September 20-29, 2007
We are back from a ten day field trip traveling in the South of France with
We took the TGV, or the high-speed train, from At the Lyon train station, we bundled into three large taxis that took us to La Tourette, the Dominican monastery designed by the celebrated Swiss architect, Le Corbusier. The monastery sits on a hill surrounded by fertile farmlands and green pastures filled with contented grazing cows. My mother would have been happy that we were visiting a Dominican monastery. She went to Dominican College in California and she always spoke fondly of her Dominican nuns.
Le Corbusier, whose real name was Charles Edouard Jeanneret, designed the monastery in 1957. I have no idea why Le Corbusier changed his name except I gather one did that in those days. He was born in 1887 in Switzerland a few miles from the French border. He grew up to be one of the most influential architects of the 20th century. This monastery is considered by many among his best works.
Le Corbusier loved to draw. In fact he considered himself a painter first and an architect second. In a book we found in the convent, he said, “The reason for drawing is to interiorize something one has seen, to make it part of one’s personal history. Once things have been absorbed by means of the pencil they remain inside one for life, they are written indelibly inscribed.”
I believe that Le Corbusier was right when he said if you draw it becomes part of you. It takes time to draw and absorb what you are looking at. Stanley always has his students draw wherever they go. They end up with incredible sketch books. Since I have no talent in the drawing category, I have to make do with my photographs and notes. It isn’t the same but it is better than no record at all.
The monastery was built as a school to house and teach aspiring students who wanted to be monks. They studied here for five years. But in 1968 there were student uprisings occurring all over France and the monks in La Tourette felt the same revolutionary spirit. They were no different than the other students outside the monastery. They declared that they no longer wanted to be isolated from the rest of the world. They needed to be in the heart of things, ie: the city of Paris and not the bucolic countryside. Today only a handful of monks live at the monastery.
The best part of the stay at La Tourette was discovering Brother Mark. He is one of the handful of Dominican monks who live at the monastery. When he spoke, it was pure poetry. With his sparkling eyes, lovely smile and enthusiasm for everything Le Corbusier, Brother Mark had us all captivated by his words. I found him completely enchanting. His passion for Le Corbusier and La Tourette was so tangible and real that it became a magical tour for all of us. He talked about how Le Corbusier thought of every last detail from how the light changes as you walk down a corridor to the fact that if you put a large barrier at the end of the corridor blocking most of the light, you are forced to look sideways and out the side windows. Brother Mark learned from Le Corbusier about understanding people -- you don’t look at the decoration but at the shape and what comes from inside -- or, as he said, “the light within”.
The students loved Brother Mark’s explanation of the place. He definitely made their stay much more meaningful. One of the students, Ryan DaSilva agreed. What he liked best was listening to the untold stories of La Tourette from Brother Mark.
We spent the night in the monastery. Each of us sleeping in a separate tiny monk’s cell. The rooms had a simple single bed, a desk, an armoire and a wash-basin. Somehow it was enough. I woke up in the morning and looked out through my small cell window to the sunlight and the forest beyond. It was a peaceful experience.
Guil Almeida, another student, said it was a spiritual experience to be in the monastery. “The fact that I was there and that it was designed by Corbu and that we had a fabulous guide in Brother Mark, I could have stayed there the entire trip. Brother Mark made the whole building come alive.” In fact, a number of the students wanted to stay another night to experience the place even more and to have time to do more sketches. They all kept reiterating how much they liked La Tourette and Brother Mark.
Sarah Spanagel told me: “My spiritual highlight at La Tourette was stepping out of the taxi cab and just looking at the countryside. We hadn’t even seen La Tourette at this point but somehow I knew it was going to be special. The architectural highlight was the guided tour by Brother Mark. I also liked sitting and drawing by the pond. The Mallard ducks were singing to me as I drew. The ducks actually walked up to me while I was sketching. The social highlight for me was sitting in total darkness in the chapel at night with the entire group after dinner. After about an hour in the church, I turned on my flashlight. While we were in the dark everyone was pretty scared. In the morning I took an hour and half walk in the woods by myself. I was surprised how many trails there were and how extensive the woods were. I came across some farmland and even the monk’s graveyard. I loved La Tourette.”
In the morning Brother Mark was at the entrance to say good bye to us all. He definitely enjoyed our group. He was so pleased that they were so interested in what he had to say. The students said their good-byes to him and we headed back to Lyon in our prearranged taxi-cabs.
