La Ciotat and Cassis

What a long weekend! Even though Sunday was relatively chill, I still could definitely use another day's worth of naptime. Saturday was so busy and wonderful. There's this program that plans excursions for students in Aix-en-Provence to go to various places around the region on the weekends, and a bunch of IAU people went on yesterday's trip to La Ciotat and Cassis. I hadn't been planning to go, since it was 25 euros, but I am now very glad that Cara and my host mom talked me into it. It was just breathtakingly beautiful. Le Luberon was charming and cultural and pretty, while the landscape around Cassis was stunning. (Pronunciation alert: you do say the "s" at the end of Cassis. It confused me a little, too.)

The port of La Ciotat

We started in La Ciotat, a port town where the Lumière brothers made the first movies of all time. We saw the oldest movie theater, the Eden, and walked around the streets. The town was a lot like Aix, with the winding streets and little shops, except for the port with all the sailboats. We bought lunch there and then took it on a picnic to Parc Mugel. (Janette and I had these incredible tuna sandwiches with tomatoes and hard-boiled eggs on baguette!) The park was really cool: we climbed up into the mountains and there were two incredible photo-op spots, where you could see the water and the cliffs (calanques). Since we were so high up, the view was incredible.

Parc Mugel... or maybe Hawaii?

The girls at the higher part of Parc Mugel: Margarita, me, Janette, Cara and Mel

We also went to the beach at Parc Mugel, but the water was freezing and we didn’t have a whole lot of time, so we just sat on the pebbles and tried to skip rocks. I got three skips, but nobody was looking when it happened. So sad.

Chemin des Crêtes, a near-death experience

On our way to Cassis, the bus took us up through the Chemin des Crêtes (I looked it up; it just means “Path of the Ridges,” as in mountain ridges, and it’s a name that can be used for multiple places). But it was crazy. First of all, our bus was just careening around these tight turns on the one-lane, two-way road with a wooden guard rail only at certain points, and we could see straight down into a kind of basin that was full of rocks and short-growing trees, all of which could, if provoked and teamed up with gravity, conspire to kill us. Oh what a thrill. But, like I’ve written before, the coexistence of mountains and beaches is stunning. I think some of these were the famous calanques, which are a kind of Mediterranean fjord. We went for a bit of a hike up there and took so many pictures! It took me forever, once I got home, to go through and figure out which ones to upload to Facebook. (What a dilemma, I know.) The hike was extra-exciting because it was the first time I really experienced the mistral, the northern wind that comes down the Rhône valley and is responsible for the dry weather in Provence. It is strong! In some pictures, my hair is blowing all over the place. But I’m not Elizabeth, so you won’t see any blog posts dedicated to my hair anytime soon. Anyway, the view was AMAZING. My descriptions won’t do it justice.

Kyle, Cara and me

Cassis and the beach are below

Then we were in Cassis, which is more beach-y than La Ciotat. There was a château up on the cliffs, but we stayed down at the beach. It was also FREEZING, so after getting about halfway in I decided to turn back and read my book, but everyone else stayed in for a while (I was proud of them). It was very relaxing; I even fell asleep at one point. When it was close to time to head back, we grabbed some ice cream before meeting the rest of the group.

The girls on the beach

We were all exhausted after such a busy day, but it was Clara’s birthday (she had gone to Marseille for the day with other awesome people), so we did go out that night. It was suprisingly cold, thanks to the mistral; I tried on three different outfits before I was warm enough to walk downtown. We had a huge group, and it was really great to get to know everyone better. Kyle kept making me go with him to meet random people at the bar, which was actually really fun. My tipsy French is very impressive, and I had a great conversation with some students from Madrid who were with the Erasmus program. (Commence bonding over L’Auberge Espagnole, which is about an Erasmus student in Barcelona and is coincidentally exactly what I imagine Cat’s semester there to have been like.) Kyle and I also got mistaken for Swedish students, which was probably the highlight of our lives. It was also cool how excited people got when I told them I live near New York.

By the fountain at the Place d'Hôtel de Ville: Kim, Cara, Janetta, Eliza, Clara (birthday girl!), Brooke, me and Mel.

Overall, it was a great first weekend in France. Sunday I slept in (hello, staying out until almost 3 am!) and got lunch in town with Cara, Kyle, Kevin, Liz and Mia. The boys, Liz and I then wandered around a little and ended up at the Parc Jourdain, where we saw people juggling and playing pétanque (Bocci ball) and sitting on the grass, smoking—basically, we saw people being really stereotypically French. Glorious. And then I came home for some down time, dinner, and a nice chat with my Daddy for Father’s day (fête des pères).