Tuesday, June 1, 2004
Driving through southern France
StephenWe had a late lunch at a roadside rest on the highway. Very unusual for us, but we had a lot of food left over and we wanted to eat it. The place wasn't very charming, but served a purpose by bringing us back to twenty-first century France. We got some practice with our packs, not carrying them, but just packing them and then remembering where we put anything.
We saved ourselves a couple of bucks by getting off the autoroute a stop earlier and finding our way cross country to our destination. It was not so easy because the scale of our map was so large and the name so long that we couldn't figure out to what end of the name printed on the map we were going. We kept following signs that led us into the foothills of the Pyrénées, and soon we were there.
Dawn
St. Bertrand de CommingesJean and Isabelle have always sent us in the direction of beautiful old abbeys, Romanesque churches, and great little hill towns. St. Bertrand de Comminges was no exception. We approached it in the late afternoon and saw the imposing Cathédrale Ste-Marie-de-Comminges and its cloister on top of an isolated hill, with the smaller Basilique St. Just down below. The Hotel Comminges was right across the square from the church, and our room looked over the hilly terrain where goats and cows were grazing.
We had been forewarned that nothing would be open for dinner in the village that night because of the three-day weekend that had just ended. The hotel patronne had directed us to Montréjeau, another town where a couple of places were sure to be open. This was not a tourist town. It wasn't particularly quaint. Regular working people, not in the tourist biz, lived there. It had a movie house that was closed until the next night (playing Harry Potter). Nevertheless, we found a very good Vietnamese restaurant and decided to have dinner there. So the first night on the road in France, after eating "chez nous" either at our place or with Isabelle and family, we find ourselves eating Vietnamese food. There was some irony about Americans in France, eating Vietnamese, given the history of these three countries. It was the first night in a week that we ate no cheese.
Wednesday, June 2
After breakfast at the hotel, and a couple of excellent, individually brewed and steamed cafés-au lait, we headed over to the abbey and church. I think we were the first ones to arrive at the abbey. It was 9:00 a.m. and the mist was still rising off the hills. Being in the foothills of the Pyrénées, it really did get cool at night. What a magnificent setting! Through the repetitive pattern of the cloister columns and arches, we overlooked craggy, verdant hillsides. It was so quiet. I could imagine how the monks found the necessary peace and solitude here to meditate. The only sound was from the bell around the neck of the lead goat in the farmer's herd below. Plus there were roses. I am a sucker for climbing roses on old stone buildings. I have probably taken more pictures than we will ever need of flowers against stone walls, arches, churches, barns, and bridges. Not just in France, but everywhere I've been…bougainvillea against whitewashed clay in Costa Rica, yellow cactus flowers against adobe in New Mexico, Delphiniums against stone walls in Maine. Maybe it's the softness of the flowers against the hardness of stone. Maybe it's the tenacity of nature when vegetation actually roots in stone and manages to flourish in such an inhospitable spot.
In Turning the Mind into an Ally, Sakyong Mipham says, "There is an old saying that bringing Buddhism to a new culture is like bringing a flower and a rock together. The flower represents the potential for compassion and wisdom, clarity and joy to blossom in our life. The rock represents the solidity of a bewildered mind. If we want the flower to take root and grow, we have to work to create the right conditions. The way to do this – both as individuals and as people in a culture in which the attainment of comfort sometimes seems to be the highest standard – is to soften up our hearts, our minds, our lives." In the last few years I have been trying to soften up the rock of my own "bewildered mind," so perhaps this rock and flower imagery now captures my attention spiritually as well as aesthetically.
Back to Cathédrale Ste-Marie-de-Comminges. Like so many of France's churches, this one was built in stages, over many centuries. It was started in the 11th century, Romanesque style, then the nave and side chapels were added in the 14th c., Gothic style, while the extraordinary woodwork of the choir stalls is a Renaissance masterpiece. While marveling at the architectural and sculptural beauty inside the church, the most spiritual place for me was still the cloister. Its simplicity of design, with vegetation and animal motifs on the capitals, and its very openness to the environment blends the natural and spiritual worlds in a magical way. "Location, location, location," say the realtors. This place really has it.
Stephen
We spent some time in the choir, looking at the carvings. Many represent cardinal sins. Here are some photos, not for the faint hearted. Much of the imagery is non-Christian. We can probably look to the present day Catholic Church in South America to give us some idea of the nature of the church at that time and in that place.
