A Full Day in France

Ah, voila -- sorry it took so long to make this post. For the past few days I've had two dual obsessions: reading and downloading information about Katrina, and exploring the city of Grenoble... on foot (which should help explain the delay - this city is huge!). Now, back to my first days in France...

On Thursday, I woke up in Julien's apartment after about 9 hours of sleep, around 10am, happily thinking I was slowly adjusting to the +7 hour time-difference (no such luck; even now, 10 days later, I'm still a bit iffy). I helped him arrange his things and clean out the apartment, a time-consuming task but one that I could sympathize with (it took Dad and I five 70-lb. UPS boxes to ship all my stuff back home from Tempe, and even then my car was jampacked with other belongings). I checked my e-mail online - 80 messages! - and tried to write back a few, but the French keyboard is really peculiar, so it was a painful undertaking.

We went out in the late afternoon and explored Aix-en-Provence, a neat little college town about 20 minutes away from Marseille. I bought a SIM card for my phone (e-mail me if you want the number!) and a calling card to call back home. Julien's roommate arrived and helped move out some of the remaining things with her Dad. We then started taking things over to the new apartment and ended up sleeping there, after exploring the city -- we walked a ton, but WOW, it was worth it. Aix had so many historical buildings (and fountains - Julien said at least 60 exist in the ctiy!), including one that dated from the 13th century. It was quite fascinating, especially at night, when the dim lighting made the stern architecture even more imposing.

I took only a night's worth of clothes with me and we retreived the rest of my luggage and his late Friday morning. We then lugged it all across town to the train station and grabbed a train (with 5 minutes to spare) to Marseille, a large and nasty industrial city. We deboarded and took another train to Les Arcs Draguignan, a small outpost in the south of France, and his uncle and some other male relative met us there. We loaded up the petite voiture and drove to Plan-de-la-Tour. (Yes, I fell asleep along the way.)

We unloaded and... wow. Two thousand people call Plan-de-la-Tour home and I think that's an exceedingly generous estimate, perhaps including all known relatives of the actual inhabitants, and counting every other dog as a person. This was an actual village and it was tiny! (I figured Johnny Depp would've been notified of my arrival; I expected to see him weeping with joy as my procession arrived, but his personal assistant must have dropped the ball - again.) We stowed away my bags -I was so relieved to be free of them; somehow they'd been steadily increasing in weight, or my weariness was starting to exact a serious toll... We explored the village in about 25 minutes, meeting his three aunts, grandmother, uncle and some other relatives along the way. As we were walking back to his house, one of the aunts invited us to dinner. I leapt at the opportunity - and was so glad I did. We had a five-plus hour classic French meal (my first ever!) and it was wonderful. All sorts of local dishes ("Provencal" style) accompanied with two different wines. I was positively gorged. I politely declined coffee, citing urgent reports from my stomach that suggested an immediate implosion was imminent. However, they insisted I try the "Liquer des Moines" - a thick yellow-ish liquer made by some monks on an island south of Nice. "How strong can it be," I thought, "if it's made by monks?" Forty-three percent strong, it turns out, but that really doesn't tell the whole story. This alcohol was SO strong, I had to wince and close my eyes - involuntarily - with every miniscule sip and suffer silently as liquid fire rolled down my throat. It took me 30 minutes to finish my serving, about half a shot glass. His aunt, meanwhile, was able to polish away three in that time... Julien and I waddled back to his house well after midnight and I collapsed into bed, concerned that the sudden increase in weight would strain the bedsprings.

And so concludes Friday night in Plan-de-la-Tour. To follow: Saturday, venturing to Julien's friend's house and pool - BRR, meeting the rest of his immediate family, Sunday, going to the pool again and going to... drum roll... St. Tropez. (Cue the rolling-R sound that Roy Orbison makes in "Pretty Woman.")

Here's what the view over Plan-de-la-Tour looked like from the friend's house...


And oh - here's a map of southern France where you can see all the cities we jetted through... Nice, Marseille, Aix, Draguignan, Ste. Maxime and St. Tropez. Plan-de-la-Tour is northwest of Ste. Maxime, in the middle of absolute nowhere. I loved it :)