Museums

On a quest to better understand my world, I have become a huge fan of strange museums. It's kind of like reading a crib sheet instead of reading the book...I always feel a bit like I'm cheating, but lord knows I wasn't going read the goddamn book anyway, so what the hell. While I was stuck in New York I got the chance to wander around the Met for a day, visit the Museum of Sex and peruse the odd collections at the Museum of the City of New York. I guess the dorky bookworm in me is a real die hard, cause even as an adult, I really can geek out on some weird-ass shit.

Provence, it turns out, has some really fab museums. Elly and I drove all around the place looking for strange and interesting educational tourism. We really got the bug with the Jacques Cousteau Aquarium and kind of branched out from there. So we ended up driving to some really obscure locations in looking for some really obscure museums.

One day we made the trek to a little hilltop village in the Louberon called Gourdes. It's pretty high up, quaint and very Peter Mayle-esque. Just outside of this town are two sister museums: the Museum of Olive Oil and the Museum of Glass. I found the olive oil museum much more interesting. It was housed in an old Roman structure with an ancient aqueduct system running around the floor and the most gigantic stone mill I'd ever seen. We learned about different methods used to crush and then press the oil, saw some really old oil lamps and learned how to make olive oil soap.

Elly really loved the museum and wanted to know everything possible about how to make the oil. I'm sure she could tell you far more than I could about the history and processes and gadgets. The poor museum lady kept trying to leave to do something else, explaining that we could "explore the museum for ourselves," but every time she tried to go, Elly had another question. I was giggling at her a little in the corner, geeking out myself on the huge, old apparatus and the way the colored light from the window lit up the white stone in the room. In case you haven't picked up on the theme yet, with Elly and I there is hella geeking all the time.

Right next door was the glass museum. If we'd had more time, it probably would have been more engaging, but we kind of flew right through it. It looked promising but time was short. Here's my one tidbit of knowledge gleaned from running through the exhibitions: did you know that glass was opaque for a long time because they couldn't get the kilns hot enough? Makes you wonder what the point was if it wasn't transparent...

Later in the week we wound our way to Grasse in the eastern part of Provence. This little town is renowned for its production of perfume. It started with glove making in the 15th century, but all that tanning of hides had a pretty hideous smell, so, geniuses that they were, they started growing smelly plants to offset it, and eventually began to perfume the gloves themselves. Elly and I went on two perfumery tours and also stopped by the International Museum of Perfumery.

The first perfumery tour was a real bust; we followed the signs to Molinard and went on the complimentary (and really crappy) tour, followed by a nasally offensive sampling of their perfumes. Don't go there. We went next to Fragonard Perfumery. It was the same basic tour as Molinard, but the guide was much more enthusiastic and knowledgeable, and their perfumes actually smelled good. One little educational tidbit this guide shared with us was about the "noses" of the industry. This group of about 80 master perfumers are freelance artists and design almost all of the fragrances in the world. Our guide shared with us that these folks are born with a gift, an elusive ability to compose fragrances in their minds, a gift which has nothing to do with genetics or training. And about 95% of them are old French dudes. What are the odds?

After Fragonard, we headed to the museum and were treated to some of the best interactive displays I've ever experienced. There was a garden with perfume plants, complete with little boxes by the plants so you could smell their distinct aromas while regarding the flowers and vegetation. They had a little machine where you could mix your own scent on the spot. There were thousands of glass perfume containers and rooms full of historical perfume artifacts, some dating back to Egyptian times (the original perfumers, apparently). My favorite exhibit was a history of modern perfumery with the major scents from each era. All those bottles lined up and so beautiful was really inspiring. They also had an room that was an "aroma bath" with music, images and scents all coordinated to induce particular state of mind. It was a frickin' awesome museum.

Elly and I drove back to Aix that night, our little minds brimming with new ideas, our noses full of wonderful aromas, our thirst for the next geek-out satiated for the moment.