France 2005

These photos were taken during a holiday trip to the South of France in July 2005. All the photos were taken with a Canon IXUS 40 camera.

The full-size photos are also available as a single zip file. (The photos on this page are also linked to the full-size versions.)

In case you prefer seeing only one image at a time, this page has a projection style sheet. (Supported in eg. the full screen mode of Opera.)

Layover in Brussels

Worship Services upstairs

The Catholic chapel

By this time I was expecting to see the shrine of Our Lady of Europe. I was a bit disappointed to see only this. I guess the shrine of Our Lady of Europe is in the Trans-Atlantic terminal.

I am not making this up!

The consultant was not in.

I am not making this up, either! The literature in the waiting room of the Moral consultant was in Finnish.

The Orthodox chapel

The Synagogue

The Mosque

The generic Protestant chapel

GPL

The black helicopters are here!

Lost in the suburbs of Montpellier before resorting to GPS navigation

The view out of the hotel window in Montpellier

A French highway. Compared to California, the road tolls were very frequent and annoying. And France is supposed to be a country where there is taxation.

Narbonne

Cathedral of St. Just in Narbonne

The cathedral was tall but short.

In the treasury of the cathedral there was a Dutch tapestry (no photo) depicting the creation. There were seven groups of three crowned men. Apparently, they represented God as the Trinity on seven days. Interestingly enough, the Jesus and Holy Spirit personalities of God were not represented the usual way they are represented in isolation. Instead, there were three identical men in each group.

In the spirit of fair and balanced, I guess I need to show this after showing photos of American signs. This one has more legal stuff on it.

On the road to Fontfroide

We hiked up there later on.

L’Abbaye de Fontfroide is a former monastery.

There was an obligatory guided tour that was too long.

The chapel of the monastery.

There was a rose garden.

A view to the side while hiking up to the cross

The hiking trail

The monastery

Taken from the top of the hill with the cross. This panorama is also available as a QuickTime VR panorama (5.1 MB).

Taken from the same hilltop to the other direction. This panorama is also available as a QuickTime VR panorama (3.8 MB).

Another castle

Random ruins

The road to Carcassonne

Carcassonne

The main gate of Carcassonne.

The Basilica of St. Nazaire & Celse in Carcassonne

The church is always assigned to the Roman Catholic cult.

On the road though the Pays Cathare. The Cathars practiced a flavor of Christianity that was not approved by the Catholic Church. They rejected the Catholic sacraments, for example. The most fatal heresy, however, was that they refused to pay taxes to the Pope. They also thought oaths were a sin, which was bad for commerce. The monks of Fontfroide were ordered to convert the Cathars to vanilla Catholicism. They were unsuccessful. Hence, in the 13^th century Pope Innocent III (gotta love the audacity of Papal names) ordered a crusade against the Cathars—the only crusade in Europe. The Cathars refused to convert and were massacred. After the genocide, there are no Cathars left, but the region has been branded as the Cathar Land for tourism purposes.

The Castle of Peyrepertuse as seen from a distance. The Castle of Peyrepertuse is one of the “Five Sons of Carcassonne”. They were used for guarding the border when the border with Aragon (Spain) was here.

The Castle of Peyrepertuse closer up

Duilhac-sous-Peyrepertuse

The start of the hiking trail up to the castle

A view from the hiking trail to the valley

Up in the castle

The upper part of the castle

The lower part of the castle

This staircase probably does not conform to any accessibility standard.

A panoramic view from the upper part of the castle. Also available as a QuickTime VR panorama (3.4 MB).

The lower part of the castle

A 360° panoramic view form even higher up in the upper part of the castle. Also available as a QuickTime VR panorama (3.4 MB). A panning video from the same spot: Motion JPEG in a QuickTime container (15.3 MB) or DivX in an AVI container (820 KB).

Hiking back down

The castle as seen from near the start of the hiking trail

But in Mäyry there’s no wine.

A castle here, a castle there

We had dinner here.

Back in Carcassonne

The old city of Carcassonne

Why do foreign faucets have to be so impractical? (At least on the Brussels airport they had Finnish faucets.)

This has to be the largest chunk of legal stuff ever on a sign in a “green space” aka. park.

The forum of Nîmes

The forum was closed due to a concert!

La Maison carrée turned out to be a rectangular house.

This is what happens when you don’t have those “Don’t block intersection” signs.

The fountain

There were a lot of men playing pétanque.

Performers (?) with unusual outfits near la Maison carrée

There had been bombings in London. The Londoners appeared very calm and called the attack “inevitable”—in stark contrast with Americans characterizing 9/11 “unimaginable”. (See also: A video clip of outrageous commentary on Fox News.)

Pond du Gard is a Roman aqueduct that was built to get water to Nîmes.

“À vingt mètres, au rond-point, prenez la deuxième sortie.” The rented Citroën C5 had NAVTEQ on Board. The system was extremely useful—especially in cities where we lacked detailed paper maps. I think this is one of the key features you want to have in a rented car in addition to air conditioning and automatic transmission. (This car did not have automatic transmission, because renting a car with automatic transmission is expensive in France. The anti-automatic attitude in Europe annoys me.)

I think having this kind of navigation systems in cars makes streets addresses more important and will make coordinates enter the mainstream. Hotels on the outskirts of cities should have the municipal council (or whatever) give them a real street address that can be entered in a navigation system. Also, advertising for and tourist guides about castles or other tourist sites that are in the middle of nowhere outside any particular city or village should include GPS-compatible coordinates. I don’t care what Michelin map square a castle is in. I want the coordinates.

There were a couple of problems. First, due to the limited screen, the system had no means of previewing the planned route on the map. Second, the CD of cartographic data had to be in the CD slot during the guidance preventing the use of music CDs at the same time. As far as I can tell, there no sound technical reason why a car couldn’t contain enough solid state memory for caching a CD of data. I guess they just don’t want people to copy data from one CD into many cars. It always annoys me when something is made impractical due to copy protection.

Le Pont d’Avignon

The Papal Palace in Avignon

There was no imminent treat, but one of the Popes wanted to have city walls just in case.

The Papal Palace

The palace was rather unglamorous inside.

Performers down in front of the palace

The Small Papal Palace.

The angel of Announcement in the Small Papal Palace

One of the numerous similar group portraits with an anachronistic crowd. Jesus is depicted as a baby but John the Baptist is usually (like here) depicted as a grown man. Not to mention the other by-standers.