Our main outing today was a tour of the Palais des Popes (including the gardens). This palace was the home of the papacy for 67 years (9 consecutive popes: the “Avignon Papacy”) in the 14th century. Who knew? The tour was very cool: it was self-guided with small tablets and headsets, and many of the rooms had augmented reality on the tablets to show more how the room would have looked at different points in history.
A total and unexpected non sequitur at the end of the tour: when we entered the Great Chapel, we were greeted with a large space filled with an Amazon rain forest exhibit by photographer Sebastião Salgado. The exhibit itself was designed by Lélia Wanick Salgado, and there was music by Jean-Michel Jarre playing (Benton recognized who this was, rattled off some facts about him, and then pulled up his phone to confirm that he was thinking of the right person. He was. Because…he’s Benton). The exhibit was a number of large black-and-white photo prints of both the nature of the rain forest in Brazil as well as the people in various indigenous tribes there, with each photo accompanied by a descriptive inscription. And, there was a message about the risk and consequences of both climate change and farmer encroachment on those areas. It seemed wildly out of context for the building, but it was still pretty darn cool.
By the time we left, we realized we’d spent three hours on the tour! So, we headed to one of the larger squares and grabbed a table at a cafe for a late lunch. After lunch, we pondered what to do next and opted for…ordering another round of drinks and people watching.
After that, we headed back to the apartment to do the research and booking work for extending Lucy’s stay on the trip and getting the travel and lodging set up for Lyon. That actually took a while, so it was time to head out for dinner afterwards, which took us back to the old city for some more wandering before having a nice dinner in another square and then calling it a night.
An interesting/memorable experience of the day:
Benton: The odd fact that, during each conclave during the Avignon Papacy, they actually knocked a huge hole in a wall to join the room where the conclave was occurring to another room. Then, after they’d selected a new pope, they’d wall it back up!
Tim: Coming across some restaurants/cafes that had ZERO women in them. I noticed this first at the little cafe that butts up to our apartment, but it was much more dramatic when we headed away from the old city for dinner only to find 2 of the 4 candidate locations closed, and the third one had at least 30 patrons at it, but they were all men. We weren’t comfortable and bailed immediately.
