La Traviata

This afternoon Emilie, Cécile and I drove down to Aix-en-Provence in southern France to see Verdi's La Traviata, which is being performed as part of the city's annual opera festival.

For the most part the 5-hour drive was uneventful, aside from a couple of items. First, there was a brief traffic jam that was caused by a guy crossing the road with his herd of sheep. If you look very closely in the photo below, you can see the flock in the background to the left of road.

Second, in order to knock a couple of minutes (!) off of our 5-hour travel time, Emilie and Cécile enjoyed insilling fear in me by passing cars on the two-lane highway. And it wasn't just some one-off passing of cars that were going slow. At times we passed lengthy groups of cars that were going over the speed limit. And this entailed driving in the wrong lane for far longer than any sane person would otherwise consider. But at least we saved a couple of minutes, I guess...

After arriving in Aix, we dropped our stuff off at the hotel and grabbed a quick dinner before heading to the performance. From the outside the venue looked like it was simply part of an old building, but in reality there was an open-air theater in a central courtyard-like area.

The performance was very nice and we had great seats near the front. Fortunately there were French subtitles and a plot summary in the program. Otherwise, I would have been completely lost.