Avignon with the Crew

The crew!
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On Saturday Carina, Valerie, Kiki, Wolfram and I took a day trip to the little town in the south of France called Avignon.  There is a really well-known snng in France named after the Pont d'Avignon, which is basically half a bridge in the  middle of a river called a Pont.

At first when we were there we just walked around and wandered the Christmas market.  Every city (that's large enough) has a Christmas market and there are just a lot of cute little things to guy.  A bit like a craft show...Only there is food and it's very Christmas-y.  They had vin chaud (hot wine) kind of like spiced apple cider but alcoholic, candied fruit, and then of course Provencial specialties like herbs de provence, calissons, etc etc etc.

The Palais des Papes is HUGE. The pictures do not do it justice.

The garden
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We also went to a garden...I can't remember the exact name of it, but it was nice and there was a really great view of the city and  waterfall.  There were a lot of Japanese tourists, and they cracked me up because they were taking hundreds of pictures of things like...a rock.  hahaha.

After wandering around a little bit we sat down and had a coffee (of course, it's the French thing to do) but the cafe we went to also happened to have a movie theatre (a very small one) in the back.  That is so weird!

Les Halles...a food market...aren't these cool looking?
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We did some shopping there too, they had a really nice tapenade place that had all sorts of flavors of tapenade.  Olive, garlic (ail in French), pesto, etc...yum.  After shopping we had a quck lunch before trying to find the Palais des Papes (Pope Palace literally translated).

We took the ferry to see the Pont d'Avignon which was okay except it was overcast and looked like it was going to rain.  But we got some nice pictures and everyone knows the Pont d'Avignon so it was kind of a "must-see".

Christmas market!
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The Palais des Papes is HUGE.  The pictures do not do it justice.  In fact, Avignon has two claims to fame, the Pont d'Avignon and the Palais des Papes.  We went to the palace and there was a huge wait...so what did we do?  Sat down and ate some crepes of course!  Then we went back to the Palace and paid our tickets and got these huge cell phones (think Zack Morris from Saved by the Bell) and you type in the number of the exhibit and then listen to what it says.  I got a French phone (go me!) and tried to understand everything that was going on.

Palais des Papes
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Honestly the palace was not very interesting....they have removed anything that could be remotely interesting from the enormous castle.  So basically it is a HUGE castle that is completely empty....Really fun haha.  But it was ffun trying to understand the guy speaking French and listening to all the Popes that have been to Avignon and what they did, where they slept, what they ate, etc...

After that we just decided to go home so that we were back relatively early.