Avignon during the Theater Festival

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This is the last of 4 posts tonight. I wrote this one on the train today, and tonight our Toulouse hotel has wi-fi, at last. Scroll down if you want to read them in order.




July 22, 2010. Avignon, Provence, France


Disembarking from the TGV (Train de Grande Vitesse - Train of “Large Speed”), our noses crinkle with the smell of burning forest. The rain hits during the shuttle ride to town. Hits hard. People on the street are soaked, water sheets down the bus windows. I try to think where I’ve stashed my mini umbrella. The smell of smoke is washed away, the air cleansed.

We have arrived in Avignon at the height of the annual Theatre Festival. It’s a major month-long event that attracts thousands of people from all over France. Hotel prices jump 20% for the month, cafes are constantly crowded. Every wall, fence, lamppost is festooned with posters. They slump and wrinkle from the rain.

The downpour relaxes as we reach our stop. We step onto a steamy sidewalk and make our way down a broad, Hausmann-style boulevard to our little hotel, just off a church park.

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We had just one night in Avignon, arriving at 2:30 Thursday and departing at 1:30 Friday. It was just the right amount of time for seeing the most famous sites, exploring the backstreets, and absorbing the atmosphere. After checking into the Hotel du Parc, we set out into the twisted medieval city core. The streets were only wide enough for a single vehicle, and the sidewalks were barely more than balance beams, so pedestrians walked on the street, moved off when a car would come, then drifted back onto the road. So many people! Normally, I would not like the crowds, but this was such a festve atmosphere. Every few meters, someone would hand us a card advertising their show—a comedy, or “spectacle”, dance or music—and often that someone would be in costume, with full make-up—a member of the cast. There was an unbelievable number of these shows being produced, dozens, or maybe hundreds. Just walking along Rue de Lices, we saw at least four venues.

As we headed towards city center, the Place de l’Horlage (I think), and the Papal Palace, we heard music and headed towards it. There was a long-haired man playing a kind of tin drum, a tune that sounded like a Celtic harp. (Later we saw an African man playing the same instrument, but sounding like an mbira.) Further along, there was a family playing a kind of African-American folk, the mother and father on guitars, one young son playing a box-drum (what a natural he was!) and a yet younger son dancing. Further, there was a brass band, then a jazz combo. Beyond that, a strange marraca sound, which we figured out was coming from cicadas high in the plane trees of Place de l’Horlage. Underneath them, the sound was astoundingly loud. We found out later that the cicadas are in Avignon from mid-June to mid-August every year. They are a good luck symbol in Provence, and tourist shops are fully of cicada souvenirs in the form of oven mitts, shakers, fridge-magnets, and noisy ceramic motion detectors.

We walked into the massive square beside the massive Palace des Papes. The Pope moved here from Rome in the mid 14th Century to escape the plague. The Vatican virtually built (or rebuilt) the city to accommodate its many personages, and the population grew to some 25,000, about twice as many as live in the old-city core today.

A recorder player wearing a halo danced as he played Renaissance tunes. Painted statue-men posed. A juggler drew crowds. At the centre of the square is a sculpture of an elephant balancing on its trunk. I don’t know, yet, what it signifies, but it is, again, massive.

We walked up a hill behind the square and the cathedral into a peaceful, treed park with fantastic views of the Rhone and . . . the Pont d’Avignon. The song whirled through our heads.

We found our way down the ramparts to the river, took some photos, and made our way to the bridge. Of course, we had to dance there, and we got some shots of ourselves kicking up our heels ridiculously. We were glad to see others doing the same. Everyone gets it.

It is not free to dance—or walk—on the Pont (which is actually called Pont de Saint-Benezaire), but €4,50 gets you on, along with an informative audio guide. Information is great, but in this case, it seemed beside the point.

The sun came out in full while we were on the bridge (the better to photograph it!), but the breeze kept us comfortable, much more pleasant than it has been for much of the past twelve days. We made our way back to the center of town, then up a street called Rue de Teintereurs towards where we planned dinner. On one side of the rue runs a small canal with huge working waterwheels. On the other, an eclectic assortment of shops and restaurants. Temporary stalls sold things like frog-scrapers, the kind that croak when you run a stick across their back (I bought two small ones for €12, and John bought a cricket for €7), and glass light-catchers, and brass singing bowls. The crowd was thick and flambouyant, many people in costumes and masks, many handing out their advertising cards.

The restaurant we’d planned to eat at, a Rick Steves high-end-ish kind of place, was fully booked, so we chose a Moroccan place in the heart of the action. We ate at a tin table on the cobblestones, right beside a two-piece band—bass and soprano sax—who bebopped through our entire lamb couscous meal without a break. We sat for at least an hour, watching people.

The night was just beginning in festival Avignon, but we had had enough. We took our bottle of rosé (bought from its maker in a tiny shop, where we also had the pleasure of tasting a most delicious, and beautiful-to-look-at, lavender liqueur), and retreated to our hotel above the park.



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