Sur le pont d'Avignon

L'on y danse, l'on y danse...

Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQXkNSB9KlY
Words: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sur_le_pont_d%27Avignon

SO. Y helo thar. Welcome back. Etc. On March 28 I went to Avignon with Tristan, Cori, and Juli. It was pretty sweet. And cold and rainy, but sweet all the same. It was two or three hours on the train each way, I think, and of course we left super early in the morning. [Excuse me if there are random typos here; I'm in the computer lab at school and French keyboards are set up differently.] We got in to the station around 11ish I think. Took a bus from the station to the city because we were pretty far out. The entire city is still surrounded by the medieval ramparts. It was awesome.

After a little bit of wandering we made our way to the Palais des Papes. Decided to get lunch first. Then got ice cream. Then Juli and Tristan bought paintings from people. Then we went back to the Palais des Papes. And I realized once we were inside that yes, it was a historical castle thing, but it was entirely empty. Because it would make sense to leave all the expensive stuff when the popes went back to Rome, right? Dur. So we walked through the entire thing and just looked at the empty rooms and the signs that said "This room used to be this and this kind of stuff used to be here." It was a little disappointing because I like seeing historical things, but whatever. It was still pretty cool to be all, "lol hay I'm in a castle where all kinds of cool stuff happened!"

From there we took a long detour around the castle in order to get away from an obnoxious group of eigth graders. Eventually we made it to the Pont Saint Benezet, otherwise known as the Pont d'Avignon. It was much fun, even though it was really raining by this time. The story behind the bridge is that God told a shephard to go build a bridge at this spot across the Rhône. He went and told the people in the city, who laughed at him and told him to pick up this huge boulder for the first stone. He did, and now there's a bridge there. Yay bridge.

There's not a whole lot else to do in Avignon, so we went to a café before going back to the train station. During our stopover in Lyon we got dinner at Subway. Quick, what are the French names of all their random veggie toppings? Yeah, that was amusing. All in all, it was a good day. Tiring, but good. We spent the train rides in the morning talking about books and majors and geeky things, and the ride from Avignon to Lyon talking about music and swapping earbuds. Geeks? Yeah, what of it?

Peek-churs.