St. Remy-de-Provence

Day trip numero uno from Avignon was to St. Remy-de-Provence, a sleepy little French town about 10 miles south of Avignon. It has the perfect mix of “things for tourists to do” and “being an actual town,” since all the main attractions in town are actually a 20 minute walk south of town. So, we got to see some cool sights, but didn’t have to walk through hordes of folks trying to sell us cheap stuff.

First, though, we had to get there. Despite only being 10 miles south of town, it’s about a 40 euro cab ride, so we nixed that pretty quick (at that price, we could almost get a guided tour of the city that would pick us up at our hotel). Instead, we found out a bus leaves Avignon for St. Remy every 2 hours, and only costs 3.50 euros. Much better. Only catch to this was that the bus station in Avignon is…less than clean. It’s funny, the people aren’t sketchy at all (plenty of grandmas, school kids, and commuters were on the bus), and the station isn’t in a sketchy part of town, but it’s…kinda awful. The ticket office reeked of urine, and the entrance was right off a big highway, so we were a little put off at first. But then again, it’s kind of hard to feel sketched out when you’re standing next to a 13-year-old boy headed home from school for lunch and a group of chattering teenage girls with bags of shopping.

Once we got there, we tried to head to the tourism office, but they were closed for lunch. Since we only had a few hours, we couldn’t wait for them to reopen, so we just headed straight for the main sights south of town.

First: the St. Paul Monastery and Sanitarium, where Van Gogh was kept for a year after he cut his ear off. He was here for only a year, but in that time, he painted almost 200 paintings, and about that many drawings. It was really cool seeing all this, especially since they would put prints of his paintings next to scenes he had painted. For example, next to the olive tree grove were two prints of paintings he had done of the grove. They also had the room where he slept, which was amazing, as you could look out his window and see the wheat fields he painted. They’ve since converted them to flower fields, but it’s still cool, especially since little bits of wheat still grow as weeds around the flowers.

Another cool thing is that the monastery still acts as a psychiatric hospital, and they specialize in art therapy to help patients recover. The gift shop (in addition to the typical Van Gogh-themed mouse pads, mugs, and calendars) sold the patients artwork, which was pretty amazing.

After that, we wandered the fields for a while, looking at the trees, flowers, and mountains, then headed further south to the ruins of the Roman city of Glanum. Glanum was a totally NOTHING roman town, which is part of its charm. When you go to Rome, you see grand basilicas, arenas, and monuments, but no ordinary buildings; the modern city was just built on top of those. At Glanum, though, you can just see what a blacksmith’s house was like, or how a Roman village’s roads were laid out. There was also a tour group of little schoolchildren, who were all dressed in togas and traditional Roman clothing. It was just ever so slightly adorable.

Afterwards, we started to head back, but took a wrong turn on the way, so we got kind of turned around. The map from the guidebook we had only had the main roads, so we couldn’t figure out where to go at first. In a city like Paris or Barcelona, this could be a bit of a problem, but St. Remy is about half the size of my neighborhood at home (i.e. really frickin’ tiny) so it took us all of five minutes to find the bus stop again. Once we found it, we killed time in a truly American way: snacks! Mint chocolate chip is apparently just as tasty on this side of the Atlantic, too.

Once we got back, we pretty much just bummed around for the rest of the day, then grabbed dinner from the super market.