We decided to take it easy today and follow Rick Steves’ tour route through Aix; it’s all inside the city (half inside the old walls, and half outside). We also had a lunch date scheduled with our friends from Shir Hadash at home, Kevin and Denise, who are here for a three-week “Living In France” Smithsonian tour.

Naturally, we started the day in search of breakfast. We had croissants, bread, orange juice, and a hot drink at Nino Café on the Cours Mirabeau. Everything was fine except that even though I thought I’d ordered an Americano, they gave me a small expresso, and I felt deprived. We found a solution, though – a nearby Starbucks, where the coffee and tea came in BIG mugs (and the barista was American).

Rick Steves’ tour started at La Rotonde (the fountain near the Tourist Office); I noticed an anachronistic addition to the statue that I’d missed yesterday.

There weren’t many tourists out early in the morning, so Diane was able to pay her respects to Cezanne without being photobombed.

Thursday is France’s national day of remembrance for the Armenian genocide of 1915; Aix has a permanent statue near the Tourist Office to commemorate the genocide.

The tour took us down the shady side of the Cours Mirabeau, and we saw the companion statue to the one for Arts and Sciences that we’d seen yesterday.

One of the few places that was open today was the Caumont Center d’Art in the Mazarin Quarter; they’re between exhibitions, but they did have one piece from the upcoming event in their courtyard.

We stopped (again) at the Fountain of the Four Dolphins on our way back to our hotel.

Kevin had suggested we meet them at the most appropriate possible place for Silicon Valley dwellers – le Marche de Pomme. We all stayed outside, though.

They’d made reservations for the four of us at a lovely small restaurant a few blocks from our hotel, La Brocherie. The food was delicious, as was the wine, and the company was excellent.

After lunch, we resumed our tour, returning to the Cours Mirabeau to visit Good King René, the final king of Provence before it became part of France.

We continued onward to the square containing the Palais of Justice and the Église de la Madeline, then further to the Place d’Albertas and Place Hôtel de Ville.

Rick Steves’ tour ended at the Cathedral of Saint-Sauveur, where they had just finished with Easter celebrations and were getting ready for a special event marking the death of Pope Francis earlier today, so parts of the Cathedral were closed in preparation. It’s a very large cathedral, built up over many centuries, with many architectural styles visible.

We weren’t quite ready to go back to our hotel, so we stopped in the Museum of Tapestries (one of the few other museums open today).

When we were almost back to the hotel, we finally had a chance to visit our neighborhood church, Saint-Jean-de-Malte; when we’d tried before, either the doors were closed or they were holding services.

Kevin and Denise had praised another restaurant they’d found, Le Petit Verdot, so we went there for dinner – it was a couple of blocks from the Cathedral, but that was OK…we need the exercise! We’d made reservations for 7pm and were the first people there, but the place was nearly full half-an-hour later. It was delicious and reasonably priced; the waitress was even kind enough to let me confirm that we had a reservation and give her my name in French before switching to English. :-)

As a long-time IBMer, I have a hard time pronouncing “Aix” as anything other than the three letters. But here in France, it’s pronounced “X”, and we’re here for a couple of days.

We left the S.S. Catherine a few minutes before 9am (the trip was a delight, and not having to get up hellishly early on the last day so the crew could ready the ship for the next batch of guests was an unalloyed pleasure) and took the short walk to the Arles train station.

The trains ran on time, and we were in Aix a few minutes before noon. The weather was nice, so we walked the ten minutes to the Hôtel Cardinal. We left our luggage with the manager and asked for advice about finding a place to eat – we hadn’t passed any on our walk, and I was worried because it’s Easter. The manager told us to go three blocks to the Cours Mirabeau and promised there’d be many places – he also said that they wouldn’t be gourmet experiences. After a week of Uniworld feasts, that wasn’t a problem!

The first place we saw was an Irish pub, but it didn’t really appeal. There were five other places on that side of the block, all of which looked OK, and we chose Bar Le Grillon, went inside (to avoid the smoke outside) and sat down. Our waitress spoke good English and was able to steer us to the Ravioli with Pistou sauce. After we’d ordered, I looked at Tripadvisor and found lots of complaints about the service and attitude, but fortunately, that wasn’t our experience; our food arrived in just a few minutes, and was good but definitely not gourmet…perfect for today.

We were in a little bit of a hurry because we wanted to reach the Tourist Office before they closed for lunch so that we could pick up the information we needed to do the volksmarch, the “In the Footsteps of Cezanne” year-round event. We got there in plenty of time, got the brochure, and went back to the hotel to officially check in and take our luggage to the room.

We finally were ready to go back to the Tourist Office to start the walk; along the way, we saw a couple of Aix’s many fountains.

We also saw a building with a plaque with Hebrew on it, so we took a closer look.

As far as I could tell, the building had been a shul from 1836 to 1952; it’s now the headquarters of the French Protestant Union – it seemed like an interesting reuse.

Once we got to the Tourist Office, it took us a few minutes to figure out exactly where to start the walk and what road to take, but eventually, we were on our way. I’d downloaded the route into my phone as a GPX file, and it was a good thing – the printed map really wasn’t sufficient for someone unfamiliar with the area to follow. The route took us out of the city and to the banks of the River Arc, where Cezanne painted the landscape and the river. Much of the walk was in a park, and other parts were on narrow winding roads and trails; it was just under 12km and took us nearly three hours.

We returned to the Tourist Office, got our books stamped, and headed back to the hotel to rest for a few minutes before going out in search of dinner. We still weren’t looking for anything fancy, and Tripadvisor suggested Pittz, a Middle Eastern falafel place just off the Cours Mirabeau. I wouldn’t make it a regular stop if I lived here, but it was a nice change from heavy European meals.

There’s lots of statuary on the Cours Mirabeau.

Before calling it a night, we walked down to the church at the end of our block, the Eglise et Paroisse Saint-Jean-de-Malte. They were holding services there, so we didn’t go in…maybe tomorrow.