That last entry was skimpy and a half.

Arles was chicken soup for the weary traveler's soul. The night that I got there I sat down to the crappiest croque monseiur this side of the Rhone (which ran right through Arles) while mosquitos amassed atop my feet sucking gleefully at my veins. I didn't care. A nice quiet boulevard and a beautiful sunset. I found out that the reason Cezanne and Van Gogh and other painters liked to come to the south of France to paint was because the quality of the light and the colors it produces are so rich. The sunsets were long and drawn-out and it never got completely black before ten o'clock.

The dorms were closed from 10 AM until 5 PM and so that forced you out onto the street. The curfew was midnight, which normally would have sucked but you don't come to Arles for the nightlife. It was an ungodly sort of hot while I was there and so after a day of walking around stone streets and rarely encountering air conditioning you were too tired to do too much anyhow.

It was cool to see the country version of France, since all I really knew of it before was the city side. The people here have different chins than the city-folk. There are two prominent types of French chin I've noticed. The first is the chin held high as if some invisible butler was walking alongside the chinbearer at all times holding it aloft. The second is the pillow chin. THis is the chin that seems to grow out of the front of the neck and that is used as a pillow for the head to rest upon, smooshing the skin of the jowls and cheecks into a multi-layered array of pouchy flesh. No matter which chin a particular Frenchman or woman has, I always get the feeling they're looking down their nose.

The hostel in Arles was good for meeting people from other places. The first night I sat for a long time talking with Dmitri, a photographer from Belgium, and Nadia, a student from Germany. It was good to have some real conversation, and especially to talk about differences in American and European life. I know I want to write about America, but I really needed to uproot myself and get some outside perspective on the place, something to compare it to.

We talked about travelling alone and how it allows you to lose yourself. You could be anyone you wanted to be and no one would be there to recognize you or know the true you. But you don't really want to be anyone but yourself and in a way you become yourself in a way you can't fully be at home among friends and family where there are certain constant rhythms and with them expectation. Plus, you're on foreign soil, and it's like what I said in an earlier post about the self being a self-defense measure. You're alone and young on foreign soil, and faced by a world of difference you get to know yourself better.

I keep thinking about one line from the movie Cube:

"It's a headless blunder, operating under the illusion of a master plan."

There was nothing to do but walk around all day in Arles.

I saw all the different parts of the city and took a nap by the curve of the Rhone river near some extremely old buildings. Went to some museums and wrote down all that jazz in the park afterwards. Yadda yadda yadda. I stuck around Arles for about 3 nights because I was so in love with the town. It was such an out-of-the-way crossroads. I interacted with more interesting people in my time there than at any other hostel I've been at.