Since all most of February has been spent studying for finals, we celebrated the conclusion of exams last Sunday (I’m a bit late with this one) with a daytrip to Avignon. A quick train away, we arrived in the early afternoon to explore. We’d be interested in seeing the Palais des Papes for a while and knew it’s be one of of our first stops upon arrival.
The Palais des Papes was pretty incredible. It was extensive and considering the time period, it didn’t take that long to construct such a building. Also indicative of the time period, all of the doors had incredible low thresholds. Apparently they didn’t have anyone over six feet tall in those days?
The view from the top of the Palais is also pretty stunning, but I’ll let you decide:
(click image for gallery)
I would tell more about the trip, but as we finished up our tour of the Pope’s former home, I got what Web MD diagnosed as an “ocular migraine” that came complete with an acute pain in the corner of my right eye that hurt so bad I may have started to cry. We stopped for a bite to eat, thinking food and water might help, but when it didn’t, we headed for the train station, only to find out the next train wasn’t for another 2 hours.
We waited in the station and I think a woman tried to offer me something for the pain, seeing the extreme discomfort I was in, but unfortunately we don’t speak French well enough and she seemed to take offense to that when we told her so.
The bottom line is that we’ll have to go back when I’m feeling better and not so uncomfortable that I actually wind up putting on a display of “stunning digestive pyrotechnics” (as the movie “10 Things I Hate About You” called it) off the end of the train platform.
At least the trip was memorable?