Southward Bound

Tuesday–Sunday 5–10 July
Grenoble, Avignon, Marseille, FRANCE

Getting out of Paris was harder than we had imagined. So was crossing the great bread belly of France. We didn’t get into Grenoble until nearly eleven at night on Tuesday, after a missed train, a stop in Dijon, a delayed arrival, and a 7.5 hour trip. Eventually, Ben and I resorted to playing Rummy, the classic card game that entertained us across the great expanses of Nebraska and Kansas in our youth.

I must admit—there’s not much happening in Grenoble. Although it is nestled in a prime location in the French Alps, Grenoble itself is a somewhat sleepy university town the only really wakes up in ski season. We had the chance to arrive in the town on a bustling evening; on Tuesday, the results for the BAC (an intense exam required to graduate high school in France) were released, and the streets were packed with reveling high schoolers. An outdoor cinema festival in Grenoble also collected decent crowds in the downtown squares, where short French films were projected onto large screens. As for organized “tourist” activities, though, I can’t say that we did much. I have the impression that people come to Grenoble for the mountains, not the city itself. On Wednesday, Florian, our Couchsurfing host, accompanied us to the summit of la Bastille—an impressive fort built on the mountain overlooking the Grenoble valley, the Drac and Isère rivers, and the surrounding mountain ranges (Vercors, Chartreuse, Belledone). At the foot of la Bastille, Florian left to run errands and Ben and I decided to explore the Musée de Grenoble. For the 2€ entrance fee, the museum was hardly a disappointment, but it paled in comparison to art museums in Cleveland, New York, Paris, etc. There was, however, an impressive collection of paintings from l’Ecole Dauphinée that depicted breathtakingly realistic landscapes from the Alps surrounding Grenoble. We take what we can get.

As usual, the real excitement in Grenoble didn’t start until we exhausted our patience for tourism. After le Musée de Grenoble, Ben and I decided to rent bicycles and explore a bit more of what the town had to offer. We stopped by a supermarket for nibbles and wine, and set off on our bright yellow bicycles towards the central campus of l’Université de Grenoble. About halfway there, were attracted by what sounded like trance/electronic music coming from a park. We found a crowd of full-grown adults dressed in bright, vibrant colors, dancing on a platform with a DJ stand outside of a bar. We’re still not entirely sure what was going on, but the detour led us to a magnificent park where we enjoyed our pre-dinner aperitif on a bench in a shady grove. Eventually, our bicycle wanderings tooks us along the Drac again, and then to l’Université de Grenoble main campus, which was surprisingly underwhelming. The architecture lacked a certain coherency and aesthetic, which of course affected the entire atmosphere of the campus. I suppose I’m just incurably spoiled by Athens. There’s nothing quite like brick streets and hills, even in the French Alps.

Our bellies drew us back into town as the sun was turning the mountains violet (Oh! purple mountains’ majesty . . . ), and we stopped in a wokbar downtown right next to an English Pub that looked promising. It was less promising than it had appeared. Regardless, the evening turned out to be more exciting than we had planned for. At the pub, we met up with Amine (the childhood best friend of my OU friend Mohammed; they both emigrated from Algeria to pursue their studies elsewhere) and his friend Edouard. Networking is amazing. Edouard eventually convinced us to accompany him to a nearby bar that served specialty wines (raspberry? peach? mint?) and treated us all to a round of Chartreuse—a liqueur brewed by a small order of monks in the Alps, not far from the farm where I was WWOOFing only a week ago.

A successful evening, but an unsuccessful morning. We had to return our bikes then take a roundtrip on the painfully slow intracity tram to pick up our bags at Florian’s apartment, and ended up missing our train to Avignon. After the Paris —> Grenoble transportation debacle, I was somewhat upset, but thankfully we were able to catch the next train to Avignon, where Sylvaine was waiting with Constance and her best friend Ambre to pick us up at the train station.

What a JOY it was to see them again. The details are hardly worth it, because they could never capture the emotion. The house was as I left it. The pool was at 27°. My pool towel was laid out to dry. Tara (and the new puppy, Lancelot) barked. Courgette (my zucchini-colored Suzuki Samurai jeep) was covered with a tarp and pigeon poop. The roof was still missing tiles. The net around the trampoline was still stretched out. The mosquito net canopy protected the bed in my room. Cosette, the housekeeper, was finishing up laundry. Virgil and Alban were playing video games in the library, as though I had never left. Constance and Ambre swam. Montaine walks now, and babbles, and calls me “Selle.” Rodrigue and Gauthier were at the coast, sail boating with their godmothers, Catherine and Françoise. Eric gave me at least three hugs when he saw me. We sat on the white leather couch under the parasol and drank cocktails and ate cherry tomatoes while the children finished up their dinner. Sylvaine made ratatouille and salmon for our dinner because she remembered my favorite meals. Eric insisted upon dames blanches for dessert. We drank wine and ate cheese and Eric laughed because like me, Ben never says no. Oh how nice it is to be home!

On Friday, we swam in the morning and then went into Avignon around lunchtime. I took Ben to the Bistro à Tartines just inside le portail St. Michel, where I used to walk to get from Isabelle’s house in Montclar to Place Pie. Unlike Grenoble, Avignon was alive and animated with swarming crowds for le Festival d’Avignon—the biggest theater festival in the world. We saw what we needed to see—le Palais des Papes (and Tommy, my security-guard friend), le Pont d’Avignon, l’Ile Bartlelass, le Rhône (from the overlook at Rocher des Doms), l’Université d’Avignon, la Rue Carnot and le Palais des Glaces (best ice cream in town, hands down), Place Pie and Red Sky (no Xavier, unfortunately), les Halles, la Zone piétonne, and la Rue de la République. Not bad for an afternoon. We took a bus back to the house, where Catherine, Françoise, Gauthier, and Rodrigue were awaiting their “surprise.” We played Uno without a hesitation. For dinner, Eric treated us to homemade, authentic Belgian fries, just like I like them.

Saturday morning was filled with promises that I would be back in August to see them and we set off for Marseille, much to Eric’s chagrin. We did not miss our train this time, and I even had enough time to run to the bakery at the end of la Rue de la République to pick up some pain au chocolat and un gourmand au mozzarella for the train.

We received a warm welcome in the Mediterranean heat of Marseille, and found our hotel agreeable, clean, and in a perfect walking distance of la Canebière (Marseille’s version of les Champs Elysées). Our adventures took us down la Canebière to le Vieux Port and up to Notre Dame de la Garde. La Bonne Mère (the affectionate name that the Marseillais have given to their cathedral) overlooks the city, the surrounding mountains (les Calanques), the islands in the port (including l’Ile d’If, where the Count of Monte Cristo was fictionally imprisoned in Alexandre Dumas’ famous novel), and the Mediterranean. Ben and I had planned to take the bus out to a beach a bit east of the city, but public transportation proved to be more obnoxious than we had foreseen. The bus we needed to take inexplicably never arrived, which delayed us significantly, and we didn’t arrive at the beach until nearly 8:30pm. We couldn’t swim, but we picnicked in the sunset as the sun slipped into the watery horizon. Having given up on buses, we took the metro back downtown, where we stumbled on another electronica/dance music festival happening all along le Vieux Port. I wasn’t about to let Ben visit Marseille without getting a bit of the local flavor, so I made Ben try some of my kebab (North African lamb sandwich) and bought him a pastis (a typically southern French drink made anis liqueur).

Today, I write from the train to Nice. And from what I can tell thus far (we’re currently crossing through Cannes), Nice will be nice. Tomorrow, I start class, but tonight, I better get my toes in the Mediterranean.