Bonne anniversaire, Caitlin! Et Bon Voyage.

As I begin this post, we've just returned from a lovely weekend visit with Shelley Boyes in Aix-en-Province. Shelley, bless her, had just finished two weeks of visits with her sisters, who only left Thursday, but she insisted we come. As it was Caitlin's trip and Caitlin's birthday weekend, we left the decision to her, and of course she chose to go and see her  tía malifica. (Don't bother checking Google Translate, it's a Shelley-ism: "naughty aunt" in Span-talian or Lat-lish.) 

We packed up our little Fiat bug and headed out on Friday morning. The plan was to drive through the Camargue, the flat, marshy area around the mouth of the Rhone River, to Arles, and then hit Aix about cocktail hour. The Camargue was not a hit with Caitlin: too flat, she said. (Duh!) She stuck her earbuds in and listened to music. We did see flamingos again, though not as pink as the ones Karen and I had seen earlier in the week, and lots of white Camargue horses, though most paddocked, not running wild.

We also saw the walls around Aigue-Mort to better advantage. It's almost as picture-perfect as La Cité de Carcassonne, and there's a real town inside inside these walls. We saw it from quite a few angles, in fact, because our map wasn't detailed enough to guide us smoothly around the city and out the other side. We ended up trapped for awhile on narrow little city streets and suburban roads. The French have perfected "traffic calming," with speed bumps the height of small mountains every 100 metres or so, and a speed limit of 30 kph.

Arles is a city we visited 25 years ago on Caitlin's first trip to Europe when she was a kindergärtner. She remembers little of it, although when we went to the famous Roman arena, which has been restored and retrofitted with modern stadium seating for bull fights and other entertainments, she did experience a little frisson of memory, she said. Here's a picture of her on that first trip, when we had money and could afford to take her inside the stadium to clamber around the bleachers.

On this trip, the main objective in Arles was the very new Fondation Vincent Van Gogh. The literature about the Fondation, to be fair, does make clear that it's not really a museum about Vincent in Arles, despite the name. It's a contemporary art gallery for displaying work inspired by or somehow intersecting with Van Gogh's legacy. Shelley and her sisters also went to this place and were told that what little of Van Gogh's work is held here was currently on tour. Although it's a lovely exhibition space, we were more than a little disappointed in it, not least because it was virtually Vincent-free on this day.

Arena at Arles today

The art currently on exhibition, by the Chinese-French expressionist painter Yan Pei-Ming, and French painter and conceptualist Bertrand Lavier was mildly interesting, but not really to any of our tastes. We thought the connections made to Van Gogh's work were tenuous at best. There was one rather nice, if small, Vincent self-portrait, but the Fondation was definitely not worth the €9 entry fee we paid, in our humble opinions.

View point on roof of Fondation Vincent Van Gogh

Arles was redeemed for us by the charm of its medieval centre, with its lovely squares and narrow streets festooned with artistic grott (n. from Eng. grotty, dirty, shabby, down-at-heels). We spent a happy hour and a bit wandering and taking photographs.

Banksy-like street art by Diabolik

Quaint street, pretty woman

Found art

Found art

Street art

Miss Tom-Tom guided us more or less directly into Aix-en-Provence. Shelley's apartment, in a new-ish building just outside the old centre, is lovely - quite a bit larger than ours, better appointed, nicer decor. The rooms are elegantly understated. She has no parking at the apartment - one of the nice things about our place is our reserved street parking spot - but her landlady had given her an entry card for a nearby parking garage where she has a spot. We unloaded our bags and Shelley and I drove over and parked.

After the requisite cocktails, we headed out about 8 p.m. for a birthday dinner in the centre, which is a ten-minute-or-so walk away. Shelley had a few places in mind, and was almost as successful as Miss TomTom in navigating us to them - only a couple of lost moments. We looked at a few along the way, but ended up at one Shelley had selected, that she had already been to a couple of times and likes. Bistrot des Philosophes has funky decor, simple tasty French fare and great young wait staff. It was very crowded on this Friday night.

Our waiter at Bistrot des Philosophes

Shelley let our waiter know, sotto voce, that it was Caitlin's birthday and when her desert came - some outrageous chocolate conconction - it came not with candles but a gushing rocket-like firework thing. We sang our girl Happy Birthday and other patrons clapped and laughed, to Caitlin's mortification (but secret delight, I suspect.)