Lyon surprised me. I didn’t expect to find such a beautiful and vibrant city. It helps that the medieval and Renaissance part of the city has been named by the UNESCO World Heritage Site as one of the best 100 sites in the world. When Stanley and I visited Lyon in the late sixties the buildings were covered with black soot from the coal burning furnaces. Not only were the buildings dark but the streets and squares were filled with fumes and lots of traffic. Today the buildings are clean and the traffic has been cleared out of the inner city and most of the important squares. The city has been transformed into something very livable and very enjoyable. People either walk or ride bicycles throughout the town. The open squares are filled with cafes, restaurants and sophisticated clothing shops. The medieval and Renaissance parts of the city have been completely cleaned up and gentrified with secret little covered alleyways and courtyards jetting off from the narrow streets called “Les Traboules”.
Lyon has been an important city in France’s history for a long time. We learned that the city site goes back to prehistoric times. In 44 BC the Romans came in and conquered the indigenous tribes who had settled in the area. The Romans built a large city on top of a hill over looking the river. They called it Lugdunum probably after a cult God, Luge, who the local people worshipped. The Romans were sensitive enough to take into account the gods of the people they had just conquered. They were also known to make reasonable treaties with the local tribes. Centuries later, after the Roman Empire fell, Lyon became an important medieval city.
Today Lyon is also known for its “saucisson” -- (salami and sausages or what we would call cold cuts). I bought three kinds of salami for the students to taste: wild boar, donkey and pork with nuts. I didn’t tell them which was which. They liked them all and were only surprised afterwards that they had actually enjoyed eating donkey! We visited the two large cathedrals, a museum built into the hillside on the Roman era next to a Roman coliseum and we even took a boat trip on the Rhone and Saone Rivers. Many of the students liked seeing the city from a river perspective.
One night we all went to the Opera House to hear a contemporary jazz quartette with two hip hop dancers interpreting the jazz. It was an exciting evening. It turns out Lyon is a center of contemporary dance in France.
The next morning we were in our rented vans at the Lyon TVG train station designed by the architect, Calatrava. The students sketched this incredible structure and then we were off in our vans to Aigues Mortes. Stanley was one of the designated drivers. I wasn’t too happy about this but surprisingly it wasn’t a difficult trip. I was worried it would be too tiring for Stanley but we were on super highways the whole way which made it a lot easier. Next year, though, I would like to see us take more trains and do less driving.
When we got to the walled medieval town of Aigues Mortes, Stanley unfortunately scrapped the side of the van when trying to turn a sharp corner in one of its narrow streets. It is the problem with even the mini 9 passenger vans in these small medieval towns. The van already had much worse dents in it so in the end we did not have to pay for these minor dents.
Aigues Mortes is an intact medieval walled city laid out in a rectangle in the middle of ancient swamp lands. It means dead or stagnant waters and was founded by Louis IX (St Louis) in the 13th At the time the surrounding areas of “Provence” belonged to the German Empire and “Languedoc Roussillon” to the Kings of Arragon. France had no land on the Mediterranean Sea. King St. Louis chose this swamp area because it joined the sea via a branch of the Rhone and no one else had claimed the marsh lands. To get people to come and settle in this malaria riddled area, King St. Louis granted them exemption from tolls, port taxes and forced loans. People, in 1246, actually came and built the walled town. Two years later in 1248, having founded the town, our King Louis set off on the 7th With 100 ships, thousands of men and his wife and children, he took off from Aigues Mortes.
King Louis IX left his kingdom under the control of his mother, Blanche de Castile. She must have been quite the woman to rule for over six years while he was away on his crusade. Funny how you never hear of the women behind these kings. When St. Louis returned to France he only stayed for a few years before heading out again in 1270 to Tunisia on another Crusade leaving again his kingdom to be run by his mother. Within a month, Louis got typhus in Carthage and died. When we were in Tunisia as Peace Corps Volunteers we heard another story about St. Louis. The legend went that St. Louis landed in Tunisia and was taken to the lovely town of Sidi Bou Said sitting up on the cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. He found the site so beautiful that he said he wanted to live here for the rest of his life. He asked his aids to find someone who had just died of typhus and to dress him in his royal clothes. They found someone and sent the dead body back to Monreale just outside of Palermo in Sicily where they buried him in the beautiful cathedral. (At the time, St. Louis’s brother ruled Sicily as one of the Norman kings) St. Louis lived the rest of his life in Sidi Bou Said as a humble man talking with the other holy and wise people of Tunisia about philosophy and the meaning of life. I, of course, prefer this story.
Many of the students enjoyed having the time to sketch at Aigues Mortes. Stanley gave them the whole afternoon to draw. In the evening Ryan taught the students how to step dance by the rampart walls. They broke into two groups and competed against one another. They promised to show us their new learned steps one of these days.
The next day was a free day for the beach in the afternoon and for horseback riding in the Camargue in the morning. They all opted to do both. Our whole group of twenty went horseback riding in the Camargue national park. The Camargue horses used to roam wild in this marshland and ever since I was a little girl I have wanted to see these horses. The horses are no longer wild. Instead they are now used as work and pleasure horses.
