France

Quaker Center Congenies

We left Darmstadt, Germany by train on November 1 by way of Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Strasbourg, and finally Lyon, France, where we spent the night.  The countryside through Germany continued to be interesting and mostly rural or forest.  However, about the time we crossed over to France at Strasbourg it got dark, so we couldn’t see any more scenery.  Lyon was only a convenient place to sleep because we were really aiming for Nimes.  The countryside on the second day was really pretty.  To my surprise we could see high snow-covered Alps for quite a while. 

 

Quaker Cemetery

At Nimes we caught a local bus to the village of Congenies where there is a Quaker Center with rooms to stay in.  It happened that there was a group of pacifists, les Couflaïres, living in the area from the early 17^th century.  They heard about Quakers in 1785 and some of them went to London to learn more.  They all converted and built a Meeting House in 1822 and there was quite a colony for a time with much visiting back and forth.  Eventually however, the group died out and the building went into other hands.  However, recently the house became available again and was repurchased by Quakers.  When we went to Meeting for Worship there were about 15 people present.  Most of them are British or Americans, but there are also some French members.  There are quite a few rooms to stay in, a nice large sunny Meeting room, a large garden area, and an old cemetery.  The current resident friends, Bonnie and David, are from Greensboro, North Carolina.  We were also invited to a delightful lunch after Meeting by a local couple along with another American couple from the Meeting.  This occupied all of Sunday afternoon.

Congenies town square

Pretty much everywhere we went was very pleasant and interesting.  The village of Congenies has a couple of small stores which open at odd hours.  There is one Catholic and one Protestant church.  We walked up a street and fairly quickly got out to olive trees and small walled fields and scrub land.  The houses in town are all of thick rock with sand-colored plaster and shutters.  The roads widen and narrow through town randomly.  There is a 22 K bike path that runs near the town along an old train track.  There is an hourly bus that goes into Nimes (or Sommieres in the other direction) and only costs 1.50 Euros.  Bonnie and David drove us into Sommieres on Saturday for the market, which is a combination of flea market and food vendors stretching along the river and into the town squares.  The old section of town is mostly pedestrian because the streets are very narrow.  It is very medieval-feeling and also very Mediterranean.  But it was also very bustling with all the people there for the market and felt very alive and vibrant.

Nimes Arena (Roman Amphitheater

Nimes is an interesting city with a number of Roman ruins.  The Arena, a smaller version of the Roman Coliseum, dominates the town square.  It is said to be the best preserved amphitheater remaining and it is still used for bull fights and rock concerts.  There is also an almost perfect temple to Augustus, or rather it was dedicated to his two grandsons and heirs (until they mysteriously died).  Nimes is named after the god Nemausus of the spring in the town, and the garden where the spring is looks very Roman and imperial but is mostly 19^th century.  There is one authentic Roman temple there.  Even though there was a good water source in town, the Romans used so much water for their baths that they, of course, built 19 miles of aqueduct as soon as they started to populate the town.  Plots of land were given to veterans of the legion which defeated Anthony and Cleopatra, so the town symbol is a crocodile chained to a palm tree.

Nimes' Roman Temple

Even without the Roman remains, the town is a delight to walk in.  The old city is again mostly pedestrian because the streets are very narrow.  They randomly open onto little plazas with tables and chairs set out for the cafes and restaurants.  The streets were filled with lots of shoppers, and Nimes also felt like a very modern and busy city, which spreads out far from the old center.  Unfortunately, in general France is a terrible place to try to eat in if you are vegetarian, but we managed.  It is also amusing to me that most places give you no choice about what wine to drink besides red, white or rose, and sometimes the local wine that they served was not all that good.  There was usually more choice among the beers.  In Germany most places had at least a page listing all the wine choices.  We also saw a lot less variety in ethnic cuisines, at least in this area of France.

Pont de Gard

We also took a day excursion out to the Pont de Gard, which is near the beginning of the Nimes aqueduct.  It is a magnificent structure, of course, over the Gard River with 3 tiers of arches.  It has been well preserved probably partly because it is far out in the middle of nowhere and also because the water system continued to work for a couple of hundred years.  There is also an archeological dig there in a big cave that has prehistoric remains from 20, 000 years ago.  There was not a lot of information posted yet, but we could watch the people working.  There is also a good museum with lots of information about Romans and their water use and technology.

Archeological dig

We really liked Southern France.  The countryside is pleasant and almost every village and town looked like it would be fun to spend time in.  There is a lot that we didn’t see, but after 5 days we decided to continue on to Spain.  We decided to avoid Barcelona for the moment, and so we took a train from Nimes to Toulouse and then to Bayonne on the Atlantic coast.  From Nimes to Narbonne, we could catch glimpses of the Mediterranean, and from Toulouse onward we could often see snowcapped Pyrenees.  Lourdes was the train stop closest to the mountains.

Bayonne

Although we were basically only in Bayonne for one evening and one morning in order to catch a train into Spain, we really enjoyed walking around the city.  It is in the French Basque country, and we could get a little flavor of that culture.  The architecture was more French than Mediterranean with iron work balconies.  The roads in the old town were still narrow and pedestrian.  It confirmed the thought that everywhere is picturesque.