Sunday, October 01, 2006

Arles

This weekend we had another excursion with our program to a city calles Arles. It was so pretty you would not believe it!! As you can see in the pictures, we went to an old collosium wich was so cool to see and hear about. Our guide, George, said that at one time most of the city was living inside of this stadium during war times for protection. It was so amazing. Throughout the town there are ruins of old buildings and walls. I loved it. Then we went to another place close by that had an exhibit of a famous painter's work in France. The painter's name is Paul Cezanne. He was from Aix and everything in Aix is named after him because he was such a great painter. If you live in Aix you MUST like his paintings. They are really good though. Anyways, so we went to this giant rock which you can walk into. Rooms and stairs were cut into the rock so no other material was used to make the "building" except the rock itselfe which was already there in this mountain. It used to be a rock quarry, and then they continued to cut out the interior for this exhibit. So inside this rock it is really cold and they have projectors which project a painting of Paul Cezzane's work on the rock wall. The entire place is dark and there are tons of these projections all over the place. The colores from the paintings light up the walls and reflect all over the place. His painting are really something!! It is a huge room and the demensions of the rock walls make the paintings look 3D. The projections change all the time so the paintings are always moving. It is a little hard to explain but I hope you can start to imagine it. Some of the paintings are projected onto the ground so you can walk on them. This place was so amazing. The entire city is stratigically placed on a mountain ontop of massive rocks.
We also stopped on the way at different things like a windmill to see the view of the country side. It was a great day. I hope I explained it okay for you all.

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