Toulon-ish

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I am going with Lise, her friend Charlotte, and Charlotte’s Spanish boyfriend Juan Lu to Toulon in the south of France. I will be spending a fair amount of time there and even staying for New Years.

On the way to Toulon, another girl named Celia carpooled with us because she was headed that way anyway and it made it cheaper for the rest of us. It was more than 12 hours of driving and Lise and Charlotte would switch off every 2 or 3 hours. Lise and Charlotte both brought food for a midday picnic but the weather wasn’t having any of it, so we had an indoor picnic at a rest stop that consisted of tabouleh, bread, ham, various cheeses, soda, and some chocolate cake that Lise and I made prior to leaving. When Lise was on her second driving shift it started to rain like crazy and afterwards they made jokes like “That wasn’t really legal I don’t have a permit to drive a boat”, “Did you see me driving on the sea?” and calling the area the Bourgognique Ocean because the deluge occurred in an area of France called Bourgogne. We arrived pretty late and moved into the tiny apartment near the Mediterranean.

The next day we woke up late because we were tired from the long drive the previous day. We did a little bit of exploring in the surrounding area and it was incredibly windy because of a phenomenon the French called the Mistral. We didn’t explore too much though because we had to go pick up Juan Lu from the airport. We drove to Marseilles to pick him up from the airport and stopped in Aubagne on the way back home.

We parked on a hill and managed to find a pretty good lookout of the town. There was even a guide on the surrounding landscapes that explained what we were looking at. We descended some steps and found a market that was just closing and another Christmas market. The usual stuff was in the Christmas market except that there was an exceptionally large nativity scene and a small terracotta army of unpainted nativity figurines. At one end of the market we found a small expo dedicated to the French writer Marcel Pagnol and another nativity scene. He is a famous French writer that also participated in the adaptation of his books into films. He is from Aubagne and they are proud of being his birthplace. I took some pictures of the nativity scene because I really wanted to name the figurines. We left Aubagne after a few hours and stopped at a supermarket on the way back to get food for the rest of the week. Juan Lu prefers vegetables and I don’t really. We were in the supermarket for a while but we eventually came to a good mix of food that everyone agreed with. We came back home and everyone was tired so we heated up French frozen pizzas for dinner and went to bed.

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Photos

Rocks and the Coast
It was hella windy cuz of the Mistral

Nativity Scene
If you look very closely...

You can see this?
Wasn't expecting to find this at a nativity scene. Gonna try to name some of the figures I saw