France

Arles – Early in the Morning

Good morning Arles! We need to move our car by 9 am so we treasured our time and woke up early. Breakfast was included and started at 7 am; we were right on time! Breakfast was adequate and not bad in choices.

It was our first time having French yogurt and it was so good….not as thick as the yogurt we had back home and not as sour! We loved the pineapple yogurt!

We quickly ate and walked out to the amphitheater for day time photos. The streets were so serene in the early morning! The sun just hit the old yellowish stone walls of the houses.

It was so peaceful that I really enjoyed the charming old streets and houses.

Another church across from the amphitheater, not sure its name:

There it is, the Arles Amphitheater in the early morning!

We arrived late last night where the cafes were nearly empty and so in the morning, I wondered does Arles ever get busy and how does it look when filled with people?

See the tall pole on the left and a short pole right in the middle of the road from the photo below? That is one of the limited access road that you’ll need to punch in the code on that tall pole and then the short pole will lower so your car can pass. Then, it will raise back up again. The center of Arles is filled with those limited access roads! I strongly recommend that you stay outside of the old town if you have a rental car so it’s easier to find parking and the hotel! The old town is charming, don’t get me wrong, but was a pain for us to get in with our car!

I got this map from the hotel, as you can see the red block on the map, those are the limited access roads….I think it’s impossible to get into the center!

More houses and streets that we enjoyed photographing.

Also, around the corner is another Roman amphitheater – Théâtre Antique d’Arles:

We were too early so nothing was open at that time so we walked back to the Arleas Amphitheater and did a whole loop around its circumference.

Different section had a different feel to it due to the angle of the sun light!

The wall of this house is very strange, are those cardboard boxes?

The houses surrounding the amphitheater are beautiful!

You can walk around the outside circumference of the amphitheater in probably in less than 10 minutes but we spent an hour at least because of those old beautiful streets and houses!

The whole old town is yellowish in color and has a sleepy feel like walking in the dream!

A closer look of the Arles Amphitheater:

It was like 8:15 so we walked back to the hotel, checked out, rolled our luggage to our car, and left Arles to head Carcassonne. Bye-bye Arles, it was nice meeting you! The only regret I had with Arles was that we didn’t get to visit any of the sites that Van Gogh painted like the Van Gogh cafe, the L’Espace Van Gogh (hospital where he stayed and painted the interior courtyard but it was closed for renovation), and the bridge…..maybe next time!

2 thoughts on “Arles – Early in the Morning

  1. I know what you mean about the pole in the middle of the road. I sat on one right across the big fountain in Aix-en-Provence while my hubby was trying to take a picture of me. A man in a car was coming straight at me and honking his car horn. I was surprised because he was not driving on the road so I stood up and then I saw the pole I was sitting on went down. Little did I know until you explained what that pole was for. :)) Thanks Yi.

Leave a Reply