Unfortunately, the rain continued today and Christie got a bit sick (cold) so, she bowed out of today's excursion. Lael decided to go on the excursion by himself. Because of the weather we were able to get a refund on the unused ticket. Cannes was the one port were people had to take smaller boats (tender boats) to get to the dock instead of just walking off the ship. The tender boats were actually running behind due to the weather so the tour didn't start until about 45 minutes late.
The tour today was to Gorges du Loup (in this case Loup which is wolf in French actually refers to Loup du Mer, which is the name for Sea Bass), Gourdon & St. Paul de Vence. The first stop on the tour was Grasse and the perfume factory of Gallimard. They took us through the factory and explained the methods used extract the essence from various plants. The first method involves distilling the essence by boiling. This involves putting the flowers in a copper tub of water and boiling the water and condensing the result into another tub in order to extract the essence. This is the most popular method and provides less waste. For instance in order to extract a single liter of essence from lavender it would take about 200 lbs of flowers.
The other method involves placing a single layer of flowers on a layer of gelatin. The flowers are changed daily until enough essence has leached into the gelatin. Once this happens, the gelatin is removed and placed in a tumbler with alcohol and the alcohol leaches the essence from the gelatin. The remaining gelatin is used to make soap. This method is much more wasteful. For instance it takes about 600 pounds of roses or 1000 pounds of jasmine to make one liter of essence. For some perspective, 2 acres of roses will yield around 17 liters of essence per year.
The perfumeries also have people called "Noses" that work to create perfume scents. There are only about 200 Noses in the world and only about 30 of them are women (seems backwards, however the analogous profession for wines is dominated by women). The qualification exam to enter the school involves identifying 150 different fragrances in an hour. After the tour we had a chance to purchase perfume direct from them at wholesale prices. They also had some face cream that I bought for Christie that apparently has caviar in it and is equivalent to a very popular brand name (which they wouldn't tell us).
After Grasse, we left for the small town of Gourdon. Gourdon is located at an altitude of about 3000 feet and is an extremely small town. The picture was taken at the entrance to the town and the last house you can see is actually the other side of the town. I saw a cat here that I tried to pet but it actually took a swipe at me :( . There is a monastery at the top and several small shops and restaurants but not much else. However, the view is amazing. From the viewpoint you can actually see Nice and Cannes (I could also see our ship our on the water outside of Cannes). We did not spend much time here as there was not too much to see and do and after this we headed to St. Paul de Vence.
On the way to St. Paul de Vence we stopped for lunch at a restaurant (that we could actually see from Gourdon). The food was good and I got to sit with some Canadians and practice some French. After lunch we went to St. Paul de Vence and had about an hour and a half to walk around. The town itself is a small medieval town surrounded by walls. Within the walls there were actually no cars. It is a typical medieval town in France in that there are many art galleries. I spent my time there taking pictures of the town itself, the small walkways and the views. I did end up buying some chocolates and wine here to take back to the ship.
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City of Gourdon
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Paul St. de Vence
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City of Cannes
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