Walking France: Avignon to Pont-Saint-Esprit

The perfect place doesn't make for perfection, at least for me

(Thank you for all your questions last week, more than I expected, which I will answer after I finish walking in France)

A month ago I wrote that I didn’t think there’s a perfect place, which after a week in the Rhône Valley I had begun to think I’d gotten wrong, because it sure felt like the perfect place. At least for me.

Only twenty minutes after landing at Marseilles, I was on a clean commuter train bound for Avignon. Two hours later I was weaving my way through quiet cobblestone streets past cafe after cafe, leading to plazas of even more packed cafes, all walled in by magnificent historic buildings that gave the scene a seriousness and gravity, despite the drunken giddiness of the actors.

It was only 3 p.m. on a Monday afternoon and since everyone was drinking, I began to drink, pulled into a relaxed and numbed torpor by the buoyant crowd, despite being jet lagged and frazzled from fifteen hours of travel.

I sat for three beers, charmed by the fading evening light, and the surrounding tables of romantic couples, families, groups of men in dirty work clothes, the elderly sipping coffee, before I realized I needed food, and so fifteen minutes later I was in a more intimate plaza eating a transcendent meal beneath a shuttered 12th-century cathedral.

The next day I wandered with no plan beyond getting acclimated. Avignon is a small historic city that draws crowds of day trippers with their colorful shorts, tiny backpacks, and guidebooks, yet it’s managed to maintain a sense of place beyond the tourism. It has yet to become just another McEurope franchise, although there are stretches of it that want to be.

The French are too proud, or too stubborn, or too lazy, to let it. Go fifty yards away from the must-see sights, and it’s a mid-sized, and beautiful, historic French town with people simply living their lives, without concern for selling you a highly manufactured slice of the past.

That is especially true of the south side, outside the ancient walls, across the rail tracks, where most of the residents live, and where a more modern, and far more Muslim, France is on display. Gone are 800-year-old buildings, replaced by only 200-year-old ones. Gone is the thicket of cafes of day drunks and restaurants with their chalkboard signs, replaced by a scattering of alcohol-free cafes and take outs.

By that second night I’d already realized finding the best restaurant was a fool’s game. There were too many, and the quality at each was already so high, optimization mattered little. So I ate at a random place that offered the best view, and had another magnificent meal, sipped my wine, and watched people.

France’s cafe culture is different from Argentina’s, or even Belgium’s. It’s far more social. People sit for hours, not only to stare at their phone, or read a paper, or slowly get plastered, but to talk and talk and talk, to the guy at the next table, to the waitress, to the owner, to the couple passing by, to friends that come and go.

While day drinking, long drawn out meals, and smoking might not be healthy from an FDA or WHO perspective, from a human-thriving-requires-the-social standpoint, it’s very healthy.