City On A Hill

Restaurant Miettes I

2012-01-25T16:21:00.000+01:00

In which we try a sort of experiment: short restaurant reviews. These will be used mostly to pull your coat to some places I've either written about before, but which have news to report, or places I haven't been to enough to have a solid opinion about. They'll also occasionally (as this time) have food-related things to talk about.

I mentioned the opening of the Korean place, Omija, a while back, but I hadn't eaten there. The Other Ed suggested we meet there for lunch, and the first lunch was good, but not spectacular. A second lunch, however, more than made up for it.

We had bibimbap, which I imagine is quite the versatile dish in Korea. I used to get it all the time at the Korean place near where I lived in Berlin, and there it was a bunch of rice in a big iron bowl, which had been heated very hot in the oven, and a bunch of stuff, including an egg, slapped on top of it. The pleasure came not only from the mixing-in of all the stuff (which the waiter urged you to do immediately) but from the way the rice crusted onto the sides of the bowl. I didn't see how Omija was going to do that, given that their chief source of heat is a microwave. Well, the answer is that they didn't. Nor did they use an iron bowl. But the dish was very nicely topped, and a wonderful hot sauce was served on the side. We also got bowls of miso soup, which I always like. With the bibimbap coming in at €7.50, it's not the kind of lunch I can have very often, but the second time we ate there, The Other Ed opined that he was no longer concerned for the place's existence, as a throng of people came in, ordered, sat down at the communal table, ate, left, and made way for more people. As they note on their menu, Korean food is way low in fat, and this seems to appeal to their young, multicultural clientele. I wish them luck, and, well, with their skills, they don't really need to rely on luck. I should also note that the Korean/Japanese groceries seem to be flying off the shelves, although I was sorry they didn't have any panko. A couple of weeks, I was assured.

Omija, 8 rue Boussairolles, 34000 Montpellier. Open Mon-Wed 10am-7pm; Thu-Sat 10am-9pm.

* * *

My friend John's visit in November took us to restaurants old and new, with two brand-new ones for me. The first was when he was waiting for the hotel room to open up, and we were wandering the neighborhood and he asked if there was a place serving seafood. In fact, wandering around by myself a few days earlier, I'd noticed a lot of new restaurants in that part of town, incuding one that was all fish and shellfish. That's how we wandered into Chez Toto.

Chez Toto is tiny, and very specialized: there are a dozen warm dishes, and lots and lots of build-it-yourself coquillages, assortments of shellfish. Those can get expensive quickly, although the quality of what they had on hand was excellent, from what I could tell. We settled for brandade de morue, a local specialty made from desalinated salt cod and mashed potatoes and...other things, and stuffed mussels, in which the mussels are cooked with a pork-based stuffing. Both were excellent, and the brandade, at €7.50 for the lunch special, was a particular deal. Service was excellent, the guy spoke English, and the business card says there's a shaded terrace somewhere for dining, noon and evening. That said, those of you familiar with Japan have probably figured out that not many Japanese will venture into this place, excellent shellfish notwithstanding. I'm going to check this out again on a summer's evening, with some cold rosé and shellfish.

Chez Toto, 20 rue du palais des Guilhem, 34000 Montpellier. Reservations or orders to go: 04 67 92 53 37 or 06 82 00 32 43.

* * *

One evening, inspiration struck and I suggested we try something that was right out in plain sight, so much so that I'd never even considered eating there although I'd passed it a million times. Le Bouchon St. Roch is at the confluence of a couple of streets just below St. Roch church, in a weird V-shaped space with lots and lots of outdoor dining which spills over into the St. Roch Bar's space. The St. Roch Bar is Montpellier's version of Memphis' Peabody Hotel lobby (minus the ducks and the player piano, of course): sooner or later, everyone in town has a drink there. Me, too. But while doing that with a woman who'd studied here, she said that in her day, the Bouchon was the student eatery.

It still is, in the evening, and at noon, all manner of locals fill the place up. As I stood shooting that second photo there, the smells of cooking steak, duck fat, and potatoes rolled out the door, almost driving me nuts. This isn't a place to go for daring new takes on traditional recipes or to see what cuisines are influencing today's young chefs. It's a place to get down-home traditional French food, cooked the way they've always cooked it. There's a hell of a lot to choose from, too, and a small, okay wine-list. Prices are very reasonable -- a two-course dinner can be under €20 -- and the decor is pretty garish. The confused signs are due to its having finally consolidated itself in one building; the former place across the street I'll deal with in a second. As a neighborhood place, and an inexpensive neighborhood place at that, Le Bouchon St. Roch isn't going to be the best restaurant in town, not with a menu as long as the one posted there by the door, but it most likely hits the mark enough of the time to keep 'em coming.