This was the first church where I found out how useful binoculars could be to see art. The stained glass windows were very high and the binoculars made it possible to really see the details in the work. The capitals at the tops of the columns were equally interesting to see up close.
Lunch was the local creperie. It was still too cold to eat on their terrace so we downed a couple of crepes and headed for St. Just. It is a small Basilique out on a flat field in total contrast to to St. Bertrand. For the first time we got audio guides. We pushed the buttons, and the voice told us where to go and what to look at. But after a while we just turned them off and wandered around. So solidly built in a location so defenseless against an attack, I wondered whether the congregation was looking for some protection from God. What did these places sound like when they were first built? This was before Pope Gregory and his chants and certainly before Bach and all that great music of his era. A much more primitive religion in those days.
The organ was being dismantled, cleaned and repaired. Not the last time will see evidence of the importance the French ascribe to these beatiful churches.
We returned our guides, took some pictures, and headed east. We didn't know where we were going to end up for the night, but we knew that we should move in the direction of Avignon. We had three lines hastily scribbled in our notebook, the result of a hasty session with Isabelle. One said St. Bertrand Comminges, okay we had done that, the next said Chateaux Cathares and then listed four towns that we had never heard of, and the last said coast with another list of towns. From this our next few days would be formed. Today we decided to head toward Foix. We went south toward Spain, and then cut across country through some of the greenest and most hilly country I have ever seen.
We brake for old churches, so our afternoon stretch took the form a visit to a church that recently had its roof replaced. There was a bulletin board with pictures of the new roof trusses being put in place by helicopter. Sort of an alpine town, a stream rushing through the center, a fly-fisherman trying his luck, a couple of guys sitting on some benches, keeping a watchful eye on everything. The old painted frescos from the fifteenth century on the porch of the church are the attraction here. They were in pretty good shape, mostly because of the lack of air pollution out here. We spent some time wandering around, took a picture of a stone wall and continue on our way.
I wistfully noticed a man sitting on the terrace of a Gîte Rural, feet up, reading his book next to the gurgling brook. I thought this would be a really nice place to stay, but instead tried to get a photo of a stone arch framing the mountaintop behind the brook, visible through the arch. Onward! - Dawn
Coming around a corner we had to come to an abrupt stop because we were confront by a herd of goats coming down the street with their shepherd trailing behind. There didn't seem anything else for me to do except wait as the sheep passed us by on each side. Of course, Dawn is scrambling for the camera and by the time she got it out they were behind us. I said take it anyway so we have a shot of them turning the corner and heading out of view. You can't hear the wonderful sound of their bells nor smell the strength of their odor.
Just before six we stopped at a tourist office and inquired about a place to stay. The young woman behind the counter tried to get us in to a couple of B&B's, but they were all full. She finally came up with a place but we decided not to stay there because it was on the main road. To us it seemed like the worst of both worlds, you got the noise of the city, but not the cafes, restaurants, museums within walking distance, etc. So we decided to push on to Foix and try our luck there. She gave us directions to one of the hotels there and we were on our way.
We wandered a bit in the town, found the place, but they didn't have any rooms we wanted, so we took a map and walked to another. They were full, so we got directions to the third hotel that is in town and even got another set of directions from a woman who stopped us on the street and asked if she could help us. She spoke English and we wonder if she just wanted to practice it on some tourists whom she heard speaking English. We found the hotel easily, next to the Post Office and got our room for the night. He ran our credit card and explained how to use the key in the glass outside door, which we would need to do if we came back late. We brought our packs up, leaving the suitcase in the car and took a rest, showered, changed for dinner, consulted our Guide Michelin and headed out to find a restaurant.
Foix is a town of about 10,000, big enough to have a small rush hour, but small enough to walk around. It was my turn to pick the place for dinner after Dawn selected the Vietnamese restaurant the night before. We went by a couple of places, until I recognized one from the Guide, a Moroccan restaurant named Atlas, named after the North African Mountains I think. It was nearly empty when we went in, a couple of businessmen, a young couple who only had eyes for each other were among the clientele. The meal was great, and huge. We ordered couscous and when they brought it in, the couscous itself and the skewers of meat, I thought it looked great. After a pause the great bowl of broth and vegetables arrived and I realized that they have served enough for eight! We dig in and were halfway through our second ethic meal in France when I heard the phone ring.