We all mounted our white and grey horses and rode one behind the other through the marshes. At a certain point, the guide let us split into two groups -- those who were experienced riders and those who were not. My group of experienced riders galloped through the grasses. The rest including Stanley, continued in a line, walking through the estuary at a more leisurely pace.
My horse, Tatoe, liked to be in the lead. I was told that he was one of the dominant stallions. So I found myself mostly in the lead with our tour guide. Stanley was somewhere in the back of the line, taking many pictures of the horses’ rear-ends. We rode through the protected marshes passing egrets, swans, black bulls, ducks, flamingos and lots of birds. The grasses were tall and there was water everywhere. We even rode through shallow ponds with the water splashing up onto our jeans as the horses maneuvered through the estuaries.
Narciss Nesari, from Iran, had never been on a horse before but she chose to be with us. She was a natural and wasn’t at all frightened when we starting galloping across the fields. The other surprise was Ryan who also wanted to try galloping, although he had only been on a horse once before. Some of the students said they had never gone so fast on a horse before. They definitely found it exciting.
Another student, Jessica Sticklor-Lipson, was frightened most of the time she was riding. At one point she asked if she could get off her horse but our leader said no since we were about to start walking through the mud and then into a shallow marsh pond. By the end of the ride, Jessica was feeling better and was so proud that she actually conquered her fear of horseback riding. The only mishap was with Greg Plavcan, whose horse decided to lie down and roll over after walking through the water. He did wait until Greg got off before he started rolling in the mud! Greg was a good sport and told me: “Horseback riding was fun until my horse, Buddy, threw me off to roll in the mud. I did enjoy running through the water with Buddy even though I didn’t feel I had much control of where he was going.” Jennie Santoro told me that riding horses through the estuary was a highlight for her. “I liked riding my horse, Prince, and especially liked it when Prince started to trail blaze and take a short cut through the brush with Greg’s horse, Buddy, following behind.”
After our horseback ride, we stopped at a typical roadside restaurant and had a wonderful meal. The people at the stables had recommended the restaurant to us. They gave us all a taste of the sweet wine Muscat and some salami made from bull (toro) meat. I had a glass of the local rosé wine called “Gris sur Gris". It is more gray colored than rose, sort of like the color of the horses.
In the afternoon we were off to St. Marie sur la Mer -- a beach with sand dunes. The weather was a little cold so I didn’t go into the water but Stanley and some of the students did go swimming. It was Erik Wyche’s first swim in the Mediterranean. I sat on the sandy beach feeling the sea breeze and holding onto my green hat that kept flying off. The students all slept, read, played soccer or swam with Stanley in the water. He of course took many pictures of the students frolicking on the beach.
The next day we drove to the walled medieval town of Carcassonne. It has been a town site since the 6th century BC. Then the Romans came and conquered the town in the 3rd century. Around the 10th century, it became an important medieval town. The first Christian church was built in the 6th He thought the church should be modernized and asked that they rebuild it into a Romanesque church! When St. Louis saw the church in 1269, he ordered it to be again modernized this time into the style of the time -- Gothic. Most of the Romanesque church was torn down but they ran out of money so the nave remained intact. Ah, the whims of popes and kings.
The day we were at Carcassonne it was cold and rainy. No one was dressed for the rain so we were all quite cold. By afternoon, the sun finally came out. The fortified castle inside the walls was quite remarkable. It had been redone in the 19th century by Viollet le Duc making it one of the biggest and best preserved fortified castles in Europe. Many of the students liked sketching there and it had an excellent three screen High Definition film on the history of the castle.
On our drive back to Aigues Mortes there was a fantastic full moon. Stanley entertained the students with his jokes and his stories of how he was named Walking Eagle by the Crow Indians in Montana. The Indians loved to joke with him since they also had a great sense of humor. One day one of the Crow Indians came up to him and said they had a new name for him. Stanley asked what would that be? They said: “Walking Eagle which actually meant that you are so full of crap, you can’t fly!
Our next destination was Arles. We stayed at a lovely hotel, L’Hotel Amphitheatre. It had only two stars but it had large rooms, great sitting areas, wireless internet, breakfast included and very nice people running the hotel. I had a bath tub which also made me happy. We also stayed in a good hotel in Aigues Mortes just inside the ramparts called L’Hotel des Ramparts where again the rooms were large and I had the added luxury of a bathtub.
The weather in Arles was not cooperative. It was again cold and wet. It makes a difference to the students. It is no fun sketching in the cold. We did manage to visit a lovely Romanesque church and its cloisters in the center of town. Then we were off to the modern museum which had fabulous models of the Roman coliseum in Arles. When it is cold, we head for the museums.