Le Bouchon St. Roch, 14 rue de plan d'Agde, 34000 Montpellier. 04 67 60 94 28. Open daily noon to midnight.

* * *

Stand where that first photo was taken, rotate 180°, and you'll see a very welcome addition to the Montpellier bar scene: the Beehive.

It's not an Irish pub, like other bars with English names here, but a very faithful reproduction of an English pub. And not only does it serve English beer (mine's an Abbot, please), but it also serves burgers (beef and veggie), full English breakfasts, and fish and chips. With the recent change of management at the Vert Anglais putting their status as serving the second-best burger in Europe at risk, the Beehive is in good stead to grab the title, although if they cleave to the authenticity of the rest of the place, maybe they'll miss. One place they definitely win is with their fish and chips, which even outdid the last batch I had in London. I went with a native, who delighted in the brown edges of the fish, and the chips were fresh, not frozen, and served with excellent malt vinegar. There was a little pot of what my dining companion called "parsley sauce," although it was more like a mayonnaise with horseradish to my taste, and there was also a small lump of the inexplicable mushy peas, served tepid, which is apparently also authentic. There's a daily special every day, and happy hours and all the rest. I'm ready to go back in the evening so I can have the fish and chips again and sink a few pints of Abbot. it's been a while!

The Beehive, 15 rue du plan d'Agde, 34000 Montpellier. 09 66 94 53 71. Open daily noon - 1am.

* * *

And, as Woody Allen once observed, frequently there must be a beverage. I've been trying to find new sources of inexpensive but excellent wines around town (easy enough if you go for a drive, of course, since there are caves cooperatives and individual wineries offering stuff you can't get in stores out there), and I've lucked out. First, there is the Caves des Arceaux, which I walk past twice a week as I return from the market (or I do if I take a particular way home, anyway). I'd had the perception of them as being really upmarket and out of my range, but the other day I went in and discovered that, while they have some wines that are far more expensive than any other place I've found in town, there are also, tucked away here and there, some magnificent bargains. A couple of St-Chinians proved it to me: La Grange Léon was a place E and I had driven past in Berlou, and they produce two wines: L'Audacieux, which has a fascinating nose not unlike exploded gunpowder, and a whole bunch of fireworks of the fruity and earthy variety on the tongue, and L'Impudent, which I almost bought, but was put off by the label. L'Audacieux shows a guy casting into a stream, but L'Impudent shows a kid pissing into it! Only in France. But now I'd like to find the one I haven't tried, which is even cheaper. Of course, it's been sold out every time I've checked since then. As you'll recall, when E and I went on that drive, it began as a way to find the winery that had produced the wine we'd had at the restaurant on his birthday, Les Eminades. We'd had the Cuvée Cebenna, and it was mighty. Their less expensive wine, La Pierre Plantée, is just as good, with a haunting, aromatic but not flowery nose, and a big, complex mixture of fruit and earth on the tongue. One thing the Caves des Arceaux does is stock fewer wineries than I've been used to, but a deeper range of their wines. This is why I'd perceived them as expensive: they had the €60 bottles of the same folks they also had €7 bottles from.

The problem, though, is that they're not all that close to the house. That's why I was intrigued when I noticed a place called Les Vins de Charlotte opening in the lunch-joint ghetto behind the Musée Fabre just before Christmas. It's kind of an out-of-the-way place for a wine-shop, but my curiosity had been piqued, and so I went in the other day to look around.

I was impressed: one wall is solidly Languedoc wines, excellently chosen in a wide variety of price-ranges with a good range of little-known wineries mixed in with Languedoc's Greatest Hits. The proprietoress, Charlotte Isabello, is extremely knowledgeable (and speaks fluent English), and guided me towards my purchase of a modest bottle of Domaine Chazalon le Gouletier, a Pic St. Loup that was somewhat light for that area, but full of the deep fruit I've come to expect from our neighboring mountain. The best thing about the shop is its intelligent design. allowing a lot of wines to be stored in such small quarters, and the equally intelligent labels looped around the display bottles with accurate, un-hyperbolic descriptions of each one. Charlotte and her business partner Jean-Michel Davidou clearly have a plan going here, and I do hope it succeeds. I'll do my bit: they're practically around the corner.