On Saturday, the girl's actual birthday, I went out in the morning to repark the car and buy croissants, birthday card (she'd already had one hand-painted by her mother via mail), Valentines éclaires for the ladies, etc. and came back to find that Shelley had already given Caitlin a very generous gift of Euros. She got more from us, so was feeling flush and ready to shop, shop, shop. We headed out about noon, Shelley and Karen to buy dinner at an open-air market, Caitlin and I to shop for birthday presents. The plan was to meet later at the Musée Granet, the major art museum in Aix.

By now it was spitting rain and decidedly chilly. Caitlin and I trolled around the shops in the old centre. The shopping in Aix is as good as or better than in Montpellier. I don't understand how the French have avoided the downtown blight that afflicts North American cities. They do have suburban malls in France, but they don't seem to have killed the traditional shopping districts in the centre. We saw some chain stores in the centre in Aix, and some designer outlets, but there are still lots of independent boutiques for clothes, shoes, home decor, toys, etc.

Caitlin tried on some stuff in a couple of chain shops, then ended up in a very cool little boutique with quite unique clothes and accessories. The manikins in the window and inside were topped with papier maché rabbit and bird heads. She found a necklace with a pendant with a spooky-looking resin-encased rabbit image. Weird but cool. That was our birthday present to her.

The Musée Granet, like the Fabre in Montpellier, was founded in the early 19th century and is housed today in renovated historical buildings, in this case, part of a former priory. The collection is also similar to the Fabre, with mostly second-tier old masters in the main collection. The highlights at the Granet are the French 19th century painters, in particular Ingres and David. Ingres is represented by a couple of massive pieces, including a very powerful, and sexual, picture of Jupiter and Thetis.

The Granet has much more and better modern stuff than the Fabre, especially with the recent addition of the Collection Planque, the intact collection of Swiss art dealer Axel Planque, housed in a renovated former monastery chapel a few blocks from the main Granet museum complex. Planque collected modern artists from the 1940s to the 1990s. The collection includes a treasure trove of Picasso oil paintings and prints - they alone must be worth tens of millions of dollars - as well as less well-known but estimable artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Nicolas de Staël, Raoul Dufy and Paul Klee.

We spent a few hours combined at the two Musée Granet sites and then headed home to Shelley's where we had a lovely chicken dinner, and a fabulous chocolate cream birthday cake for Caitlin. I think our girl was, for a change, well fêted, on this her momentous 30th birthday.

The plan for Sunday was to visit Le Site-Mémorial Camp des Milles, the suburban museum housed in a former ceramics factory that was used as an internment camp during the second world war - including for Jews who were deported by the Vichy regime in 1942 and ended up at Auschwitz. It's remarkable also for the expatriate - supposedly enemy alien - artists and other intellectuals held there in the early years of the war, including the German artist Max Ernst. Most later escaped Europe.

Les Milles is a powerful museum, designed to give the history of the site, but also teach about racism and genocide. It draws in other examples such as the massacres of Tutsis in 1990s Rwanda, and of Armenians in early-20th century Turkey. What are the factors that lead to genocide - remarkably predictable - and how can we recognize the signs and ensure it never happens again? It's an important and powerful presentation, but way too large and wordy. Most of the exhibits require a fair amount of reading. We spent hours.

We unfortuanately got separated from Shelley fairly early on in the visit. Poor Shelley assumed we had rushed through because we were anxious to hit the road to go back to Montpellier. So she rushed to the end and then searched for us all over the site. Meanwhile, we were actually behind her and taking our time going through the exhibits. She spent 90 minutes waiting and traipsing back and forth looking for us. What a shame! She says she'll go back and see some more of it before she leaves Aix.

We drove Shelley home, grabbed our bags and skedaddled back to Montpellier - through violent rain showers. This morning, Caitlin and I went out and shopped for more birthday presents at Mango (Spanish discount fashion chain). Her presents from Shelley turned out to be two very nice sweaters. In the early afternoon, we went for a walk down in Antigone - Caitlin pronounced it "impressive" but was clearly not as taken with it as we are. Then later in the afternoon, we drove her to the Nîmes airport and put her on her Ryan Air flight back to England.

Dr. Caitlin Blackwell at 30 (on our balcony)

Karen and I drove the Fiat to the Montpellier airport, dropped it off at the rental place and took the navette back into the city. And so endeth the weekend.