Some Visitors

I've been distracted the last few weeks by some surprise visitors from home. The Mistral wind was blowing hard when they arrived; we were freezing!
But it slacked off and the sun was quite warm when they left a few weeks later. School has been keeping me busy. I'm glad to have a routine, otherwise it would be boring here! It's not that there isn't stuff to do, it's what to do. I think there's so much, one can't really decide-- so it's boring without a routine. Humph!
Oh, my visitors. Well, they came. I can say that much.
We used our French muchly, and they made a lot of the same mistakes as me--I felt redeemed! I'm not the only one around here who can't always get the right verb tenses. I had my first French quiz last week. It went well-- no surprises. My spelling isn't too good in English either. I'm working at it-still.

We also went to the towns of Orange and Arles: 

In Arles my camera went out, so I hope to post more pictures--if the memory card isn't dead :(

The wonderful roman theater at Orange.

On the bright side,  I applied for and got a "La Carte Zou!" from the SNCF train station at Avignon. It gives me 50 per cent off for all my trips in the region, me and two others, that is--that's a bargain. So I used it for these two trips

At Orange: In the meantime, I can say that the weather was frigid the day we visited Orange, but the ancient Roman theater with its small interior movie theater was the saving grace--because it was heated! We learned about the site from the interesting video presentation and enjoyed our picnic lunch there.

The next best thing about Orange was the Cafe-Bar we stopped at. Open on Sundays, we were so glad to enter inside and were greeted by the owners, a husband and wife who graciously served us hot tea at the bar and also waited on their customers easily in French, English or German! How nice is that?!
Please do stop in at the place: V Cafe,  2 Place de freres Mounet Orange
Tel. 0490663214

They serve good, hot and tasty food at fair prices.

A hot drink at V Cafe, Orange warmed us up!

We wanted to visit a few other places, but being low season, they were closed on Sunday. We did see the interesting museum located across the street from the theater, and their cathedrale. While it was impressive structurally, it's sad to find that sooo many churches in France today now fill the role of "museum."

The visit to Arles was a week later; with the Mistral winds tamed for the day, we enjoyed fine a spring day. At Arles we saw the Roman Arena, the local museum, the Roman baths, the cathedral St. Trophime, the Cloister of St. Trophime, the Roman theater and their city park, all very attractive and most quite interesting.

The Roman amphitheater at Arles.

 We also saw Les Alyscamps, the ancient Roman cemetery, one of the few surviving intact burial grounds of antiquity in France. It was most interesting. We also attempted to visit the Museum Reattu but were very disappointed. It's undergoing renovations and, at the moment, has a chaotic schedule of openings. It may be opened for the summer season, but the renovations are scheduled to continue through 2013. Blah! We so wanted to see its art collection. Also we tracked Van Gogh a bit and realized that his presence there is a bit mystical--the society which holds some of his works was also closed and maybe moved from it's first building to a newer one, so some of the signs we followed were out of date.

A map with Arles indicated.

A Painting by V. VanGogh of Arles Les
Alyscamps cemetery.

One of the best things we did in Arles was to enjoy our picnic lunch at the fountain in the town square at the Hotel de Ville, and to meet a woman in her bakery when we stopped by to buy a baguette before lunch. She was very kindly and corrected our French! We weren't the least bit bothered; we thanked her, and we all laughed. Such a kind heart, for sure.