Let's be clear about this. We didn't know what town we were going to be in until six o'clock that evening and we didn't know what hotel we were going to be at until seven-thirty and we didn't know what restaurant we were going to be in until we walked up to the menu and liked what we saw.
Madam walked up to Dawn and says, "It's for you" (In French).
"Moi? Mais personne ne sais que je suis ici!" ("Me? But no one knows that I'm here!"), I say, automatically thinking that something must be wrong with someone in my family, then realizing that truly, no one we know has any idea where we are or how to find us at that moment. No cell phone, no e-mail.
"Are you staying at the Hotel l"Echauffaugette?" she asks.
"Ah, oui," I reply, barely remembering the name of the place, and vaguely wondering if it means small, hot zucchini.
"Well then, it's for you. He asked if a Canadian couple was here at our restaurant."
So I go to the phone and pick it up. It turns out that the guy who had checked us in was worried that he hadn't explained to us completely how to get back into the hotel when he wasn't there. So he managed to track us down to explain that there would be another door in front of the glass one, but that one wouldn't be locked. We should not use the key in that door but push it open and unlock the glass door. Well, I was surprised, not only by the fact that he would take the trouble to find us, but also because his hotel was the only place we ever stayed on the entire trip where they made us pay the night before. Therefore, I wasn't expecting him to be so concerned for our welfare. Everywhere else we went, we made a reservation, usually by first name only, but sometimes with the Visa card, signed nothing on arrival, and paid on the way out.
After hanging up, the server at the restaurant said, "Are you Canadian?"
"Mais, non!" I replied, not being sure if I should be flattered by this mistake. I guess he thought I spoke French well enough but not with what he considered to be a French accent. Actually, I sometimes have trouble understanding Canadians myself because they speak so differently…but then the sound of French in this part of the country is very different from what one hears in Paris. Moreover, there is the "langue d'Oc" (the language of Oc) movement here in Languedoc. There is a group that tries to keep the old language alive, even doubling up welcome signs to villages, one in French, once in Provençau in which there seem to be many more "u's" in most words. Well, it's undoubtedly just as challenging for a French person who learns British English in school to go to New York City, and then say, Texas, and try to understand American "English."
Anyway, we were so stuffed by the end of the meal that we could not possibly eat the dessert that was part of the prix fixe meal we had ordered. So we opted for that wonderfully sweet North African mint tea instead, which proved to be the perfect digestif. - DawnI know that to appreciate a running joke one must be there, so I hesitate, but only for a moment, to say that for the rest of the trip whenever we heard a phone ring, one of us said, "It must be the guy from Foix, seeing if we are okay." Later in the trip, we heard a late night phone in a B&B, made the joke, but learned the next morning that it had been for us, from the United States, but more of that later.
Also, I did some research on the history of the language in this part of France.
As in other parts of the Roman Empire, Vulgar Latin was heavily influenced by local languages. This accounts for the differences between for example Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian. It also helps explain the existence of different dialects of Occitan, a number of which survive, and can be divided in three main groups:
Northern -Limousin, Auvernhat, Alpine --- Southern –Languedocien, Provençal or Provençau, Gascon.
The picture is slightly confused by the fact that the literary form of Occitan was also generally referred to as Provençal. Between the 12th to 14th centuries, Provençal was a standard literary language in what is now southern France, northern Spain and northern Italy. It was widely used in poetry and was the primary language of the troubadours. Occitan literature is therefore plentiful. Provençal was still the leading literary language of Europe when Dante wrote his Divine Comedy. It was therefore something of a surprise that he chose to write it in the obscure vulgar dialect that we now recognize as the precursor of modern Italian.
Thursday, June 3
When we are in towns, we decline the breakfast option at a hotel. Most of the time they are dreary events. In a two star hotel, the coffee is rarely any good and the places lack the energy of a café on the street. In four star hotels, which I have stayed in while working, it is different. I remember in Linz, Austria, Peter Colao and I actually moaning in pleasure over the coffee at a Ramada Inn. And the spread was varied as to satisfy the clientele that come from different breakfast cultures all over the world. Here, as we passed the breakfast room on the way out, we saw a few couples sitting at their tables, silently waiting for their coffee.
We didn't have to go far, just to the corner. The woman behind the bar got us our coffees. We found a paper and sat there and watched the town wake up and go to work.
On our way over to see the abbey of St. Volusien, we met a woman with two dogs. Dogs are also becoming a motif in this story. What they represent we will have to discover as we go.
