A day in Avignon — SEE and EAT

Jul 15

Jul 15 A day in Avignon

I think the best place to start in Avignon is Les Halles, the central market, as long as it is early in the day or around lunchtime, since it is open from 6am-1:30 each day. i specifically found a hotel not far from it, so we could head straight there for breakfast.

It doesn’t look like much from the outside and it’s not a huge market, but it has just about everything you could want, I wish I could shop there every day… Pastries, cheese, bread, produce, spices, and meat, what more could you want?

I was immediately ready to shop and then cook, I was particularly impressed by the shellfish selection.

But I had to settle for breakfast and some snacks for our train ride back to Basel later (goat cheese, strawberries). There was no seating in the market, but the square outside had many cafes, and no one seemed too bothered when we sat down at one of the cafes with our food and ordered coffee to go along with it.

After breakfast, we walked over to the Palais de Papes, a pretty massive palace occupied by the pope in 1300’s.

It’s mostly a self-guided tour through many empty rooms, but they had this interesting thing called a histopad, which was a tablet with headphones that would let you view what it looked when the halls were occupied. It was a little awkward to carry them around, but it also added a lot of interesting information to the tour.

After touring the palace, we walked up to the park above the river for a view of the famous Pont d’Avignon.

And then it was lunch time and our last meal in France and really of the whole trip, so I wanted to make it count and I think we were successful. There are many restaurants in the Place de l’Horloge, but we kept walking and ended up going to a Lonely Planet recommendation that was more out of the way, because of the mention of a pleasant courtyard.

Aux Jardin des Carmes was a small restaurant that was mostly a pleasant interior courtyard, or at least that’s where everyone was sitting the day we were there. The plat du jour was fish and they also had a plat du moment which was asparagus risotto which was SO fabulous with crispy serrano ham and milk foam, I’m still thinking about it. And dessert was a colorful strawberry tart.