A Toast to Carcasses and Castles (not really a toast, but it sounded cool)

This weekend, I went to Carcassonne, a lovely fortified city that is a three hour train ride from Bordeaux.  Since I have no idea how to put pictures on my blog, I’m just going to tell you to look it up on Wikipedia, since they probably have better photos than I would have, if I had remembered to bring my camera. I realized this on the tram to the train station, had a mild panic attack, and seriously considered going back home to get it.  Thankfully Lindsay, who was sitting next to me, answered in the affirmative when I asked her if she had a picture-taking device.  However, her computer hard drive is full and therefore she has to wait for her mom to bring her an external hard drive next week before she can put the pictures on her computer.  Quelle chance.

 

After our lovely 3-hour train ride, which, unlike the one home from Biarritz, lacked any noxious odors, we arrived in Carcassonne.  Technically, we arrived in the lower city of Carcassonne, the basin that the peasants expanded into after the space inside the city was filled by various royal buildings.  We walked around the basin a little, located the Office of Tourisme, and procured a map, at which point we began our lovely walk to the castle.

 

You have to walk up a hill to get to the castle, which is on the other side of the river from the basin… luckily, this river came equipped with a handy-dandy pedestrian only walkway!  As we rounded the curve on our walk, the city appeared in front of us… and darn it, it was pretty dang cool.  Like way cool.  Like totally cool.  Like the coolest thing I’ve seen since I got to France cool.  A huge, medieval walled city sitting on a hill, complete with drawbridge and dry moat.

 

Entrance into the city is free; everything else in the city is not.  The first goal of the day was to locate someplace for lunch.  We settled on a nice little place with a nice view of the chateau (inside the city, basically where all the royals hung out) covered patio and overly friendly waiter.  We got the meal deal, meaning a glass of wine (starting that at 12pm on an empty stomach was probably not the brightest of ideas), salad (I think they just chopped up a head of lettuce, added some vinaigrette, and put the whole thing in a bowl… one for each of us), and a Cassoulet all for the bargain price of 11 euros.  And what, you ask, is a Cassoulet?  Well, it is a regional dish that is basically compiled of beans (haricots… white beans), a chopped up onion, some spices, a little cheese on top, and a sausage as a garnish.  This is then baked in a large ceramic bowl until nice and thick.  Deliciousness.  Needless to say, I enjoyed the cassoulet so much that I not only ate all of mine but half of Lindsay’s as well… the waiter evidently noticed this, because when he asked if we wanted dessert, he made a comment to the effect of “Are you sure you don’t want any? She can eat both of them…”  Thaaaaaanks, French waiter man.  Thanks.

 

After this, we moseyed around the chateau and became experts on the construction, destruction, and reconstruction of the city.  We also took a lot of weird pictures and hit up the gift shop… I now have a foot-long cylindrical eraser about half an inch in diameter that says “Cité de Carcassonne” on it… useless souvenir?  I think not!

 

Following a trip to our hostel to check in and drop off our stuff (the hostel tthat was, might I add, in the middle of the walled ancient city?! In the middle!  Of the city!  And there was a vending machine in the lobby!  The lobby of the hostel that was in the middle of the medieval city!), we ventured around the ramparts and went on a walk around the city perimeter.  At this point in the trip, a goal was fulfilled… we went to CARCASSonne, and although the name is completely unrelated to any kind of carcass at all (it is named after Dame Carcas, who once outsmarted some invaders and used the bells to call the soldiers to attention, therefore ambushing the unsuspecting invaders… anyway, the point is that her name is Carcas and “to ring” in French is “sonner,” so when conjugated its “Carcas sonne” or “Carcas rings”), it was determined that we had to find a carcass at some point.  Although we took numerous pictures of the numerous Dame Carcas statues, I was fully prepared to lie on the floor and play dead if necessary… it turns out that a crow had met its untimely demise via a collision with the ground… carcass found.

 

After some more souvenir shopping and store-browsing, we met up with our new-found friends Eric and Maxime for one last photo op before their train departed.  Post-réunion, we headed back to the hostel, where I read and Lindsay took a nap (there was also some cell phone Sudoku involved) and then went out into the blustery night to find a cheap place to eat dinner.  This was rapidly accomplished, as their meal-deal time limit was about to expire… once again, more delicious food, but we stayed away from the Cassoulet.  The waiter could tell that we were not French, and when we told him we were from California, he proceeded to ask if we had any dollars… I was extremely confused until he explained that it was for his collection… I handed over a twenty (don’t ask why I was carrying American dollars around… I have no idea) and to my surprise, he handed me 20 euros… that is by far the best exchange rate that anyone has ever gotten in a Euro-Dollar transaction in a really long time… ah, the French.

