Antique markets, antique theater...

We awoke to our first full day in Provence. The sky was crystal clear blue with clouds hugging the summit of Mt Ventoux. The Mistral was the blowing this year, so it was too cold to have breakfast in the garden. So we enjoyed our breakfast of coffee, croissants, yogurts, fresh fruit, walnuts, honey and fresh orange juice in the dining room.

It was a Sunday, the day of famous weekly antiques market in L'Isle sur Sorgue. So on to L'isle sur Sorgue we went. The market is quite well known, and gets packed with people on the hunt for beautiful and interesting objects (i.e, antiques). The whole town was packed with vendors selling everything from furniture, to prints, to old copper cooking pans, and various odd and unique old objects (antiques) plus the usual market stuff of fruits, vegetables, cheese, sausage, etc. We had a good laugh at the manequin pis a vendor had set up on a pool filled with canned drinks for sale. Antique and culinary treasures were found at every turn we took. I drooled over several Louis XIV chairs we came across (another obsession of mine, though i may be mixing up my Louis)... and fantasized about being able to purchase a pair to ship back home. Fantasies are great, but as my husband would say "Champagne tastes, beer budget".


After the market, we jumped back in the car and headed to Orange, to visit the ancient roman amphitheater, Le Theatre Antique. According to their website and my guidebook, it's the best preserved Roman theater of it's kind in Europe. Dating back to the 1st century BC, and it's still used for performances to this day. The theater is quite an impressive site the stage wall is 37 meters high and 107 meters wide. The audioguide tour was both entertaining and enlightnening. We easily spent an hour and half listening to the history, the stage mechanics, the social hierarchy of the seating, and the development of theater in the time of Roman rule. As we reached the top seating tier, we both admired the views and I fought off my mild case of vertigo. Long legs are great for ascending, but not so wonderful for descending.