and I walked into town to get sandwiches from our favorite place, and we ran into three different groups of people we knew! It was just a great feeling to know that there are people around who kind of know you, even though you’re in this crazy foreign country. The Paris kids seem to be enjoying Paris, and there’s definitely pros and cons to both locations, but they seem to be having difficulty connecting with people outside of their American friends. And Paris is just so huge that it seems like they don’t ever see anyone outside of class. That’s why I like Aix!

Anyhow, this weekend, my roommate and I went to Marseilles again! Yesterday morning, we took the 20 minute bus to Marseilles, and had the best day ever! The first thing on our list of things to do was hike up to Notre Dame de la Garde, the huge cathedral that looks out over the whole city. Most people take a little bus because it’s a pretty long hike to the top, but we decided to just do it ourselves. So we climbed up, and it was really more enjoyable that way, I thought. The church was beautiful, and the view of the city and ocean was even better. There’s not anything that you can’t see from the balcony of that cathedral. Apparently the cool thing about Notre Dame de la Garde is that when Marseilles got bombed during WWII, Notre Dame de la Garde got bombed too, but not enough to really hurt it very badly. Some parts were refurbished, but for the most part, it’s pretty much in good shape still. Even though Notre Dame de la Garde was beautiful and fun, the next part of the day was my favorite part!

My roommate had seen a sign earlier for a science fair taking place this weekend, so we thought we’d check it out. We were both pretty excited, a science fair, IN FRANCE!!! So we got there, and not only was it a huge science convention, it was all about global warming, alternative energy sources, and recycling! We walked in and immediately were escorted into this big theater, so we figured there would be maybe a 30 minute film about the environment, or something like that. Then this guy walked out on the stage and told us that we were going to be watching, “An Inconvenient Truth” and that we could stay and discuss it afterwards with all the professionals in the field at the convention! So we watched “An Inconvenient Truth” in French, and stayed to discuss and ask questions. Of course we were too scared to ask questions, but it was SO interesting to listen to other people’s comments. Most people decided that the best way to tackle the problem was to educate the younger population, and get the subjects more taught in schools. Other people thought that there needs to be television programs that gets messages out about environmental awareness. It was so interesting because no one really brought up any ideas about legislation, or government action to promote good environmental action, but I think that’s definitely a French thing because they’re already driving small cars, and keeping their lights on timers, and limiting their water supply. Man, there’s definitely no time in my life when I’ve been more ashamed of the US than when I was sitting in that room though. Al Gore just shows those numbers and it makes me want to vomit. To think that we’re producing 35% of the world’s CO2 emissions, and only support about 8% of the world’s population, it’s pretty disgusting. And we don’t even have the decency to ratify the Kyoto accords! That was about the point where I was like, “I can’t believe I’m watching this in France, I was embarrassed enough when I watched it in my own country!” But it was really fun to be in a place where all the people around were all as outraged and fired up about the environment as I am. After the movie, we walked around to all these cool booths and talked to some guys about their machine that made paper. It was pretty cool, you can put in every sort of paper, plus a bunch of water, and the machine blends it all up and makes it into paper! So that was really cool, but the funny part was that after they had explained the paper machine to us, we just stood talking to them about random stuff for a half hour or maybe 40 minutes! We were talking about environmental issues and stuff, but then they started talking about Americans and stuff, and we were trying to convince them that, “No, we don’t eat hamburgers and beer for every meal in America! I promise!” They gave us a list of French movies that apparently we HAVE to watch because they’re classics (complete with the guys’ phone numbers, which we didn’t even want!). Only in France do people exchange phone numbers at a science convention. All in all, it was a great day in Marseilles. We still have a lot of things to do from our list of Marseilles attractions, but it was worth all the time we used up to go to that cool science convention!