Le Luberon - I'll water your fountain.

This past weekend, I stayed in the great country of France and did a mini tour of the area with the group. We went to Luberon, which I thought was a town but actually was an entire region in the south of France, specifically we visited the towns of Vaucluse, Gourdes, et Rousillion.  All fairly small towns, not many shops or restaurants or great things to do, but all very pretty countryside panoramic views (Gourdes was a perched village so you could see all the way down the hills).  First stop, Vaucluse, saw the Fontaine de Vaucluse, which we all thought would actually be a fountain, I guess none of us remembered our French history lessons. It was a grotto with a stagnant pool of water at the bottom, very unimpressive.  See, we didn't have a guide really, so no one was telling us why this random pool of water was so well known and attracted so many visitors. We walked for twenty minutes down this path to arrive at the pool, where there was a meager barrier of defense that we crossed to climb frther down towards the water, almost slipping many times, and then we turned around and we all said (including the french roomies who were with us, who have lived in this region their whole lives), "Let's go find the fountain now." I did not do much post-research on the fontaine but I think the story is that it's this pool of water and no one knows where the source of the water is, but in the winter and spring the water rises and overflows into this watefall and it's supposed to have magical qualities and bring diamonds and all this stuff, there's lots of stories and myths associated with it. 

Moving on, next stop was Gourdes, a really cute little perched village where we just had time to get lunch of paninis and pizza before remounting the bus (my sentence structure in English is suffering miserably I can tell because I'm thinking in French) and we headed off to our last and longest stop of Rousillion. There we saw the mines of ochre, the pigment that Cezanne and other artists used in their works, its this rich orangy red color and there are these hills, almost like sand dunes, made of this grainy ochre and if you touch the walls or the earth below your feet your hands get stained the red color.  After sufficiently exploring "le pays d'ochre" (ochre land/country), we got some ice cream by the side of the road and just enjoyed the beautiful sun and nice weather of October in Provence.  We were all tired on the way back, I was sleeping so I missed the decision not to stop at the lavender fields museum, which I actually would have loved to stop at (that's what going out the night before gets you I guess). Before this journey someone told me that Luberon was known as the seat of the lavender fields of france, and I was looking forward to seeing these majestic fields, but we did not see any. They might have all already been harvested in mid-September, but none the less that was a little disappointing. But the trip overall was nice, we got to hang out as a group of Americans all together and take advantage of our great location in the South of France.  Staying in Aix this weekend also allowed me to get some work done, catch up on sleep sort of, and return to my fave IPN for the hopping nights of Friday and Saturday.  Our long break is in two weeks, so we are all preparing ourselves for big things, and the tests that come next week.