I recently took a week of holiday to enjoy Provence in early spring before the tourists were out and before the weather became seasonable. We've spent our time pretty solidly in the Germanic-language zones of Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, so crossing the border into France was a treat. Not to mention that, as Canadians, we spent a good deal of our schooldays memorizing French verb conjugations, and this is the place where, nominally, all that work should have paid off.
We took the new TGV line from Frankfurt to Marseille. This is the line that boasts a bunch of brand-new TGV-dedicated stations built outside of city centres. Although this means that you get a wonderful view of the changing French countryside and its mustard fields and quaint castles and rusted car lots, it also means that you get next to no sense of the cities you are nominally passing through (Dijon? Besançon?). From the TGV station at Avignon, you have to take a shuttlebus to reach the downtown, making it a very airport-like experience. However, you also get where you are going very, very quickly without leaving the ground, so I am willing to take a little inconvenience with my comfort. (Having stood along a tiny local platform in Cassis as a TGV barrelled past, an experience that involved gale force winds, lots of horn-tooting, and being frightened to death, I think that reducing human-high-speed-train contact as much as possible is probably a good idea.)
The seats were very comfortable. The company was a little weird. Because this is a completely new route of travel from Germany to France, extra precautions were in effect. Before we crossed the border into Strasbourg, an extremely friendly German police officer came by and handed out brochures in English, German, and French highlighting the dangers of pickpocketing in France. Friendly - to a point. When we insisted on taking the lone English brochure, he could not resist questioning us on our origin, place of residence, and our apparent disregard for the German language. Six pages of photos basically boiled down to a warning to stay alert and stay safe. Clearly they expected unsuspecting German pensioners to take the new line to France only to be fleeced of their life savings and Hugo Boss leather goods. Notably, there was no brochure on the way back for the poor Marseillais headed to the hard streets of Frankfurt.
He probably should have handed out a brochure on surviving crowds of youth, as well, because as I see it that's the weirdest endemic French problem of the moment. How do they do it? One moment you are standing in a deserted street in a little French town with lavender window boxes and the next second you are in the middle of a crowd of loud French teenagers hanging onto each other - boy, girl, girl, boy - and laughing along to a story about somebody's sister or sister in law or something. You don't see packs of teens like this in Germany, swarming hungrily, or if you do, nine times out of ten they're actually French schoolkids trucked into Germany for goodness-knows-what kind of cultural exchange.
Other than that, Provence was beautiful. We saw flocks of bulls and flamingos in the marshy Camargue, biked to villages perchés on rocky cliffs in the Alpilles, and hiked along the fjord-like calanques outside of the coastal town of Cassis. We ate more than our fill of olives and olive products, cheese, local tomatoes, sweet and savoury pastries, and, uh, more olives. We dipped a toe in Marseille. And after months and months of typical German service, those famously obnoxious French waiters seemed refreshingly friendly.
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