Recently, I was lucky enough to go to the Fete des Lumieres in Lyon, France. I had learned a bit abot it three years ago and it was one of the reasons that I decided to come study abroad in the winter, so that I would be able to attend. What I didn’t know is that it is the third largest festival in the world! The first two being Rio Carnival and Oktoberfest. It was estimated that last year over 4 million people came for the four day festival. And judging from how many people I saw, I would believe it!

The festival is a devotion to the Virgin Mary who in 1643 when the village was struck by the plague, supposedly saved the entire city from ruin. The original date of the festival is December the 8^th and that tends to be the peak point of the festival, but now it is a four day event starting on the sixth and ending on the ninth. I really enjoyed it because what they do is cast light onto their most important buildings and create shows using the lights.

Every year ne of the major squares called the Place des Terreaux, does a different themed light show. This year was the Little Prince which is a very popular French children’s story! I have read it many times and really enjoy it so I was excited to see it in show form! It was a bit different than I expected but it was an absolutely gorgeous show! The abilities that they can do with projections and light amazes me!

I also really liked walking around the city at night because of how elaborate the shops and roads become filled with Christmas lights and candles. It is a Lyonnais tradition that every house put out candles or lights in their windows and then leaves to walk around the city. It was absolutely gorgeous but there were a lot of people and the center of Lyon has very tiny streets!

If you go to this festival make sure you book your hotel about a year in advance so as to be in the city limits. At night because of there being so many people, they shut down the city and make it impossible for cars to get in and out, so you have to take the trains to get out of the city. It was really an amazing trip and I wish that we had been there for longer. I can’t wait to go back again someday!

So I decided it would be nice to do a blog about the Christmas traditions here in Aix because they are interesting and so different from ours in the US. One of the most southern things about France at Christmas time is that there are a ton of Christmas markets! It is kind of like a Saturday market but open from mid-November until Christmas. Here in Aix they do a a sort of fair where there are rides for the younger kids. They also have special foods like vin chaud d’Alsace which is hot wine with extra spices from the Alsace region of France. Alsace along with Lorraine were sections of France that were added later, so a lot of French people do not consider these regions as being a “real part of France”. They were under control of Germany before and therefore have very strong German influences. There are also other special Christmas foods like cotton candy which are called Santa beards, sugar covered sweet pretzels, and chocolate heads which are a waffle cracker with a big marshmallow on it covered in chocolate. I can say that I have tried them all, and they are all very good! I have even tried a pomme d’amour or “apple of love” which is a candied apple. It is named after the Disney movie Snow White where the witch candies a green apple very red for Snow White and only True Love can break the spell of the sleeping death!

One of the most Provencal decorations for Christmas here are Santons. Santons are hand sculpted clay figurines that are then painted by hand. The way that you start a collection here is pretty interesting. The first year you are supposed to buy the nativity scene with the basic Mary, Joseph, baby Christ in the manger, the donkey, the cow, and the angel plus the barn. This is a pretty expensive investment, as because everything is made by hand to get just those basics is about the US equivalent of about a hundred dollars. It is a very expensive collection! The year after you buy the basics, you are supposed to buy the three wise men and the angel. Then the following years you buy one item to add to your collection. One figurine is anywhere from 6-12 euros each, so it is more do-able after you have the initial start up. At all of the Christmas markets here you can easily find Santons. They are breakable so I haven’t bought any and don’t plan on it before I leave, but they are very fun to look at in each shop. They come in different sizes and are very cool!

Another tradition here, it planting wheat on the fourth of December which is the day of the feast of Saint Barbe. The idea of planting wheat is that if it grows tall by Christmas, then the next harvest in France will be bountiful. But it also predicts if you will have good fortune in the coming year. Traditionally, you also are supposed to put the grown wheat on the table as a centerpiece on Christmas day or you can use it to decorate your nativity scene. My host mom planted hers with my host brother, who is her grandson. I am kind of excited to watch it grow because I wonder how quickly or how tall it will really grow! My host mom says it should be more than 5 inches tall before I leave in two weeks so it must grow fast!

Yesterday was the last trip that I am taking with the school here. Our first stop was the Carrieres de Lumieres in Les Baux-de-Provence. It was kind of a cool as they projected art onto all of the walls and the floor of the quarry. It was super windy and also cold there because we were up in the Alpines. The monument was really pretty because they project art onto all of the walls and the floor of the quarry. These quarries were dug to extract the white limestone used to build the castle and the town of Les Baux. In 1935, the economic competition of modern materials led to the closure careers. After that the quarries were abandoned until the 60’s when they were rediscovered by Jean Cocteau. It wasn’t really until the 70’s though that they really started using it as a monument. It was really hard to take pictures of but I did get a few decent ones, taking pictures of art is pretty hard. The theme of the monument changes pretty often but when we were there it was the Artists of the Mediterranean. It was pretty amazing to walk around because they would take the original images and sometimes include animations that enhanced the artwork. They also accompanied it with music which made it a lot more interesting to walk around and see. The show lasted about forty minutes and was on a constant repeat.

Then we arrived in the city of L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue which is a small town in the Vaucluse department of Provence. It is a really cute town that has a lot of canals and foot bridges as well as water wheels. I saw about four water wheels which still work. Though I haven’t been to Italy the town reminded me of it a lot because of all the bridges and canals. The town is also famous for its antique shops and antiques market that happen on most Sundays. It also has a lot of waterside café’s and restaurants though most of them were closed with it being winter. I heard that there are usually more people there during the summer time but with it being winter the tourism season is mostly over. We were there on the market days so I got to walk around and look at all the different shops.

The next stop was the Fontaine de Vaucluse. This was also a really small town with not very many inhabitants at all. The town is built around a spring in a valley at the foot of the Vaucluse Mountains. The spring is the source of the river in the town we had just been in which is the Sorgue River. The spring is the largest in France and is also the fifth largest in the world. I would have liked to get a really good look at it but because we are on the schools insurance policy during these trips they didn’t let us actually see the spring. They only let us get to where the water level would be in the Spring. They told us that the water is so cold and so deep that if you didn’t die from the fall or drowning, you would die from freezing to death as the water is extremely cold. I wasn’t so upset about not seeing it as I am sure being as clumsy as I am, I would have fallen in. It was also very steep.

Then after that, we walked back into town with the promise of going to a French Resistance museum and if we had time a paper mill. The French resistance museum was kind of interesting because it showed how the French resistance during World War II occupation would make the most out of ever resource that they had. They would make candles out of meat grease and also use water from boiling pasta to make soup. It was an interesting museum but after we were done with it we didn’t have time for the paper mill.

Finally, it was about time to leave so we headed back to the bus. I bought some postcards and then also we were looking at a chichi stand. Chichi’s are a kind of beignets that I guess are really popular to the region. One of the adults said that they are made from fried garbanzo beans. But I couldn’t find anything out about them. They definitely didn’t taste like beans though. One of the adults let us try one and they were like doughnuts. They also were kind of like elephant ears but more fluffy and covered in sugar. I really liked them! After that our day was over and we were bused back to Aix!