Last Wednesday in our course La Provence, which is a history of the region, we had a field trip! We took a bus forty minutes outside of Aix to the Abbey of Silvacane, an abbey that is not in use anymore. It was super super beautiful, Roman architectural style and the walls were thick but hollow so there was this amazing echo in the main room - we tried to have a little chorus but it didn't work so well. As an abbey its austere facade was to be expected, but it was still beautiful in its simplicity. The trinity was a ssymbol repeated in all forms - three windows here, three openings there. It was also suspiciously cold inside the building for as hot as if was outside, I can't imagine living there in the winter with no heating (and, if you were a monk, sleeping on the hard stone floor). It was pretty small, it housed 30-40 monks and then some people who came and went but didn't have the right to the monk's prayer. We went to the refectory, the courtyard and little garden, the main prayer room, and the scriptorium where they'd keep the manuscripts in these little niches in the walls. The abbey itself was in this remote part of the countryside, as our prof said, that's part of the feel to the place, the isolation, the beauty of sounds of nature. You could birds singing and insects moving and the water flowing in this little stream with little fishes but no cars, there was also a long stone wall that cut off the abbey from the route. The wall was covered in this bright red ivy that gave a dash of color to the whole picturesque scene (I seem to be using the word picturesque in a lot of my posts but it's so true) and since it's the start of autumn here there were huge, really like the span of your two hands put together) oak leaves brown and green covering the pathways. So that was a great trip, we also had a field trip earlier in the year inside Aix proper where we walked up to the cathedral of Aix and toured it, that was also cool but since the cathedral is in the heart of Aix, surrounded by people moving and cafes and dogs and other large buildings, I think we couldn't really appreciate its beauty looking at it from a distance to see it laid out on the surface of the earth like we could with the abbey (if that makes any sense).
On a final note, props to my friend Danny who says he's looked at this blog a couple times. I appreciate the readership mon ami, and I've come to terms with the fact that I'll never be as slapstick hilarious as you are with your blog. Jesus H. Christ!
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