My travel adventures have, as of yesterday, come to an end. It was a bittersweet ending to it all, but I have thoroughly enjoyed the chance to discover four different countries across Europe during my stay here. The travel adventure in the South of France and the eastern cost of Spain was interesting, convivial, and, not to mention, French. Just like my experience in London, almost everything was done in French, making it perhaps less authentic than I would have liked. That did not, however, keep me from enjoying it. Little things spoke to me as I hung out with my orchestra colleagues.
The Orchestre Symphonique de la Haute Mayenne is more than an organization; it's a family of people who gather weekly not only for the music but for enjoying one another's company. That is something I haven't ever seen in the States. I suppose it has to be very French for it to be so convivial. It certainly is a testament to the French lifestyle of living healthy and happy lives. The conviviality of the group helped make this trip a thoroughly worthwhile experience.
We started out early on Saturday morning, heading to the Gare de Laval, where we would board our TGV train for Avignon. TGV trains still excite me just as they did when I arrived in France on my very first day in September. I love reveling in French superiority when it comes to high speed rail, because they really are among the best in that area. (They are in other things like healthcare, too. But that's for another time.) Our train arrived in Avignon after five hours of traveling, where it was pretty hot. And we transferred to the autocar (bus) to take us to Goudargues, where we played our first concert at a Roman church in the area.
Goudargues is actually in the South of France and it is a very beautiful town. It's actually where our conductor grew up. It was such a balmy and sunny day in the South of France, and I relished every minute of being in that area of the country. (In fact, I'm recognizing how many times I've actually traversed the country and how many areas I've actually seen. Pretty cool.) Our concert went okay. Unfortunately, due to the reverberations of this old church, it was extremely difficult to stay together, and I found myself struggling through. I wasn't the only one in any case. The people of the town provided us with a beautiful dinner with pate, couscous salads, and various other things from the South of France.
The next day, after spending a night in a Formule 1 hotel, we crossed the border into Spain, traversing the Pyrenees, which was very enjoyable. We went to the Dali Museum in Figeras, which was a shrine to surrealism. As much as I tried to get into surrealism, it didn't really work. I enjoy psychoanalysis in literature, but when it comes to art, it's very hard to understand certain things from a psychoanalytic perspective in surrealism. The art is very exaggerated, very out of real life, almost in another world. Perhaps, however, it goes into a deeper part of reality that which lies within the human psyche. That makes it more difficult to figure out. That's the reason why I was rather perplexed upon leaving the museum. Nevertheless, it was interesting. After the museum, we checked into our hotel in Lloret de Mar, the Aquarium.
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