We walked outside of town to Paul Cezanne's workshop. Couldn't take photos inside. It was just one room, but all the stuff inside was preserved as it was at his death; objects for still lifes, coat and hat hanging on the wall, bag for his lunch. I was impressed. Of course, I know less than nothing about Cezanne, but I didn't let that get in the way of the cool. Then we walked (and got lost, and got lost, and finally found it, and I don't want to talk about how obvious it was really) to this lookout spot from which you can see this mountain that he painted a lot. A lot a lot. Like, 80-something times.
Also, there was this dude sketching a cat, who really couldn't have cared less that he was becoming a muse.
We also took a bus (for free, sort of by accident, but the driver seemed to like us, so it was just as well) to l'Oppidum d'Entremont, which is a Celtic-Ligurian settlement on the top of a hill a few kilometers outside of Aix. I appreciate greatly Mom putting up with my archaeology-geek excitement about this whole deal. Ruins!!! And a grape press, seriously. Walls, stairs, remnants of the town. We almost missed these stairs, but when we saw them, Mom said, We have to go down them. They're really old. So that's that.
Oh! This photo of a blank room with square blocks running down the center. It's a room called the Porch of Skulls, I kid you not. The inhabitants of the town used to display the decapitated heads of enemies on it. What I find most amusing is that the porch of skulls is right in the middle of town, not, say, on the edge, or near the entrance particularly; so who, exactly, are they trying to intimidate? Their children? People windowshopping down the street?
This is a candy shop, clearly. It was a candy shop taken to the nth degree, though. They had baskets and baskets of cookies, a wall of chocolates, hard candy, caramels, buckets of things, oh, I don't even know. I wish I had a better picture of it. It was almost a caricature of itself.
Fountains. I like this one with the moss. The other one is the Fountain of the Four Dolphins, which is in the middle of the Quartier Mazarin, the 16th century (I think?) part of town.
We had a picnic for dinner, in our room. We had singularly bad luck with dinners -- everything was closed, or not serving dinner today, or crabby. A lot of crabby. Please ignore Mom's hair. She'll hate me for posting this.
And then we were back in Paris for a day, running around Montmartre, Sacre Coeur, the Eiffel Tower, and then Trocadero at night to see the Eiffel Tower from across the river. Mom sent me some of those pictures, but I'm too lazy to find them.
And then she went home, and I sobbed. Figures.
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