Last, last Sunday the whole CEA group took a trip with a friendly French fellow named Georges. He is an official tour guide for the tourism office here in Aix. First, we went to Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. This is a little medieval town on an island in, you guessed it, the Sorgue River. It was full of winding streets, which is pretty similar to how Aix's town center is too. On the Sunday morning that we went there was a big market going on.
So we took pictures of food. They also had these cool waterwheels scattered about the city, which were really big and used to provide mill power to the city. I'm not sure if they are still used for electric power or not. But they turn! While we were at the market we bought some food for lunch, which was bread, some fruit, some roasted chicken and quail, and some Comte cheese. The quail still had its head on, so you know, it was pretty fresh. We had some difficulty ordering the cheese, as we don't know how to say fractions in French, so we ended up with half a kilo (that's a little more than a pound) of cheese. Luckily, the cheese stayed good for the next two weeks while we ate it, so that was okay.
Next we went to Roussillon. This used to be (and still is somewhat) ochre mining town, so they had these really cool cliffs that were all shades of red, green, and yellow. The village was nice, too, although we didn't really have much time to walk around it.
After visiting those fancy cliffs, we went to a little town called Gordes on top of a hill. As we drove by Georges pointed out an 11th century abbey that was in a valley, still being used by monks. The town was really interesting. It had a little castle, old stone streets, a beautiful church, and some excellent views.
All in all, it was pretty neat little expedition to the Luberon!
That is ALOT of cheese! what kinds was it?
ReplyDeletewhat about the cave church? talk about that!