Arles

Arles is shabbier, less opulently bourgeois than Aix. This poverty may have saved it from becoming a Disneyland version of itself, a tourist postcard. A guidebook I read suggested that one might experience deja vu during one's first visit here, as it is very much like walking into a Van Gogh painting. This intriguing pronouncement became was eerily true as I wandered it shuttered faded streets. The colors, sense of isolation, and it's weird off-kilter geometry reveal just how un-stylized Van Gogh's work actually is. It really does look like that! Arles runs along the river, which was once the most important port in France, once Cesar had successfully trounced Marseilles.

Nowadays the river is sleepy, with some few barges and cruise ships ambling through, a shadow of it's former self. Like many southern French towns Arles has Roman ruins right in the town center- in this case an impressive amphitheater currently being meticulously restored in an ambitious long-term project. I spent a very happy afternoon lingering along the water, loping through the shady parts of the street, and in the evening lounging in the central place full of children, old ladies, skate- boarders, foreign tourists, poised on a bench, knitting in the rose-gold evening light.