She was wearing sunglasses and walking two dogs, one black and one white. She said, "Bonjour," and we exchanged pleasantries. It wasn't until she asked me where I learned to speak French that I realized she was the same woman who had been our server the night before. So I told her about my mom having been born in Paris and speaking French for the first five years of her life, that I learned the sound of as well as the love of the language from her, but that basically I had learned the grammar in American schools. She actually seemed to think that I had a "broader vocabulary" than most people who learned French in school who, she said, use the same words all the time. Well, I was pleased to think that since my 1989 three-month stay at la Fondation d'Art de La Napoule and with my subsequent visits that maybe I was picking up a few colloquialisms and some street French!
One of the dogs turned out to be a " Chien de Montagne des Pyrénées," a breed that had almost died out when mountain shepherds started abandoning their way of life and moving to the city. However, she said, people are beginning to move back to the mountains and cultivate this breed again. Apparently she and her husband have a mountain place that they visit on weekends. - Dawn
I use my hat when I visit churches to keep the sun that comes through the windows out of my eyes, especially in the early morning or late afternoon. Not in this abbey, I was reprimanded for by a young priest for wearing it in church. I snapped it off in an instant. Some churches behave more like museums, with exhibits for the tourists. Some, like this one, are mostly just places of worship, and should be treated that way, but they are also buildings that over the centuries have heard many different languages, seen different kinds of dress, and endured different styles of religion, all while silently becoming a living repository of our history.
I showed total lack of courage, when follwing signs for a toilette, I found a pissoir. Henry Miller has written at length about them in Paris, but I thought they were a thing of the past. This one had a stand up section and a sit down one. To use the stand up part, you went through a gate amd did your business against the wall, totally visible to passerbys. I like to shake with a little more privacy, so I choose the other part but needed to find my flashlight before I could use it because I couldn't find the light. The complexity of the whole affair was deepened by having to hold the min-mag in my mouth. Ah, Europe.
I thought it exciting to be headed for Andorra as we left Foix. It just seems to me to be one of those exotic places, but it was not for us this time and we turned off the road to head for the mountain bastion of Mountsegur. Actually, the last bastion of the Cathares. The short history of the place was that it was the last refuge of Catholics that decided among other things, to pursue the religious beliefs without the aid of the priests. The Pope rustled up a thirteenth century crusade led by Simon Montfort and he came down and slaughtered as many as he could find. Montségur was the last killing ground.
As you climb up, you pass a wheat field that was the burial ground.
We climbed to the top, a forty-minute trek, stopping at the ticket booth to pay our Euros, and then have lunch. I practiced carrying a load in my pack by bringing a bottle of wine along with our bread, sausage and cheese. We sat with our backs against the ramparts and took in the view of the valley and the snow-capped Pyrénées Mountains. The road was far below us. The parking lot with space for 15 or so tour busses was empty except for a few cars. There were about fifteen or twenty tourists scattered around the mountaintop. In season, it will be a different place. Now after lunch, we walked around it and then inside. It was quiet out of the wind; also, it made us quiet for awhile.
We went on to the museum, probably because our tickets gave us admission to both. Artifacts abounded. I wondeedr how many centuries of global warming it will take before we have underwater tourists visiting the great abandoned drowned coastal cities of the world wondering what it was like to live there.
Before we leave Montségur, I must mention that in looking for a photo of the chateau, I found a website that said that the ruined castle that we visited was not the one that was besieged, but one built later. Also, that the siege was instigated because of an assassination of ten Catholic monks by members of the Montségur community. The French government keeps quiet about the fortress in order to keep the tourist business strong. I am feeling a little gypped. We think we are time traveling back to the 13th century, to a momentous location when we have, in fact, fallen a century short. I guess better to lie about a war eight hundred years ago than about one that you are about to launch.
The Mediterranean coast was our next destination. We were having some cloudy weather that seemed to be clustered around the Pyrénées so I made a navigational decision to head north to find some sun. We succeeded and spent a couple of hours driving across a dry, sun soaked upland of rugged beauty, a small version of the American West. We kept coming over rises expecting the sea, but getting only more dry rocky landscape. It was a beautiful drive but came to an abrupt end when we hit the coast and were thrown into the maw of the French Mediterranean tourist industry. We emerged a couple hours later, enduring a rising mistral that threatened to blow away anything that wasn't nailed down.