Les Vins de Charlotte, 4 rue Glaise, 34000 Montpellier. 09 53 80 73 41.

Blackout

2012-01-18T11:25:00.000+01:00

Today, a large number of websites are going dark for 24 hours in protest against two bills which are up in Congress. These bills, allegedly aimed at curbing piracy, are the result of a clueless entertainment industry which was notably slothlike in dealing with the digital era, being too concerned with making as much money as possible as quickly as possible without spending any to protect its copyrighted materials.

I, too, am concerned with this, since it has eaten away at my ability to make a living, mostly indirectly. But the way the industry is dealing with this, by attempting to enact large-scale censorship and punitive measures against ISPs, is so ham-fisted and, ultimately, destructive to what the Internet is and has been, that it deserves as much resistance as possible.

I'm not blacking out this site today. Part of the reason is that I'm in France, and most of this wouldn't affect me if it passes. France has its own silly Internet censorship problems, mostly related to torrent downloading. The other part of the reason is kind of embarrassing: I got the code to do it, but I just spent 30 minutes digging around the guts of this blog and can't find the place where Blogger has stashed the raw HTML.

You can sign Google's petition here, and read about this all over the place. I signed the petition, and I figure that's better than the symbolic action of blocking out this site for a day. Now it's your turn.

2011: The Year In Pictures

2012-01-16T13:57:00.000+01:00

One of the things I never expected blogging to do was to get me interested in photography. But from the first day Jesse Sublett showed me his digital camera in Austin and I snapped to how easy it was to use, I was hooked. That was a long time ago, back when I lived in Berlin, and the quality of the pictures sure wasn't all that great -- your phone probably takes higher-resolution pictures than my first camera did. I know mine does. But bit by bit I started figuring out how to use both a camera and the sofware that can tweak the photos to look better and overcome some of the problems not having film causes. And, since I didn't have the cost of film to worry about, I could just shoot and shoot and toss the bad ones. I sorta specialize in bad ones.

Thus, I figured it would be a good idea to sum up the year on this blog every January, showcasing some of the pictures I took, both the ones you did and didn't see. (Don't forget: clicking on the photos will bring them up in a larger format).

Last year ended with the shutter button on my faithful old camera sproinging out on the end of its spring. This, I was reliably informed, was un-fixable. Fortunately, I had just enough to buy a new one, and, when an assignment sent me to Castellón, in the Valencia region of Spain in late January, I had an opportunity to test it out. I got to my hotel, pulled out the camera, and set out to discover this lovely small city.

The camera didn't work. At all. I shot some okay shots with my iPhone instead, but I was furious. When I got back to Montpellier, I took it to a camera shop that was the designated repair location for this area and...well, the denouement is too embarrassing to go into. Let's just say that it wasn't entirely my fault, and that there's a bit of a design flaw in this camera.

Which meant that the first shots the new machine took that were at all interesting happened on my annual pilgrimage to the States. Spring was just happening in Texas, and in mid-March I went to Cajun country to do a few interviews for the book I'm going to write as soon as my agent sells it. On my way to Ville Platte in search of a superb hot sauce I used to buy there, I had a fantastic photo just fall into my lap. I still can't believe I took it.

The hot sauce proved to be no longer made, the old man who made it long retired, and that morning would have been a complete wash were it not for this photo, the boudin at the guy's former store, and a side-journey to Mamou which resulted in yet another shot of another building, which I remember having been some kind of snack bar years and years ago, but which hasn't been anything much lately.

I also got to eat, after almost a decade away, at the area's iconic crawfish joint, Hawk's, which is, as their t-shirts and ads proudly say, "in the middle of nowhere." It is indeed almost impossible to find, even with a Cajun in the car, and at one point we wound up driving into someone's (dry, fortunately) rice field. My friend Dickie laughed at me for sticking my camera into the food, but nine months later, I can click on the photo and remember how good those 'bugs were.

