Aix-en-Provence to Toulon by Bus

One of the free weekends we have in Aix we should go to Toulon.  I’ve been looking up the options and it doesn’t seem too hard.  There’s a #59 bus that runs from the Aix main bus station (Gare Routière), which is a 12 minute walk from the Aparthotel Adagio, directly to the Toulon Gare Routière.  It takes about an hour and a half and there are about 11 buses a day, beginning at 6:15 in the morning according to the schedule on the Zou! Website.  Zou! Is the regional bus system for the Region Sud and their website gives you the language option of French, English or Italian.

Back to France

 On Monday we bit the bullet and signed up for Road Scholar’s Living and Learning in Provence, which is 6 weeks in Aix-en-Provence but not until April of NEXT year (2026)!  I had been floating the idea around and nobody seemed to have any objections and it was good we signed up Monday morning.  Fernando looked at the Road Scholar web page that afternoon and the April-May dates were SOLD OUT so apparently we got the last spot!  Otherwise we would have had to settle for February-March or October-November.  After going to Sicily in late November I’ve decided against the darker months, especially if one is out in the countryside.  Give me long days, even if the temperature is a bit warmer, although we will see if May in Provence changes my mind.  May in Northern Spain was lovely.

We’ll feel like students again!

Naturally I’ve been practicing my French these last two days and what better way than to watch YouTube videos while I’m recumbent biking.  At first I was scouring YouTube for any videos on Aix but the ones in English are by visitors and what can you really know about a town if you only visit for a day or two?  And of course the things they show you are pretty much the same.  The best I found was filmed 6 years ago by Dennis Callan, who apparently leads tours of France and you’ll see his tour group from Honolulu in this video:  https://youtu.be/Iu1f6S_Mek4?si=wX7Av5MCxUsrLpGY

Unfortunately there aren’t any couples like Les Frenchies who are covering the food scene in Provence in English so I decided to try my luck in French but YouTube by default brings up the English results so you have to train it to search in French.  My latest find has been Les Carnets de Julie, which is a production of France.tv and, although the video on Provence is 8 years old, it gave me an opportunity to practice listening to French.  I understood a few words here and there…

No, Mr. Littman did a very good job teaching me; something I learned early on in college and graduate school.  But listening to and understanding a native French speaker is something entirely different from reading French.  It’s those liaisons.  I tried slowing down the playback speed on YouTube to 75% but that made it worse.  Fortunately the Provence video by Julie didn’t have captions so I wasn’t distracted from listening.  She has a video from 2 months ago on Noel in Nice which has captions in English, French or Spanish.  Fortunately one can turn them off because what I need now is to listen to French, not read it.