Hotel du Port in Gruissan was where we ended up after having been through facsimiles of towns in Northern New Jersey and Southern Florida and any other honky-tonk place you might think of. Beaches with cement factories, short cuts that had been cut, traffic rotaries that we visited four or five times were all part of a hectic afternoon/evening that led us to Gruissan. In the morning we would discover its considerable charms but this evening we were left with a view of a yacht basin that on closer inspection turned out to be a parking lot for boats. We ate dinner where the receptionist sent us, le Bistrot du Port, an international style place, perhaps more comfortable in New York or better yet Miami. After dinner we walked arm in arm around the dark, slumbering vacation spot. The thousands of condos all waiting in the pre-season for their appointed clientele, a few emitting the blue light of TV's from their darkened interiors.
Friday, June 4
Since we were not in a town, I risked having breakfast at the hotel rather than getting in the car to go find a breakfast place. On the good side, the room was bright and sunny and decorated in those provençal colors that are so cheery. On the downside, we could hardly drink the coffee even after mixing in some cocoa. We charged up with some granola and muesli and then sat down with our guidebooks and decided where to go next. Isabelle had told us that we must see Chartreuse, a renovated Abbey in Villeneuve-les-Avignon, just outside of Avignon and as the Mistral was still blowing and our first take on the Mediterranean was unfavorable we decided to pass up the Camargue and head for the environs of Avignon and spend the afternoon visiting a domain or two in the world famous Chateauneuf du Pape area. With the aid of the receptionist, we made a reservation and headed out, first to see the beach and then to get on the autoroute and speed our way on.
The beach was hard to find. The signs were unclear. We kept driving through more and more resort suburbia until finally we reached the edge of town and once we crossed the town line, all human construction abruptly stopped. We continued driving, the road surface becoming sandy until we reached a parking lot for a three-mile long beach maybe half-mile wide with one car in it. We were so far from any building that we needed the binoculars to make sure that they were buildings. The reason for the absence of cars was evident once we got out. The wind had not abated and we were in the middle of mild sandstorm. But we were here so we did walk out over the dunes to the water, a truly gorgeous beach. Looking back the way we came, what we thought were clouds on the horizon, were in fact the Pyrénées.
The wind drove us back to the car, and we took a twenty mile coastal drive through and around resort towns, vineyards, farms, marshlands, a truly beautiful area.
It was hard to believe that adjacent to Gruissan Port et Plage with their zillions of identical, pink cement condos, there could be such lovely farm and vineyard country. Yet happily, there it was. That curvy, coastal drive made up for the Disneyland feel of the place where we stayed the night before. - Dawn
The road took us inland, pushed us onto the autoroute, and two hours later we were approaching Avignon. At the last minute we decided not to find our hotel but to go directly to the wine country.
We only lasted two domains. In some ways, it was enough. Two domains, a four minute drive from each other both making wine of the same appellation, but everything else was different.
We found out that you can choose among seventeen different varieties of grapes when you make Chateauneuf du Pape and we also found out that there are at least one hundred and seventeen varieties of people who make and sell them. The first place, in a small dark room we tasted 3 or 4 recent vintages, none of them exceptional to my tongue. It was all business, we passed all their computers on the desks in their office to get to the tasting room.
The second place, Domain Mont Redon, has a large room full of large picnic tables with a wall of glass at the end that afforded a view of the wind swept vineyard. There were about three groups of people that were tasting. We all got to taste about eight to ten wines with vintages going back about twelve years. We heard a lot about the vines, including that the wind was very bad at this time of year because it was breaking the new growth. A very pleasant experience and of course the wines themselves were more interesting.
We still had not learned how to taste wines without swallowing, so this second domain brought the tasting to a close as neither of us would have been able to drive after visiting a third.
We made our way back to Villeneuve-les-Avignon and found our hotel with some difficulty. We didn't get lost, we just had to go around the block and it took us forty-five minutes, given one way streets and rush hour and just general confusion. The hotel itself was probably our low point in lodging for the trip. I didn't get the air conditioner to work until I went downstairs to the desk where the desk guy did a forehead slap and went to a closet and switched the breaker on. We finished up the food we were carrying on our little terrace and went for a walk in the evening and had a drink in a dive. Suffice it to say that not all of France is cute and picturesque and the best part of this evening was the knowledge that the next day we would move on to Avignon with our hiking beckoning to us just beyond.
