Avignon was lit at night by lights like this all over
Tara in our room at Hotel de l'Horloge
our bathroom at Hotel de l'Horloge, complete with bathrobes, slippers and bath salts
I've never seen so many fish as at the Avignon fish market
Tara wine
Graffiti on a French door
street in Avignon
candy bikini
Hotel de l'Horloge
looking out the window
room with a view
chocolate ganache tart
Popal Palace
town of Avignon
Tara and I
cross
Popal Palace
carousel
public art
The morning of Saturday, January 16th at the Taylor hotel, Tara and I overslept. We decided to split up. She went to find soy milk while I figured out how to get my train pass. I had planned to order one through Rail Europe, but didn’t realize they needed three days to ship it and I waited until it was too late. I would have had to pay nearly an extra $150 to get it shipped internationally. So, I still didn’t know how I was going to handle it. The trains to Amboise were inexpensive so I just bought them outright. The trains to Avignon were not so cheap. I couldn’t find information about it online so my only option was to go to the only place I knew that sold them, which happened to be a different train station than the one we were leaving from to go to Avignon. Time was running out, so I decided the best thing to do was leave Tara a note with the hotel information in Avignon and go to the station by myself in hopes of getting a pass and get back to the correct station in time to hop on the right train. Well, an hour later after taking a metro and waiting in three lines, one of them 40 mins. long, I finally got my pass but found that Tara’s train was booked full. I got a reservation for the next train leaving four hours later around 5 o’clock. By the time I got into Avignon it was about 10 p.m. Thankfully, Tara had found her way safely and the hotel had let her check in early… and what a gorgeous hotel room!
We stayed at Hotel de l’Horloge overlooking a main square with a Carousel and cafe chairs sprawled out into the plaza with Christmas lights hanging overhead. Our room had high ceilings with windows everywhere and it stretched around the corner. We had a bath tub with bath salts and robes and slippers… the works. We got a deal on it… Stay Saturday night, get Sunday night free. So we upgraded a bit since we were saving money. It was worth it to spend two nights in that room.
Our room also looked out over a Papal Palace built in the 1300s. At the time, the Pope wanted to move to France, so the church literally bought Avignon and made it the center of the Catholic religion. However, the people still wanted a pope in Italy so a second Pope was named. After many years of successive popes in Avignon, the centers combined again to result in one Pope in Rome. We explored the outside boundaries of this Popal Palace in an afternoon walk on Sunday, witnessing some incredible views and experiencing how old some of the buildings in Avignon are. The whole town is surrounded by a fortress wall.
The night we arrived Tara and I just relaxed and took advantage of our beautiful room and bath salts. In the afternoon before I got there, Tara had made friends with a woman who worked at the equivalent of a health food store who spoke good English and wanted to go to Canada. On Sunday, January 18, we started out the day by going to see her. It turns out she was hosting two Canadians that night from a website called couchsurfing.com. After a trip to the market and our walk around the Popal Palace, we went to meet up with them and have a glass of wine (for 2 Euros each… what a steal!). The market was amazing… with every kind of cheese you can think of, plenty of meat, vegetables, fruits, wine and fish. I couldn’t believe how many types of fish they had. I haven’t seen so many options of fish in my life. I’m sure there were many there I’d never heard of. I really wished we had a kitchen. We sampled olive oil and I snapped a picture of a wine called Tara. I purchased a variety of fruit, pizza, quiche and two sweets- creme brulee and a chocolate ganache tart that looked amazing. We had good conversations with the woman, her boyfriend and the two Canadians. They had just been woofing on a farm in Italy for a few months. My most interesting conversation was with the woman’s boyfriend. We were talking about the difference in systems between America and the US. Tara and I had been talking about the subject earlier in the day as well.
The French have their health insurance, childcare and retirement taken care of by their government. If they have nothing, they can still survive on help from the government. In America, we have to pay for childcare, health care and even for those who have retirement savings or pensions, they are increasingly in jeopardy. The conversation started with a comment of how Americans tend to switch jobs when they get tired of one, whereas the French tend to have a job and keep it for their whole life. I explained that Americans used to operate like that but the companies don’t take care of people the same way anymore. The system is fickle and even people who have worked for the same company for many years may not see the retirement money they’ve saved. I am completely in favor of the French way of taking long lunch breaks and 5 weeks paid vacation a year, but now I understand how they afford it. The everyday mandatory expenses for health and child care are taken care of. I never realized how much harder Americans have to work just to live. No wonder we don’t take vacations often enough.
On Sunday night after making friends and drinking wine, Tara and I went back to the hotel to figure out our plans for the next day. The villa we were planning on staying at in Aix-En-Provence notified us they would have no water so we booked another hotel in town.
