Provence

Considering it was built by the Romans in the year 2 AD, this building in the southern France city of Nimes is in surprisingly good shape:

I seem to keep coming back to Provence, year after year, because I just haven’t yet had my fill. You can take leisurely drives anywhere and encounter stunning sights like this village, whose name I never even stopped to record:

I took this magnificent snap around Christmas time. It was a nice 20C in Provence while Switzerland was dark and covered with snow.

Southern France has so many ancient Roman ruins that you’ll find them just about everywhere, just as this magnificent ampitheater located at an Autoroute rest stop just outside of Nîmes.

The fellow with the circle around his head is Saint Laurent – but not THAT Saint Laurent that you are thinking about!

But what does Saint Laurent have to do with Southern France, you might ask?

While driving across a lonely rural road from Nimes (a French village that a lot of tourists visit) to Beaucaire (a French village that a lot of tourists don’t), I spotted what looked to be a old stone building deep in a farm field. Because there were no angry tourist-hating French farmers with pitchforks around – and because the Gendarmes were probably all busy elsewhere looking after the protesting Gilets Jaunes, I took the liberty if not the risk of trespassing on the farm to take this wonderful snap:

I like the way the sun reflects off the stone and really highlights the building.

Fortunately, there was a sign just outside, so I quickly came to know this was the Cathedral of Saint-Laurent, dating back to the 1100’s.

And what does any of this have to do with the development of human intelligence?

Turns out that Saint Laurent was martyred in 258 for refusing to hand over the church’s riches to the local Roman emperor. What makes this very interesting indeed is while he was being persecuted for refusing to hand over riches, Rome itself was being ravaged by one of the first instances of the bubonic plague, the so-called Plague of Cyprian that killed thousands of people every day.

This is an electron micrograph of the plague, Yersinius pestis:

Interestingly, it has been show that Europeans today have increased resistance to this bacteria, most likely due to natural selection processes, i.e., the millions of people with less resistance were killed in the many outbreaks of the plague over the centuries.

This is what led me to speculate that, in a similar way, the Herpes virus has had a pronounced effect in the development of human intelligence.

While traipsing about the southern countryside in Provence, I spotted this cactus hiding out behind another plant:

This is no ordinary French cactus – in fact, it isn’t French at all!  It is a species of cactus known as the prickly pear, and it is in fact an invasive species that was introduced to Europe – from America – back in the sixteenth century.

Interestingly, like a fool, I tried to pick up one of the fruits and received about one thousand little stingers in my finger. I was able to remove most of them – but now, three weeks later, as I write this post, there is still one lodged in my finger and causing me pain. Not quite sure what will happen, since try as I might, I can’t seem to remove it – or even see it.

Continuing the series, this is a view of the center of the medieval village of Grasse,

Southern France has some amazing, amazing trees.

I’ve written about the amazing plane trees of Provence.

I’ve written about the amazing umbrella trees of Provence.

And now, standing at attention like massive soldiers before storming into battle . . . the amazing cypress trees of Provence:

Interestingly, you can steal the unopened nuts off the trees, let them dry out the pop open at home, and grow your own cypress trees rather easily. I’ll show the steps in an upcoming blog entry!

A while ago I wrote about the amazing plane trees of Provence.

Well, Provence has a lot of amazing trees, as this snap shows:

These are umbrella pines, or pin parasol.

Interestingly, this is always what I thought the Tesla trees (in the flame forests of Hyperion) would look like:

Southern France is amazing in the winter. It’s sunny – but even at its peak the sun is very low on the horizon.

So you get incredible views, such as this snap of Nimes shows:

And as you can see here, the low midday sun near the horizon gives rise to some amazing shadows and light effects:

With this blog I would like to bring a true mystery to the attention of the art world – showing that one of the all time masters of art was, in fact, a con man.

First things first: this is the famous artist Vincent Van Gogh,

He lived in the south of France, and he made a number of paintings of tiny, almost microscopic horse-and-buggy on a mammoth drawbridge, just outside of the city of Arles:

He did this paintings in the late 1800’s.  Sadly, the Germans destroyed this bridge, along with many others, during World War II.  But thankfully for tourists, a “bogus drawbridge” has been built to take its place. It is NOT easy to reach – well off the beaten path – so if you ever get here chances are, you’ll be the only one here to be looking at it!

But now we get to the fun bit – unless you are an art historian, in which you might find my opinion on this to be offensive if not downright hypostasy.

If you compare the tiny size of this bogus bridge to that of the monster size drawbridge in his paintings, Van Gogh has grossly overestimated the size of the bridge – or else grossly underestimated the size of the horse-and-buggy crossing it. In both cases he made a gross error – and I find it amazing the public has not spotted this egregious error until now!

I spotted this fellow in my hotel room in southern Provence:

In English we call them centipedes, but in French they are known as “thousand paws.”  Interestingly, there have been Cambrian age fossils dating back 400 million years, so these comprise a very old species indeed!

The French culture is obsessive compulsive in many regards.

For one, there are a few villages that are not just well known for a particular trade, but in fact are obsessive about it.

Theirs in central France is one example I’ve blogged about. 90% of all cutlery in France is made in the tiny village of Thiers.

Grasse in southern France is another.  Here is a snap I took while in Grasse, overlooking the valley below:

Grasse’s claim to fame is the perfume industry. Almost two thirds of all scents in France are manufactured here.

Well, even if nobody else thinks they are amazing, I do.

While driving around the south of France, include Provence and The Camargue, I spotted quite a number of horses grazing, and underneath them and surrounding them were whole flocks of strange white birds.

This pic has a somewhat bad quality: I took it while driving and (no kidding!) being followed by a police car!

But I think you get the idea:

I have no idea what kinds of birds these are – but I assume they eat any small insects that appear when the horse grazes.

If you’ve spent time reading my blog, you’ll see plenty of entries that show the incredible UNESCO monuments scattered around the world.  Well, at least in the French city of Orange, UNESCO fails to impress.

This is the Roman Theater from the outside:

And this is the Roman Theater from the inside, looking towards the stage:

And this is Roman Theater from the inside, looking towards the seats:

Any Roman ruin this large is impressive, to be sure.  And the fact that it dates back to 40 BC is also pretty spectacular. But . . .  compared with the usual magnitude of UNESCO sites, this one falls a bit short of many of the others.

What I thought was most impressive were not the well-worn stairs, eroded after centuries of use (and probably even more amazing when you think most people were either barefoot or wearing soft leather sandals):

No, what I thought was most amazing were the arabic, rather than Roman, numbers!

This might look like any other tree-lined street, but it’s not!

These are no ordinary trees.  And this is no ordinary street lining.  I took this snap somewhere between Sénas and Salone-de-Provence.

These are plane trees planted carefully on both sides of the street, and in fact this street lining continues for well over 20 kilometers!  According to what I’ve read, Napoleon ordered the planting of zillions of these trees along the roadsides in France, to give shade to the army troops when they marched from town to town.

No, I’m not planning to join the Legion Etrangier, also known as the French Foreign Legion.

But I did visit their recruiting truck, which I thought made an amazing site parked just across from the Roman Coloseum in the French city of Nimes,

Inside the truck, with the music of Bolero playing in the background, I spend a wonderful time practicing my French with two older legionnaire officers who you could tell from their body language that they had seen a lifetime of combat.

Outside, I also chatted in French with some of the younger soldiers, who all told me they were mostly from other countries, not from France itself, although there were some French among them. Sadly, my French is not yet that good to understand when they tried to explain why there were French in the Legion, not just foreigners.

Interestingly, when I returned later in the day, the truck was full of young men – so I guess they were successful in their recruiting efforts.