Throughout the semester, the program provides us with a few day trips around various cities and sites throughout Provence, and this past Saturday's trip took us to Bonnieux, Roussillon, and L'Abbaye de Sénanque.
Provence is a notably sunny region, typically having around 300 days of sun per year. As I woke up on Saturday morning, I rubbed my eyes to find that it was one of the region's few rainy days, so I grabbed an umbrella, picked up some warm pain au chocolat from the closest boulangerie, and wandered my way over to the 50 seat bus that would be taking the 15 of us around for the day. I was not the only one to stretch out along the excess of seats to catch some naps during our day's drives.
Our first stop was a graveyard in Luberon, which at first seemed to me like an odd idea, but seeing the place took away all questions of why we were there. For one thing, this was the graveyard where Albert Camus, author of L'Etranger (or The Stranger, in English), was buried. He was a literary great, meriting mention in my past English and French classes alike, so I would have expected a grand grave to house the man. However, his grave was by no means anywhere near the largest in the cemetery. I still wouldn't call the grave underwhelming by any means; instead, there was an overarching beauty of the entire cemetery, which Camus's grave certainly contributed to. I always expect to simply get used to the beauty of southern France. I expect to see it as commonplace rather than exceptional, but everything here, from the simple houses and streets to the graveyards, never ceases to blow me away.
After we had looked through the graveyard, we moved on to Bonnieux, a perched provençal city. This is where the stairs started to become the theme of the day. Although the word "perched" tends to suggest beautiful views and all that lovely stuff, it's also a slight euphemism for "so hilly that your legs are going to give out." And so we headed off to a little old church whose name was Eglise Vieille, or "old church." I have a sneaking suspicion that this was not its name when it was first built. This church, as chance would have it, it situated at the top of an obnoxiously tall hill, so we climbed up a gentle-ish slope to reach some stairs, which led to another set of steeper stairs. It was great.
When we finally huffed and puffed our way to the top of all of these stairs, we got a wonderful view from our perch, and my primary thought was, "How does anybody ever make it here for weekly church services?" Seriously, most of the people there looked pretty well aged, and while it would be no small feat to make it to the top at any age, I can't imagine how people would do it week after week as they progress through the years. I hold a great respect for this pilgrimage that they must make so often. My fellow program members and I, however, celebrated making it to the top by climbing the really awesome tree that we found there. I'm amazed that we never got yelled at, but I get the feeling that it must happen fairly often there; that tree just looks particularly climbable, and somebody that looked like a groundskeeper or something drove through in a truck, just going on with his day comme d'hab.
After those antics, we found some quiche and café, then piled back into the bus to head on over to Roussillon, specifically heading there to see the ochre quarry. I hadn't really put much of any thought or research into what this would be like before I got there, so this was another one of those views that blew me away.
We were surrounded by vibrant orange and yellow rock that felt almost like clay to the touch -- and stained like paint. It was absolutely gorgeous, with the colors brought out even further by the rain, but there was no shortage of stairs and hills. It was there that my friends developed the motto that we like to complain (especially about stairs) in really pretty places.
Once we had finished hiking through the ochre, we still had another two hours to kill in the city, but the rain provided us with few options other than finding food and drinking coffee, so we passed the time by drinking our second and third coffees of the day. That being said, we were good to go for our third and final leg of the journey, L'Abbaye de Sénanque.
As we pulled up to the abbey, the weather was dreary, rainy, foggy, and perfect. The 12th century building houses a lavender field as its front yard, and is backed by green hills. Since the lavender won't be in bloom until June, the delicate pastel color that is normally associated with the area was lacking during our visit, and the dark and heavy fog made for the perfect complement to the scene, showing an entirely different flavor of the beauty of Provence.
We had a relatively short visit within the abbey, taking a guided tour through its quiet corridors. We passed through the rooms where monks still live in almost complete silence, wasting no words during their days. As we emerged into the gift shop, in contrast, we spent a lot of time repeating phrases along the lines of "Look at this! This smells so good! Ooh, I want to get this!" I feel a bit of guilt in admitting that this little shop was the most exciting aspect of the interior of the building. It was filled with products of the lavender grown right outside, along with other scented soaps, perfumes, foods, and oils. Seriously, though, it just smelled so good!
We came back outside into the rain and soon noticed that all of our coffees had worn off, so we packed back into the bus and headed back home through the rain and fog. I popped in my headphones and let Carla Bruni lull me to sleep, adding a French cherry to the top of my provençal day.
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