Chateau de Lourmarin

Today I visited the Chateau de Lourmarin in the French countryside.

First off, the French countryside is every bit as beautiful as you would imagine. Grace, Mme Coates and I as well as a Chinese student went exploring the Chateau which was built in the Middle Ages but was renovated during the Renaissance. Instead of just talking about the chateau I will show you some pictures.

This is the guy who renovated and preserved the Chateau. Unfortunately he died very shortly after doing so.

This is the spiral staircase that went up about 5 stories, it is made of stone but is so old that the middle of the steps have worn off to cause indentations. Okay now some pictures of the local vegetation. While we drove by a lot of vineyards I wasn't able to get pictures of them since we were moving but there was an olive grove at chateau.

 This is what olives look like right on the tree. But don't eat them straight off the tree...trust me it would be gross.

 Olive trees

And this is a fig! I had never seen one on a tree before so I actually didn't know what it was at first. Once we had finished exploring the chateau we went down to the village situated below it. It was really cute but creepily dead. It's a tourist town so there was hardly anyone there on account of it being winter. So here are pictures from that. 

In the above picture is where women would wash clothes back in the day. As we were leaving the town, we came across a marriage caravan. It is similar to how in the US in a funeral all the cars follow each other with emergency lights flashing, except instead of for a funeral this is for a wedding. Also the cars all have bows tied onto the antennae of their cars and they honk at everyone passing by. It was actually really fun! Especially when all ten cars were honking at once.

Then we headed back towards Aix, but Mme Coates had one more surprise. Remember how I talked about the Aix version of Nativity scenes? Well I got to see one and it was HUGE!!! Here are some pictures of that as well.

 Recognize the fountain? Its the same one that is in Aix!

My Saturday then ended with catching up with some friends back home and then watching Friends for the first time ever with Grace and Ingvild. Apparently I am almost not American since I haven't seen it...