Look Down and see the beggars at your feet.

Maybe you get that reference ;)





They're partout (everywhere) in the middle of the city. Today I was out in search of chocolate with a friend (oh, the dark chocolate is so delicious here). We ran into a very "shee-shee" tourist shop and found some lovely gourmet chocolates. We pulled the lever gently to release one or two pieces for each of us... voila! maybe 40-50 olive-shaped chocolates landed in our bags. We could not put them back and were too intimidated by the "proprietaire" to leave so we bought the 10 euro's worth of chocolates. Trying to be good, we decided we needed to distribute the chocolates to our classmates toute-de-suite= right away so as to not devour them all in one sitting. But one of many homeless men passed our way and we decided to give him the very expensive bag of candies. He was delighted.





I went dancing on the Pont d'Avignon on Sunday. There's a small price but it was free this weekend due to les Jours de Patrimoine. I don't think anyone else was very into it, but as I said, the song says, we have to dance there! I'll post a picture, but here's the history behind the bridge which, yes Ceri, does not traverse the river.





Le Pont d'Avignon is officially known as le Pont St. Benezet (accent aigu's on the first two e's of course). In the 12th century he had some sort of dream or "divine inspiration" to build a bridge which would connect this part of town to Lyon on the opposite side of the Rhone river. The Rhone at the time posed a large blockade for travelers and merchants. The bridge was mocked, but Benezet eventually convinced the townsmen to help him out. The Pont had 22 arches at its completion, but years of continual flooding eroded a majority of them. Today, it has 4 and it's really just a tourist trap. Many a japonais y visite, l'apperail a la main (et la signe de la paix aussi, super-cool ya know). There's a little placard for St. Benezet on the lower part of the bridge- he was burried there at death although I'm not sure if his body has since been excavated. All in all, it's a lovely place to take a picture and feel le Mistral in you hair.

-the other famous bridge with the 2 sets of arches of which you may be familiar (pictures in pretty much every high school french room) is called the Pont du Gaurd and I'll be seeing it on Friday with the architecture class.