Lavender, and more!

i have a little piece of good news to share... this morning when i walked in the class, I was told by the instructor to go to a different room. turned out i was "upgraded" to a higher level class! woohoo! I was so happy, this is going to give a boost to the last week of my french learning. :)

aside from that, we had a wonderful weekend in south of France (aka, Provence). and yes, it is everything i imagined and more. the sun, the blue sky,the charming villages, the food and the oh-so-pretty lavender fields! it's so picturesque we can't get our hands off the shutter. there are photo opportunities in every step, every turn, every different angle. we took millions of pictures and almost felt the need for a second camera so both of us can get our hands on it. :)

we stayed at a small village Sault, away from the tourists crowd but close enough (within 20-25minutes drive) to allow us to explore the area conveniently. On Saturday morning, we started the weekend by visiting a local market in the village Apt. I love the market, it's filled with colorful Provencal textile, all kinds of spices, sausages, cheese, and of course for the ladies, natural body care products from the area (think L'occitane!). And it's fun just to watch local people come out and browse what the market has to offer. :)

one of (and probably the main) the reason for the trip is because the harvest season of lavender is August. we were hoping to see some purple ocean before it's too late. still..some of the fields are already wiped out, and in one of the field we caught the harvest in action. it's pretty cool. the machine cuts the lavender as it pushes through, bundles them, and throws it out neatly tied. all that's left for manpower to do is to pick them up. The guy working on the machine must feel like a star, he is being photographed while doing his work (by all the tourists, including us) As a contrast, no one paid much attention to the priest (or ciscercian?) in white robe when he walked out of the Abbey. :)

the view is stunning when we approached Abbey of Senanque (pictures both above and below are taken outside the Abbey). It's here that we caught the harvest in action. we said jokingly that if we had come a few hours earlier, we'd be photographing the Abbey with lavender field in the foreground (below), instead of the bare green. arh. :)

Though it doesn't look like a big area on the map, Provence is full of hidden gems, sometimes we just randomly picked a village or an abbey on the map to visit, and it turned out superb! imagine how many other magnificent places or martkets we missed out on this mini trip. A weekend is not enough to see it all. no wonder Peter Mayle needed a year!

a tidbit from the trip: while walking in this small village Ménerbes (where Peter Mayle settled and wrote his international bestseller "A Year in Provence".) we heard an asian girl asking "is he (Peter Mayle) still living here?" , a guy replied "no.. because everyone coming here is looking for him.". i thought that was a pretty witty reply. As a matter of fact, we later learned that he's now living in a nearby village Lourmarin. The girl was looking at the wrong place. :)

to see more photos from the trip, click here