City fix

Touring around picturesque villages and quintessentially French towns is everything we imagined it would be - amazing architecture, interesting people (and their dogs), curious shops and ateliers and quaint gardens. But sometimes we crave city life.

Our answer has fast become a trip to Avignon. A day’s outing to the city (just a 45 minute drive away) can be like a little shot of adrenalin. It’s a cosmopolitan place with just the right amount of spunk running thorough its veins. It also helps that it reminds us a little of Paris with its grey stone buildings, ornate balconies and wide open spaces. And some of our favourite Parisian shops are also there - gold. Of course this illustrates that I am suffering withdrawal symptoms from Paris (they started the minute the taxi drove us over the Seine on the way to Paris-Orly airport).

Today we rode a carousel, ate macarons, listened to jazz music in the streets and did a spot of window shopping. All in an effort to revive that Parisian experience. In fact, I have decided it is our ‘Paris of the South’.  Seems I am the only one who holds this view though.  A quick google search for ‘Paris of the South’ reveals that Buenos Aires, Augusta in Georgia, and one end of Collins Street in Melbourne all vie for the title. Hmmmmm, you just can’t out-French the French.

Rather than words I will let the photos do the talking today. We visited Les Halles, a covered market, for lunch supplies and ate them overlooking the Rhone river and with the golden Virgin Mary looking down at us from her iconic perch. We played in a typically small French playground under weeping mulberry trees from which the locals kept picking fruit from the low hanging branches and popping straight in to their mouths. We ate glace…again…to cool us down (to any questions about the flavour the girls are eating - it is les schtroumpfs/smurfs). And we finished the day with a coffee and macarons before returning to our semi-rural idyll.

As Ernest Hemingway has featured highly on our holiday so far I will cling tightly to one of his quotes, bearing in mind it does require some manipulation to apply to us:

“If you are luck enough to have lived in Paris as a young man then whenever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you as Paris is a moveable feast.”

Very apt.