Yesterday marks the end of my third week here in Aix-en-Provence, and I still absolutely feel like I’m just beginning to get acquainted with the city. It’s a breathtaking and funny little place. Architecturally, the impression it gives is that it’s full of endless yellowed walls punctuated by green shutters and red clay rooftops, exaggerated fountain faces that spurt drinkable water, huge cathedrals that somehow suddenly appear from around corners, and boutique after boutique, café after café. There are no skyscrapers here, and most buildings don’t reach above three or four stories, but somehow the narrow streets make one feel much more enclosed than in big, car-friendly roads back at home. You can’t see farther down the cobblestones than a few hundred feet ahead of you at a time, because the alleys twist and turn and climb and fall and dead end and disappear behind rows of restaurant awnings. Except when they suddenly open out onto busy market squares!
View down la rue from IAU
And I could swear the streets rearrange themselves as if by magic. My friends and I have been up and down the roads in the immediate vicinity of our school dozens of times. We were just starting to feel as though we know them. But this past Saturday, scouting for an economical restaurant (one day a week, our hosts do not provide us dinner), we went to pass through what we thought was a row of little shops, the kind that would be closed at dinner time on Saturday—only to discover a maze of brightly colored tables and menus and waiters greeting us as we approached. In fact, sometimes the very best way of finding perfect places is to look exactly where you expect them not to be. To romanticize the experience, it’s like the part in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass when Alice can only get closer to the Red Queen’s hill by heading off in completely the opposite direction. It’s delightful!
So that’s the way Aix feels. But let me give you some more concrete facts about the city. Below, you will find the map IAU gave us students to find our way around.
So that’s the way Aix feels. But let me give you some more concrete facts about the city. Below, you will find the map IAU gave us students to find our way around.
The main street of the town is le Cours Mirabeau, a big, broad boulevard: the Champs Élysées of Aix-en-Provence (see where I've circled the Cours above). There are fancy, expensive restaurants at the higher end, as well as Michel, the papeterie (paper and office supply store) where students buy their pencils and notebooks. A statue of Roi Réné of Anjou, 15th-century King of Naples and Aragon, Duke of Provence, presides over a fountain at the very top of the Cours. Further along down Mirabeau are the Monoprix (a pricey but convenient department/grocery store), several banks, and tourist-trap boutiques where one can shell out 60 or 70 Euro for designer sunglasses, more for boots, etc. There’s a second fountain in the middle of the Cours, draped with bright green moss, and offering naturally heated spring water. And the third, most celebrated, fountain is the big one in the center of la Rotonde, the roundabout at the opposite end of the Cours from Roi Réné. Beyond la Rotonde is the modern shopping center of Aix, which features big-name stores like Guess and H&M and Clarks shoes and the like.
le Cours Mirabeau
Branching south of the Cours Mirabeau are grayer, emptier streets, which form a fairly regular grid. That’s where one will mostly just find doors into apartments and office buildings. Aix is a major movie-watching town in France, and the three local cinemas are on the south side: the Renoir, the Mazarin, and the Cézanne (French films and foreign films shown in original versions with French subtitles, both are shown). Branching off to the north is where the magic of the older city happens, complete with all the clever winding streets that please me so.
We at IAU are especially lucky. Our school is located at the center of old Aix, practically where the town was founded by the Romans back in 122 BC. As you can see on the map (I’ve circled it in black), IAU’s main center is on the Rue du Bon Pasteur. It’s housed in what used to be a chapel, and just down the street from the impressive Cathédrale Saint-Sauveur, which stands where the Roman forum did, more than 2000 years ago. But more on the history of Aix-en-Provence is to come in further entries, as I learn about it in my courses!
We at IAU are especially lucky. Our school is located at the center of old Aix, practically where the town was founded by the Romans back in 122 BC. As you can see on the map (I’ve circled it in black), IAU’s main center is on the Rue du Bon Pasteur. It’s housed in what used to be a chapel, and just down the street from the impressive Cathédrale Saint-Sauveur, which stands where the Roman forum did, more than 2000 years ago. But more on the history of Aix-en-Provence is to come in further entries, as I learn about it in my courses!
Fountain of Roi Réné
Aix is home to just about 140,000 Aixois, making it actually a few thousand people bigger than my hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania. But its lack of modern skyscrapers and congested roadways tricks me into thinking of it as smaller, more like State College, Pennsylvania, the town of barely 40,000 that lies adjacent to Penn State University. To offer a different perspective: at one of the Early Arrival Week events (organized by IAU in cooperation with a nearby French college, Institut d’Études Politiques), I met a French girl from a truly small town who described coming to Aix as going to the big city.
Socio-economically, the city is a confusing jumble of wealthy businesspeople and tourists contrasted with humble students such as the French girl I met and myself. Apartments in the middle of Aix-en-Provence are some of the most expensive in France, less costly only than those in Paris. But the numerous institutes and universities here make Aix also a college town. Besides IAU and IUP, Aix hosts study abroad programs from Vanderbilt, Princeton, and Wellesley, three separate branches of the Université Aix-Marseille (the largest public university in France), the Institut de l’Aménagement Régional, and several other schools for advanced training in art, the humanities, law, political science, foreign languages, and more. Because living in the middle of town is so costly, most of IAU’s students live a 15-25 minute walk outside of the main city. I live to the north of town (indicated by the arrow on the map).
Socio-economically, the city is a confusing jumble of wealthy businesspeople and tourists contrasted with humble students such as the French girl I met and myself. Apartments in the middle of Aix-en-Provence are some of the most expensive in France, less costly only than those in Paris. But the numerous institutes and universities here make Aix also a college town. Besides IAU and IUP, Aix hosts study abroad programs from Vanderbilt, Princeton, and Wellesley, three separate branches of the Université Aix-Marseille (the largest public university in France), the Institut de l’Aménagement Régional, and several other schools for advanced training in art, the humanities, law, political science, foreign languages, and more. Because living in the middle of town is so costly, most of IAU’s students live a 15-25 minute walk outside of the main city. I live to the north of town (indicated by the arrow on the map).
In essence, here in Aix, one comes into contact with rich and poor, ancient and modern, science and art, all mixed together. To use a term understood by both English-speakers and French-speakers, the city is a mélange of overlapping lifestyles. Maybe it’s a cliché for an American to go to Europe and find him- or herself struck by how centuries of life have built up on top of each other in a single little city older (by millennia!) than the entire United States. But there is truth to that cliché. And with its winding streets and water features, Aix is charming, more so than I dared to hope it would be.
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P.S. The word ruelle, in the title of this post, translates to "alley" or "backstreet", just so you know!
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P.S. The word ruelle, in the title of this post, translates to "alley" or "backstreet", just so you know!