On Friday morning, I took the TGV to Marseille and we got there early afternoon. We checked into our hostel and then decided to go wander around. We weren't very far from the train station or the Old Port so we decided to go to the Old Port and look around. It's so cool! There were a ton of boats (obviously) and there was a fish market and it was so cool! I can definitely see why Marseille became such a big city! I thought it was really cool, too, to see the differences between Nantes and Marseille. Marseille is on the Mediterranean so it has a more diverse population but the architecture and colors of everything are so different! The colors are warmer - more oranges, reds, and warm earthy colors and the buildings are taller (probably because it's a bigger city). And the style of architecture is more...adobe like in certain parts and then other parts it's closer to Nantes. I made the dumb mistake of saying (without thinking, of course) that it looks more Mediterranean than Nantes does...well duh! I felt like an idiot...haha. After visiting the old port a little bit and wandering around, we still had some time to kill before we could check into our hostel so we went to this tiny beach and I stuck my feet in the Mediterranean Sea! We hung out there for an hour, taking pictures, looking at sea shells and jumping waves :-)
Then on Saturday we decided that we were going to go see the Basilica of Notre Dame de la Garde which over looks the Naval Port which we saw the day before. It was amazing!! The inside of the basilica was gorgeous and then it was sitting up on one of the highest hills so it has a view of the whole city, the Mediterranean and beyond! I took lots of pictures! That night we took a TGV to Arles which I think was my favorite city that we visited. It's a lot smaller than Marseille and slightly smaller than Nantes so it was really different. But it was really cool because it has a whole bunch of Roman ruins that are really well-preserved! When we got there it was night so we just got some dinner at the Kebabery (spelling?) down the street and then went to bed. The next day after we had breakfast we went to the tourism office and got maps and bought a day pass to go see the roman ruins since the museums were all closed. We went to the ancient theater first which was really cool but we had to go back later because when we got there it was closed. But when we went back, we went inside and looked around instead of just looking from the outside. And I climbed up on the old stage and stood on some of the ruins even though I wasn't supposed too - although to be fair, other people were doing it too and no one was watching...although I sound a lot cooler if I don't say that part. haha. Anyway, between our first and second visit to the ancient theater we went and got some groceries then we headed to the old amphitheater where we ended up eating lunch. It was cool - not as big as the Coliseum in Rome, but better preserved. And apparently at one time when Arles was under a threat, they fortified the walls of the amphitheater and moved the whole city inside! The amphitheater was big, but not big enough where I can imagine fitting a whole city! After the amphitheater and the ancient theater we went to the roman baths which were all hyped up by the tourism office - they were cool but not as cool as everyone made it out to be. It was small and not that exciting, sort of a disappointment. Then we went to the old graveyard which was pretty cool.
While we were in Arles, we also saw a whole bunch of things that had to do with Van Gogh because he lived and painted there for awhile. I found this particularly interesting (more interesting than the other girls who I was traveling with) because I had just been in Amsterdam and seen most of his art in the museum, so I've officially made the Van Gogh tour. It was really cool though because we got to see the Van Gogh Café which is in his painting of "the Night Café" and I took a picture from the same point of view as the painting - it didn't look the same though haha. We also saw the stone that said where he house (the yellow house) once stood, but during WWII it was bombed and destroyed. Then we took the TGV again, this time to Avignon.
I didn't find Avignon particularly cool - I liked it but I saw it four years ago with my school group and I kind of wish I didn't go on this part, because by then my patience was wearing thin, and I had already seen everything so I was bored. But it was still cool. I took pictures - we saw the Palais des Papes where the Popes lived when there was division in the Catholic church and some popes moved to France. We also saw the Pont d'Avignon which is a half-bridge that got destroyed in a military thing, was rebuilt and was about to fall into the river and they fortified half of it before the rest of it fell and then they never rebuilt the rest. After that we saw a cute little park and some cool rock formations (I can't remember the name) and then went back to the train station to take the night train from Avignon to Lyon to Nantes. Avignon was cool though because the hostel that we stayed in was literally right across the river from the Palais and the bridge so at night you could see it from our window.
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