Mining the Diaries 79: France 2011
Hotel le Colbert, Avignon, 10th March 2011
The Hotel le Colbert, in a narrow, quiet and shuttered back street, is independent and unpretentious. The warm welcome yesterday was reflected in the décor of reds, ochres and yellows. Our room has rough plastered sienna walls, a marble fireplace, dark pine furniture, fittings in vaguely medieval ironwork, huge theatrical posters (Lucia de Lammermoor and Elektra pierced by spikes) and a faux antique hat rack advertising ‘Bistrotot de Pari’. The plumbing is unreliable. It feels pleasantly like a bohemian student bed-sit rather than a hotel room.
This morning an excellent breakfast – cheeses, apple pancakes, croissants, breads, jam, honey, orange juice and lots of coffee. The stylish crockery is Provençale yellow; ancient tools and instruments hang from the rough stone walls.
We spent a long day exploring this city of mellow honey coloured stone and leafless pale –trunked planes, it looked its best in the sharp March sunlight under an azure sky. Sunny but cool, ideal weather for walking and taking time out on a bench or outside a café to watch the world go slowly by – locals mainly, Avignon was quiet at this early time of year. On the Place du Palais a colourful jolly carousel and a bizarre Bushra Fakhoury elephant sculpture, balanced with acrobatic circus grace on the tip of it trunk, set up a visual dialogue of opposites with the grandeur of the Palais des Papes. Plane trees cast veins of shadows across the shining tessellated cobles along the Rue des Teinturiers (Dyers Street). Our wandering eventually brought us to the four arches of the Pont d’Avignon, immortalised now as a nursery rhyme based on a song from a late 19th century operetta by Adolphe Adam.
Dinner at Le Petit Bedon. I chose, Pieds et Paquets a la Baronnies, made with the feet and stomach of young sheep; interesting and worth trying, once.