This morning Clay and Allan picked up Brenda and Rick from their overnight stay in Avignon and brought them to the villa to unpack a bit before our drive to the Eygalieres market. It is one of our favorites–snakes through the streets at the bottom of the hill and proceeds to the top of the hill in the center of town. This market is where Clay historically buys ladles and spoons made of horn. We all shopped (and bought) here before ducking in to Gilles for a tasty lunch of pizza (Italian with a French twist–goat cheese and jambon, for example) and a bottle of wine.
We dropped Connie at the villa to wait for Charlie and Patti, arriving from Marseilles around 4 PM. And, the five of us drove to Arles for the Course de Carmarguaise (a sporting match between two teams (8 men each) of people, all working to remove ribbons from a small, sturdy, fast bull’s horns. We watched 7 bulls compete. The competition takes place in the Arles Coliseum, built by the Romans in 90 A.D., this and others throughout Europe are clearly the model for our modern sporting venues. Pageantry introduces the games, but we didn’t understand French well enough to know who was presented to us. The beautiful Camargue horses (herds of them run wild in the Rhone Delta called the Camargue) strutted and carried this year’s royalty.
As in all of the games associated with bullfighting, this one doesn’t seem fair to the bull. There are 16 people that the bull has to deal with and he is teased and bothered by them throughout his 15 minutes in the ring. The men work hard using a claw-shaped metal instrument called a raset in their hands to get two white rosettes off of the horns and a red rosette from between the horns before removing the twine wrapped around each horn, and all while the bull charges them. Two men on each team are the teasers and the other six are the raseteurs.
When the men are chased by a charging bull, they step on a white step at the bottom of the red fence, tap the top of the fence and fly over, grabbing a metal bar and dropping to the ground safely behind the red fence. Often the bull runs around the entire ring, sending all 16 men scrambling over the fence.
The Arles Coliseum and the historic town of Arles are beautiful and I couldn’t resist a few photos as we walked through the town to our car.
Dinner included all 8 of us, Charlie and Patti arrived safely from Marseilles. We ate at home again, sure that our newest arrivals would be exhausted from their travels. Happy hour was happy; supper was super; and the bed was quite welcome.
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