Museé Granet/Pizza Capri
Today we visited Museé Granet and explored Aix more thoroughly.
by Vincent & Céleste
We headed over to Pizza Capri, which is a pizza stand with several locations in the city. They serve pizza by the slice, as well as whole pizzas and sandwiches. The stand was very busy when we reached it, and perhaps the French have not perfected the idea of standing in line, because the queue was just a mass of people, waiting to be called on by the waitress, with no order to the chaos. Céleste had a mushroom pizza and Vincent had chorizo. The pizza is served rolled into a wrapper, folded in half. It was warm and delicious, especially on such a chilly day.
Next, we went to the Musée Granet, a museum dedicated to art and sculpture from across several centuries. They had a Rembrandt portrait, some really large sculptures of Greek gods, and tons of paintings by the museums namesake, François Marius Granet, who painted this:
Which features a lady with a pumpkin on her head, so he seemed pretty cool.
The museum also featured a large amount of Roman pieces from the 1st and 2nd centuries. This was by far the best part about the museum. They had urns, tools, carvings, mosaics, and more. It was unbelievable thinking that these objects had been found in the very region we were now living, that this area had once been home to ancient wars, architectural wonders, and gladiators fighting in arenas. There was a mosaic of two gladiators fighting, with one on his knees about to be killed. There was an epitaph of a 20-year-old who had been killed in battle, who had a long list of accomplishments on his tombstone. Seeing the rich history of this region was definitely a highlight of our week.
Note to those considering the Musée Granet: All of the exhibits are in French only.
After visiting the museum we walked around the old town where all the shops are (and so many fountains). We live right in the middle of it all and there’s so many shops. Vincent was looking for a spice shop (épicerie) of which we found a couple to investigate at a later time. We also found our local butcher (boucherie) so we can get fresh meat. There were many more shops, too many to count, for shopping or daily needs. We walked the Cours Mirabeau a few times looking at the restaurants and shops around it. We found the Book In Bar which is a bar frequented by English-speaking folks like ourselves and Vincent was hoping to try working on his laptop while sipping some tea there some days.
The other thing we did was visit a local SFR boutique—just like in the US these are usually licensed resellers. The gentleman inside helped us get a SFR SIM card and told us how to fill it up. Like Vincent outlined in his earlier post, you can buy “a la carte” and prepay each month. Unfortunately to take advantage of the better plans you have to have a French bank account—these are plans like SFR REDcard which offer much better deals than the prepaid cards. If we were staying longer than six months we might have looked into opening an account but that is all we’d need it for. When we paid for the SIM we had to provide an ID so we gave them Vincent’s driver’s license. When we got back home we realized the gentleman had put in Vincent’s name wrong in the system so his middle name was his first name and his first name was his last. When we tried recharging the credit online through the SFR site, it was failing with valid credit card details and we think it’s because it must be sending along the bad name (and perhaps even address) and it’s failing the validation—our bank didn’t have a record of the attempted transactions so it wasn’t even reaching them. Oh well. We visited a tabac shop and bought a refill in person. You get a receipt that has a 10-digit code that you enter online on the SFR portal and it refills your credit.
It was a pretty full day and we took a nap in the afternoon—some of us are still trying to catch up to our new schedule. Tomorrow it’s supposed to rain so maybe we’ll go wander around the streets and find more shops.
