It's Been A While.

So I cannot even remember where I last left off, but there is no way that I will be able to update about everything. I think going to France for 10 days and making the transition to the Ukraine are the two biggest events that have occurred since my last post.

At midterm I had a few exams to take care of and they went fine, and then our whole group took a 10 day trip to S. France. We left on a Friday and traveled all night from Holland, through Belgium and Luxembourg and down through France until we hit the Mediterranean Sea at Marseilles, France. If that was a run on sentence I don't care. We took a bus and so the drive was about 18 hours from 8pm through to the next morning. This was my first experience with the Med. Sea, and all I can say is that it was phenomenally beautiful! We spent 2.5 days in Marseilles seeing a ton of sights. The whole week we were in France we might of had all of 3-4 hours of down time, not including sleeping. We spent most of our days from 7am until 9pm going all over to different historical and monumental sights and taking as many pictures as possible.

Some of the mentionable sights we saw in Marseilles were some greek and roman ruins, Chateau D'if Prison, some underground catacombs/ sarcophagi, and spending an evening sunset on the Med. Sea. After a couple days in Marseilles we then made a short 40 kilometer jaunt to a town called Aix en Province, and that was home base for the rest of the week. The place that we stayed was nothing less of a French Chateau. We each stayed in rooms for two people each and the entire property was incredible. The image above is the front of the Chateau. Unfortunately our jam packed days did not allow us to spend much time there.

While in Aix en Province we visited a number of the surrounding towns and sights. My favorite town was Arles. This is the place that Van Gogh cut off his ear and painted many of his works. While touring the town we stopped by the Van Gogh Cafe and a couple roman amphitheaters. If any of you have seen the movie "Ronin" with Robert De Niro, you might remember a part of the movie filmed in a roman amphitheater. The part of the movie where De Niro gets shot. That was the same one we visited. The town was sweet to say the least.

--SIDENOTE: Pictures of my trip to France will be posted shortly on Facebook. Stay tuned.

On the trip home from visiting one of the local towns we noticed an amazing opportunity that we convinced our leaders to let us stop to take a gander. This would be a level Aqueduct built by the romans. Furthermore the timing could not be better seeing as it was right around sunset. I collected a few rocks from the base of the Aqueduct that are not only ancient and astheically pleasing, but were also free.

There is much more to talk about, but I think I have already lost half of my readers with the length of this post. So I will leave an update on Ukraine until next time.

Tootaloo,
-Joel