City of Popes

Since we had already been to Rome and visited Vatican City, we thought it would be a good idea to also visit ‘the other Vatican’, which was Avignon.

Avignon hosts an annual famous theatre festival with 800 productions on show

In the history of the Catholic Church, which is definitely long and colorful, they had a period where the Pope resided in France and not Italy as per tradition. This caused a schism within the Church and also resulted in two Popes in two different cities from 1378 to 1423. The whole history is a bit too much to cover here and is also not the main aim of this entry so if you are interested, here’s a link to the wonderful creation that is Wikipedia.

One of the remaining structures from the time of Papal Avignon was the Palais Des Papes aka Vatican City II. My expectations were probably a little high but it was not as grand as I imagined it to be. Then again when the Pope moved back to Italy he probably brought everything back with him. It may have looked very grand during its day but now it looks pretty normal and is just a really large building with almost nothing inside. I did think it was rather good to play hide and seek there though since it did seem to have lots of hiding places and the grounds are quite huge.

Inside the church

We also visited Pont Saint Benezet, which is supposed to be a famous monument and a beloved song. We don’t know anything about it though and since it was super windy that day, we didn’t go up onto the bridge. In any case, there is a better view of the bridge by looking at it and not being on it, lol…

A humorous temporary sculpture by Miquel Barceló

Trailing a school excursion

Other than Avignon, we also visited the nearby town of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. It was a much smaller town than Avignon and we went to the La Chartreuse du Val de Benediction. It was rather empty when we were there so it was a little creepy. It was also very quiet which I guess suited its purpose as a monastery. It owes its beginnings to Pope Innocent VI and he requested to be buried there when he died (usually popes are buried in St Peters Basilica in Rome). Currently it serves as an artists’ residence and they can stay there rent-free if I remember correctly. Pretty peaceful place for some meditation and wonderful art perhaps.

Medieval tower

Fantastic dinner in Avignon

All in all, Avignon was much prettier in my head than in reality, but then again which other city can claim to be a papal home before, eh?

Aint no mountain high enough

As stated in our previous entry, the next mountain for us to conquer was Mont Blanc in Charmonix. Well to be honest, we didn’t actually conquer it, we took a cable car ride up, lol…

Mont Blanc

Ski season lasts pretty long for the ‘roof of Europe’ aka Mont Blanc. There were lots of people going up Mount Blanc for skiing and they looked pretty serious with all their gear like ice picks, axes and stuff. There were loads of warnings about how dangerous the slopes are and how the ski paths are neither groomed, marked nor patrolled, which seemed quite ominous. Everyone who was skiing looked super geared up so I assume they know the risks involved. You know it's serious stuff when the brochure has a note: "Bring GPS locator beacon".

Beginning of the treacherous ski down

Once you are up on Mont Blanc, you can actually take another cable car ride to Italy, which we didn’t do as that cable car looked way too scary for me. The views on Mont Blanc were great though and we had quite a lot of fun staring at the people skiing on the slopes. One guy wanted to do paragliding but there wasn’t enough wind for himto jump off. Aiguille du Midi which is where people ski and apparently paraglide is 3,842m high!!! It’s already freaky enough for me to be up that height, can you imagine jumping off a slope that high? Yikes!

Dreamy view

We had read about how the cablecar journey up can ‘make your heart leap’ but it was so jam-packed with people I could hardly see anything and so there was no leaping in my heart ascending. The journey back down was a whole different story however, the cable car kind of went freefalling for a while, which totally freaked me out. I think I gave a pretty loud gasp but then again almost everyone in the cable car did the same. CS said having that alone was worth the money we paid for the cable car journey, haha.

That's where little elves make Mont Blanc pens!

After all the leaping hearts, we decided a good meal was needed to restore ourselves back to vitality and thus we headed off to Lyon, gastronomical capital of France, for some lunch. We picked a restaurant in a guide-book and while the brasserie looked pretty impressive, the food was nothing to shout about. The escargots were pretty good, though honestly anything with garlic herb butter is bound to taste good. It seems like we have to get away from the big cities to get any decent food. Luckily we were heading to the Provence region next so beautiful scenery and hopefully good food awaits us there!

Escargot in garlic herb butter

Watching, Eating, Learning…

Since we were in a country famousfor its cheeses, we had to make our way to at least one cheese making factoryto learn how its made. Thus we made our way to a little town and found ourselves at La Maison du Gruyere to learn how cheese is made and also watch a live demonstration as well. Before entering the enclosed area where you can watch the cheese-making process, we walked through a small exhibition which taught us about what the cows eat inorder to produce the required amount of milk for cheese-making. There is also an interactive display to smell the different types of flora of the pastures and of course cheese-tasting! It was a rather small exhibit but rather fun towalk through, and then after that it was off to the enclosed area to watch the demonstration.

Where milk churns to cheese

There are only 3 people making cheese in the area that we could see and it basically requires a lot of churning and stirring. After the cheese wheels are formed, comes the aging process of cheese wheel turning. It is a back-breaking task to mature the cheese and give it the complexity we taste. It is of course all automated now but overall there’s still a fair amount of labour involved. All very interesting but one mind-blowing fact to remember - cheese-making cows eat 100kg of grass a day! That’s more than a whole human’s weight (at least for some of us) in grass!!??

Endless rows of cheese wheels

Next, we headed to the Alimentarium. This is a food museum sponsored byNestle about all things cooking, eating and digesting.

It was a pretty fun museum andthey even have cooking classes there! There was a chocolate making class when we were there but you have to sign up in advance and it was in French. It’s a pretty hands-on museum so we had a lot of fun playing with the displays. One of the better exhibitions was about digesting and we had a lot of fun tasting food and playing the various games. They also had a garden outside featuring all our favorite salad leaves and herbs.

Vegetable Garden

Just outside of the museum is Lake Geneva, the weather was beautiful so we spent some time walking around. As one of the symbols of the museum is a fork, they stuck a fork sculpture into the lake, quite a funny sight.

Anyone dropped a fork?

That’s all for Switzerland, butis that the end of the Alps? Not yet, we have yet another taller mountain to ascend!