Day One: My Home Away from Home and a Hike with Aix’s Famous

My first full day in Aix-en-Provence, France.

It was chilly today, a humid kind of chilly like January in Maryland. School activities and university orientation start tomorrow, so after wandering around Aix for an hour this morning, I returned to my host family’s house to unpack and get settled in my new room.

When the first bit of homesickness (mostly uncertainty) began to nip at my heels, I went downstairs to go for another walk through town. But I ran into Fred putting on his shoes. He invited me to go hiking with him, his daughter, and her boyfriend.

It was perfect as I had been wanting to get up into the hills around Aix that they call mountains (…my Colorado is showing!).

It was a beautiful first day in Aix, and I got my first tiny piece of the history of the region, explained to me by my host sister and her boyfriend: Émile Zola (an author) and Paul Cezanne (a painter) are both Aix natives. The lake we hiked around is named after Zola and the mountain in the distance (yes, a true mountain) was featured in many of Cezanne’s paintings.