Fezzik In Paris

I have been mulling over what to write about Avignon and find myself somewhat stuck; it’s not that there’s not much to say (we were there for three days), but I wound up taking a startling number of pictures on this trip, 237, and uploading 30-odd of them in the attached gallery.

As a side note, as someone who shot on film for a non-zero length of time, the digital photography revolution (recursive side note: I hate how fucking everything having to do with a consumer-level technology change is termed “the x revolution;” at best, the vast majority of the changes in question are evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary, but then again, nobody is calling for a pedantry revolution, so I may be out on my own here. Of course, this is pretty much the dictionary definition of a bandwagoning fallacy, so fuck it, we’re back: here comes the pedantry revolution) has done weird things to the number of pictures you take; when I was in Germany during the summer of 2000 (with my spiffy Pentax SLR), I came home with three rolls of film. That’s all of seventy-two pictures (probably 76, given that I always shot to the very end of the film strip, probability of said negatives being interrupted by a large piece of tape be damned); I used a single roll of black and white exclusively in Berlin, a roll of 400 ISO Kodak for general use, and a roll of 1600 ISO film that the father of a friend of mine gave me, the results of which I don’t really remember beyond the fact that the film wasn’t quite as low-light friendly as he’d led me to believe.

I’ve had the Nikon for well under a year now, and there are just over 3300 images in my lightroom library. As any one of the very few people that have access to the raw picture dump know, that’s not to say that these photos are worth anything; there’s three or four versions of the same thing, shot at slightly different angles, with slightly different focal points, or with slightly different framing. There are pictures of things that are hardly photo-worthy (see: stinky mattresses). There are pictures of buses, of pigeons, of window latches, of barges, of things that, before the move to digital, one would not take pictures of. I’m sure the signal-to-noise ratio is worse, but that’s where things are. It’s weird.

In any case, I’d posit that I have a valid excuse for this embarrassment of photographic riches (quantitative, not qualitative riches): for the entirety of the weekend, the light was near-perfect.

A nuclear power plant as seen from the train.

Holy shit! Carrefour comes in biggie size!

The answer to the question: “How exactly does a walled medieval city core work in the age of the automobile?”

The Purrito digs mountains.

The medieval Fort Saint-André. We’ll very likely visit (and go to the abbey behind said fort) should we return to the region.

Atop the city wall.

The remains of Pont Saint-Bénézet, as seen from atop the Avignon wall. The bridge originally terminated at the tower seen in the background.

An interesting drainage pipe.

Old bridge. New cars.

The outer setion of the pont is unfortunately under construction, so we couldn’t peer over the edge.

Pigeon!

Always interesting (and, no, this isn’t sarcastic): the bridge piers.

The city as seen from the pont.

It makes sense that one would build a walled, high-value, river-controlling city on an imposing limestone outcrop.

The Palais des Papes, home to seven popes (and two antipopes) until the papacy was returned to Rome at the resolution of the Great Schism.

Weird.

An inner courtyard.

This guy took a crossbow bolt to the brainstem while defending the palais during one of the sieges.

A random window.

One of the sub-floor vaults in which the church’s loot was stored.

A big damn hallway for big damn services.

Overlooking the courtyard.

If archers used fisheyes to aim.

The view from the papal wave-to-the-unwashed-masses window.

A passage on the south side of the Palais des Papes.

This pipe is awesome.

Very artistic, no?

As the day wore on, the streets were shut to automobile traffic and inundated with people.

…a stop sign?

The path leading up to the gardens on the north side of the papal palace.

The very top of the gardens.

“Get down from there!” “But moooooom…”

Sheep sheep sheep.

This dickmonster was apparently given to the sad archaeology museum by the Louvre.

Avignon’s station is both aesthetically pleasing and surprisingly modern.

That’s my ride home.