2019 Euro Trip – Arles, France
Next up is a small final stopover on the way back to Marseilles, called Arles. Arles was first inhabited around 800 BCE, followed by the Phoneticians who set up an important trading port, then the Romans marched in in 123 CE. Arles sided with a guy called Julius Caesar during an uprising and benefited greatly over the following years, with the building of an amphitheater, arches, circus, theater, baths, aqueducts, a mill and of course a giant wall.
Vincent van Gogh lived in Arles from 1888 to 1889 and produced over 300 paintings and drawings during his time there. From Wikipedia: “Many of his most famous paintings were completed there, including The Night Cafe, the Yellow Room, Starry Night Over the Rhone, and L’Arlésienne. Paul Gauguin visited van Gogh in Arles. However, van Gogh’s mental health deteriorated and he became alarmingly eccentric, culminating in the well-known ear-severing incident in December 1888 which resulted in two stays in the Old Hospital of Arles. The concerned Arlesians circulated a petition the following February demanding that van Gogh be confined. In May 1889, he took the hint and left Arles for the Saint-Paul asylum at nearby Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.”
Our trip from Bordeaux to Arles included yet another wacky train event and my overall patience is wearing thin due to earlier-than-expected travelling fatigue. We walked onto the train as soon as the track number came up on the display and into the first class compartment. It wasn’t clear from the ticket that we had assigned seat numbers, so we just sat down at 2 chairs with a table between. A guy walked up and indicated that it was his seat so we got up and let him in. We showed our tickets to a train lady who spoke no English. It turns out Jim was assigned seat #23 and I was assigned seat #1. Jim went to his seat without issues, but the seats in the car started with #11! So two questions: who starts numbering the seats on a train with #11, and why did the system give me non-existent #1? I think we got hosed by the ticket guy yesterday. The train lady looked on her handheld device and pointed to a seat that appeared to be empty all the way from Bordeaux to Arles, at the other end of the car, so I went and sat down. It was a 2 facing 2 setup so I had a bit of leg room. Of course at the next stop, a group of old folks gets on and takes all the surrounding seats. I spent 5 hours smiling occasionally at the lady across from me as we tried to not bump feet.
We got off at Arles, a TINY train station. It was starting to rain and there were no taxis to be found. Jim finally asked one of the ticket ladies and she said there’s a phone number on a sign somewhere and we have to call for a pick up. We finally found a tiny sign outside the station and across the street, and Jim called. We walked out and spoke with an American couple who just arrived as part of a birding group. It turned out we were going just past their hotel so we agreed to go together, drop them off then drop us off. We even let a taxi go to another couple as we waited. The birders taxi arrived and we tried to get in but the taxi man was having none of it, rejected us in the pouring rain. I was fuming! Our called taxi finally shows up about 20 minutes later and it was the same guy who took the birding couple! How many taxis do they have in this town? He tried to be nice and actually knocked â¬2 off the bill when we got to the hotel.
I tried to get into the door of the hotel but it’s locked. It turns out I had to push a buzzer and the owner came down and let us in. He’s an old guy, shuffling along, and didn’t seem interested to have us in his 12-room hotel. I confirmed the room has 2 big beds and yes, we have room 12 right off the front desk with a window to the quiet, tree-lined street. We unpacked and tried to connect to the WiFi, it’s really terrible. I tried to get the last Game of Thrones episode and was getting all of 15kb/sec peak on an unstable link.
We walked into town and found an Irish bar and had a nice local beer. We wandered through town and found the Yellow Van Gogh restaurant from the painting. I tried to take a picture from the same perspective, close but the restaurant right next door had a bunch of tables in the way spoiling the shot. We ended up having a nicely overpriced dinner there with an amusing waiter.
We walked back to the room and found nearly no progress on the GoT video, so I took my laptop down to the Irish pub and connected to their Wifi and got it in less than 10 minutes. Ugh.
I tried to play it from my laptop to the wall-mounted TV via an HDMI cable but it wouldn’t work. In desperation I copied the file to a memory stick and the TV played it perfectly. The finale was a bit of a letdown after 8 years but as the French say, c’est la vie, which roughly translates to “Hurry up already George, this TV writing is shit.”
In the morning, I saw the owner as we went out the door and I remarked on the WiFi. He blamed it on the thickness of the walls of the building. My laptop was on the opposite side of the wall from his WiFi base station, no more than 3 feet away – 4/4 bars on the signal strength but connectivity and speed SUCKS. I call bullshit.
We walked to the nearby Tourist office and paid â¬16 for the ticket that gets us into 6 old things around town, although I could only find 5 of them highlighted on the map after we left.
We stopped for breakfast at a place just across the street. We said two people, the waiter waved his finger around like sit anywhere. We sat down and he came over and said “Are you eating?” We said “Yes, eating.” Then he said “You can only sit here if eating.” We said “Yes, eating.” He then said “It’s only for food at noon.” It was 10 am. We got up and walked away. We found a breakfast cafe where I had a banana and nutella crepe, very similar to the roti I get back in Thailand, but 5X as expensive!
Finally getting our tourist on, we did a loop through town to see the old things. First was Les Cryptoportiques, which are the 90m x 60m foundation of the original Roman town Forum. Underground, it’s been excavated to show the original tunnel structures. Great stone arch technology to hold up the original building and what is now the massive town hall. It was used as food storage through the years and as a bomb shelter in the World Wars. Many screaming schoolchildren on a field trip.
Next was the Van Gogh Foundation but it’s really expensive and not included on our ticket so we didn’t go in. Next was the Roman Baths which have mostly decayed through the years but you can see the different bathing areas, set up in a series of hot and cold stone pools. You go through them in sequence for the healing powers based on the best medical knowledge of the time.
Then we went along the bank of the Rhone river and back into town to the Amphitheater / Coliseum. It retains much more of its original structure than the one in Rome, except for the highest levels of seating which were taken away stone by stone through the ages. There were several student groups there and actors were recreating a gladiator fight with shields and short knives. I carefully walked up the stone steps into one of the remaining towers and got a great view of the building itself, plus the views across the city and into the surrounding countryside. We could see wind turbines and what looked to be a real castle a few miles away, and further away the other nearby towns. I had a massive Trois Fromage pizza and a kind of Belgian Gnome beer at a nice restaurant just below the Coliseum.
Next was the Roman Theater, with the classic semicircular stone seating area and the stage area below. A student group was recreating some characters in a play and the acoustics were quite good. Last were the Cloisters of the big church in the center of town. The detail on the carving of the stone was very impressive even after many centuries.
Knackered from all of the walking, we went back to the hotel and I had about a 3 hour nap. We then wandered through town looking for a restaurant and ended up in the Van Gogh square where I spotted a sign for paella that Jim has been wanting so we went into the open-air area in the center of the square but under big umbrellas. I’m still tired and have a lingering headache so I went back to the hotel while Jim said he was going to stop at at least two more bars before heading back.
If you’re not tired of the WiFi story yet: I got back to the hotel and experimented with the WiFi system, sitting right in the front office area within a few feet of the WiFi base station and no walls in the way, with the same result – the WiFi signal is strong but connection to the outside world go on and off and terrible throughput. I did several speed tests which mostly failed before completion. When it worked, download was 0.51 Mbps, upload was 0.07 Mbps, I haven’t seen anything this bad in over 10 years. I looked at his equipment and it’s an old DSL box that was routing all of the traffic through a 3rd party provider. Ugh.
Next up, the last train to Marseilles and then home!