 

The next morning, we enjoyed our free breaky and took one last walk around the city, touring the cathedral and theatre that we didn’t see the day before.  We collected our belongings and hopped a train to Narbonne, where there was a lot more really cool old stuff to see, like a huge unfinished cathedral that now houses the mayors office and a ton more stuff, some documents from the 900s or so, and a lot of interesting art.  After some lunch and some free exhibits, we returned to Carcassonne (where it happened to be raining), wandered around the basin, and took our train home.

 

The city is quite spectacular, and like I said, the coolest thing I’ve seen since I got here almost two months ago… I’m so glad I have the eraser to remember it by….

La Chatte

Well, avid readers, I think its time to update you on the members of my homestay family.  First, we have Alain, my “dad,” a history professor who splits his time between Bordeaux and Paris, working for some kind of national professor’s syndicate or something.  Then, Guadalupe, my “mom,” raised in Texas, went to college at Whittier in LA, and moved to Paris for school many years ago.  She now teaches English to students of all ages in after-school or after-work classes, but is home most of the day (which is nice for me, because she usually offers me coffee when I get home!).  Balam is my ten-year-old “brother,” who attends middle school, enjoys bike riding, rugby, and plays an assortment of instruments… fairly unobnoxious for a ten-year-old.

 

Finally, the most important member of the family (and no, I’m not talking about myself), the cat.  Ayole.  The world’s smartest cat, and I am not exaggerating or using sarcasm here.  The thing is so stinking smart its unbelievable!  Try as I might, its always a step ahead of me, and if I try to get a step ahead of it, it usually threatens to bite me.

 

I will illustrate with several examples.

 

This first example requires some background information.  My room is Guadalupe’s daughter’s old room… and it’s her daughter’s cat.  The daughter is currently away at school in Germany, sometimes comes home for a long weekend (has yet to since I’ve been here), but the cat stayed here.  This means that the cat is conditioned to coming into my room and hanging out, scratching things, getting into bed, etc.  I have told the tale of the cat jumping into my bed and having to be scared out in a previous entry; I’ve also mentioned the shower invasion before.

 

Aside from repeatedly jumping on to the counter and opening my room door and the kitchen door to the garage, the cat also knows how to open my armoires.

 

Oh yes, my armoires.  Where I keep things like shoes and coats and nice shirts that do NOT need/want/desire cat hair all over them.  The first time this happened, I had left one of the doors open just a crack, so I figured that it had just kinda pushed on the door, which had then opened, and gone in there.  The second time, I heard a creak when I was standing in the hallway, ran into my room (one of my main activities is preventing cat hair from getting on my bed, so I was rather worried when I heard the door), and saw a tail disappear into the wardrobe.  I figured I must have left it open or barely closed again, and the cat had pushed its way in.  Yesterday, however, I learned just how smart the cat is.  I saw the cat come into my room, something that I’m now fine with, as long as it doesn’t make a move for the desk or the armchair (which acts as a stepping stone to my bed), and walk over to the wardrobe.  I then watched it use its little paws to paw open the door to the wardrobe (which doesn’t have a handle, you have to grab the little edge and pull) and, while I sat there in amazed stupor, crawl inside.  It doesn’t have opposable thumbs, for goodness sake!  How can it open doors?!

 

This weekend, my homestay family is gone.  Alain is in Paris for work, and Guadalupe joined him there Saturday afternoon, returning Monday evening.  Balam is at a friend’s house, so he has a way to go to school and such.  So it’s just me and the cat.  I decided that I was going to lock the cat in the garage last night… this is fairly common, since the cat can open the doors, and Guadalupe just locks it when she goes to bed, cat inside or not.  I fed the cats (there is a strictly outdoor one) and when Ayole went into the garage, I locked the door.  I could hear her try and open the door a couple times, but there was no way I was letting it back in to wreck terror and havoc on the house and get cat hair everywhere.  When I got up this morning, I went to open the door and let the cat in, only to have it run past me from the inside and go out. WTF?!  How did the cat get inside?!  Then I locked the door again, and went to take a shower.  The bathroom has a window in it that leads to the garage; it’s usually open when we take showers to act as a kind of ventilator for the steam and such.  The cat was sitting in the bathroom when I got out of my shower.  I then connected the dots: I didn’t leave the window open last night, the cat figured out it was there and pushed it open from the garage, so it could get back inside.  This theory was confirmed when I was brushing my teeth and it pushed the window open.  WAY TOO SMART.

 

At the moment, it is curled up looking all cutesy on my armchair… the thing has an innocent face and a mischievous face, I swear… life with la chatte is definitely interesting, that’s for sure!