Friday was a killer day in terms of driving. We did a five hour round-trip drive to see the new suspension bridge at Millau by the architect, Norman Foster. It is a beautiful structure but definitely not worth the long drive for a one-stop event. It exhausted Stanley. The students liked it once they got there. Guil said the bridge was more beautiful and more graceful than he had expected. “In the pictures it doesn’t come across as beautiful or as graceful.” Greg who has an undergraduate degree in engineering really liked the bridge. “I thought it truly amazing. I really enjoyed seeing the bridge from different places, different angles. I especially liked seeing it from underneath. I really love how it blends into the landscape. It fits so well environmentally.”
We also took a side trip to see what was explained to us as one of the most beautiful towns in France. Peyre is a tiny stone village perched on the side of the hillside overlooking the river. It has a church that was partially dug out of the mountain. The weather was grey and the village seemed abandoned. It was not on my list of beautiful French hillside villages but again the students liked it.
When we got back to Arles we treated the students to a fabulous meal. Stanley and I had found the restaurant, Le Criquet, the night before and decided it was so good and reasonable that this was where we would have our last meal together with the students. For 22 euros they had a fantastic meal -- either lamb chops, roasted duck or fish. I had a “loup” backed in tin foil. It is a medium sized Mediterranean fish somewhat like Sea Bass. For the first course I had a fish soup where you scrap a whole garlic on toasted bread and then you add a cream fish pate on top with grated cheese. Stanley had carpaccio of beef(thin slices of raw beef) and the lamp chops. It was Ryan’s birthday so they brought him a candle on his melon ice cream.
The students called their meal “fantastique, incroyable, magnifique, très bon, délicieuse, nos compliments au chef, super, si bon, très joli, bravo, excellent.” As you can see, they really liked it.
Saturday was market day in Arles and the sun was out in spurts. They say the market at Arles is the largest in France. I don’t know if that is true but it was big. There were great stands of regional products from soaps to spices, to cheeses and olive oils. It was finally a nice day. We visited the Roman coliseum which was a surprise. It was impressive and reminded me of the Italian artist, Piranaisi and his drawings of the Roman ruins especially when I was looking up at the vaulted ceilings under the arches. The guide book says it is one of the best conserved Roman amphitheaters in the world with its two stories of arcades. It was mainly used for Gladiator battles and could hold 20,000 spectators.
I went back to the lovely Romanesque church, St. Trophime, in the middle of Arles where I lit a candle for Dick Graham who had just died. He was one of my most favorite people in the world. He changed my life. Without him I wouldn’t have gotten into the Peace Corps. He believed in me and said we needed independent people like me. And then of course I wouldn’t have met Stanley and on and on.
In the afternoon we drove to Pont de Gare, a great Roman aqueduct built to bring water to near town of Nimes. The aqueduct was built in fourteen years. They had over one thousand men working on it. They finished it in 52 AD. It is impressive sitting alone in the landscape. The French do spend a lot more money than the Italians on saving their ancient monuments. They also seem to be good at museums and exhibits. This one was designed by the Japanese architect, Ban. It was a state of the art museum with fabulous displays in mixed media as well as great models of the aqueduct.
Matthew Starr told me that he liked everything about the trip. “There has been nothing I haven’t liked. I think it has been a perfect trip. I like La Tourette and the idea of minimal space and how it worked in the environment. I was fascinated by both walled cities, Aigues Mortes and Carcassonne. You only read about these in fairy tales. I liked the bridge at Millau. I liked being out in the marshes on horses moving and constantly seeing new things. It was not static at all. The worse thing for me was not having a better camera.” Jessica Sticklor-Lipson also agreed that she liked so many things. “La Tourette stands out in a huge way. Brother Mark was fantastic. I liked Lyon and the boat trip we took on the river in Lyon. I liked looking at the city from a water perspective. I liked it all.” Jennie Santoro also loved La Tourette. “And Brother Mark definitely added to the experience there. It was wonderful to have some “alone time” to just sketch and understand the place. I also liked the big bowls of coffee for our morning breakfast at the monastery. I would have liked to have spent more time there -- another night would have been great. I was just starting to get in the mood of La Tourette when we had to leave.” She also liked Lyon and the jazz and hip hop show at the opera house. “The mussels in Lyon were delicious. I also liked our night in Lyon when we had fondue and Greg had a snail for the first time. The boat trip on the river was really nice. I liked seeing the city from the river. Ryan DaSilva loves to sketch and was drawing all the time. He said “I liked all of the sketching wherever we went but I especially liked drawing at Carcassonne. I liked the chateau and the little museum with the gallery with all the original sculptures.”
Our trip ended in Avignon. Stanley had the students draw up the TGV station at Avignon, one of the great little stations that occur on the super-fast TGV Line. Back in a flash, we were soon home in Paris. It was a great trip.