Returning to France, I spent the next three months banging out a book proposal, so there wasn't a whole lot of visual interest produced around here. In August, though, an old friend from New York invited me to visit him and his wife at her reconditioned farmhouse in the Dordogne. It was a lovely spot, and I shot some fairly good pictures around there, given that sunshine wasn't as readily available as it is down here.

I was lucky in that my friend's wife took off for a few days in Paris during my stay and left me one of their cars to tool around the countryside in. It was high tourist season, but tourists are predictable, so it wasn't hard to avoid most of the places they were. One of the nicest places I found was a small town called Elvès, which I think would make a good central point for further explorations of the area. There were some very nice buildings there, but some of the coolest stuff was on doors and walls. I kind of liked this old sign, warning beggars away:

And this traditional farmer's wreath, made from the principal grains of the region, is hung each harvest as a gesture of thanksgiving.

Weirdly, one of my favorite shots from this whole trip was taken as I waited for the train that would eventually lead me back home, with the last couple of drops of battery on my iPhone as I waited at the Les Eyzies train station. They just don't build 'em like this any more.

Not long after I returned, I got an e-mail from some readers of my blog, a couple who'd just moved here after scouting much of southern Europe for a decent retirement spot. E&J may be retired, but they're sure not slowed down, and we've taken to doing a trip into the surrounding countryside on the average of once a week. Since their interests and mine coincide almost totally, this has been a godsend, because I can neither afford a car nor the $3000 it would cost me to get a French drivers license. I've documented these trips from the first one on, but I've also taken so many pictures that there hasn't been room for most of them.

I spend a lot of time shooting into the mountains and valleys, and I must say, this isn't even about skill: Stevie Wonder could take just as good photographs as I do in this part of the world. For instance, after climbing the hill on which Olargues is built, I grabbed these.

The map says these are the Monts de l'Espinouse, about which I know litle, but hey, there's a whole new year ahead of us.

Drinking and driving may be a French national sport, but E doesn't engage in it, which is good: someone has to be sober on these little back roads. Still, one day as we tootled along, I couldn't resist asking him to pull in to one winery, which is one of my very favorites around here, so I could take a nice clichéd photo:

We'll be back for a tasting at some point, though: they might have some wines they don't sell in the shops, and I do like the way Mas de la Seranne makes their stuff.

Recently, our journeys have taken us to oppida, Roman settlements providing goods and services for travellers along the system of Roman roadways, one of which, the Via Domitia, passed right through this area. There are a lot of remains of these, including the most famous, Ambrussum, which is a must-see for anyone interested in this part of history in this region -- and a place whose ruined Roman bridge got painted by Courbet.

Okay, his painting was maybe better than that (it had an extra arch, for one thing: it's been washing away for years), but the winter light around here is quite different than the Really Blue Sky gives you in the summertime. Both are wonderful, but somehow this is more subtle.

Oddly, some of the best shots I got were on one of the most recent trips, to the oppidum of Ensérune, which not only resulted in the blog post that was possibly the most fun to write of all of them this year, but some really nice photos. Part of it was because besides its hilltop location, it was near a weird 13th century engineering project which looks like a UFO landing-site. In the annals of almost-great photos, this circle of light hit the circle in the valley moments before the shutter clicked, but the wind had driven it on by the time the picture got taken. Still a pretty nice shot.

The wind, though, did help to make another shot work out nicely, sculpting these trees over the years.

And the vineyards below are patiently waiting for the weather to change.

One thing I want to do this year is to explore some of the religious history around here, because the Languedoc has been home to loads of "protestants," ie, those who resisted the Roman Catholic church over the years, yet the area around here is loaded with abbeys and other ecclesiastical buildings. This speaks to a tension which spilled over into politics, thanks to the relationship between the French king and the Pope. At some point I hope to get a bit further south than I am now to look at some of the Cathars' strongholds, but there's still lots within a day's drive of here to look at.

And you never know when, as happened in the Dordogne, you stumble upon a church whose art hasn't been erased by the centuries of religious warfare which is so much a part of French history...

...or the odd bit of sculpture which hasn't been smashed.

So I'm really looking forward to the year ahead, having culinary, travel, and historical adventures, puzzling them all out, and reporting them to you from the City On A Hill, Montpellier.

Mid-January Miettes

2012-01-11T15:10:00.000+01:00

Okay, let's start out the year with some good news. As you remember, there was a rash of bakery closings around here, starting with the famous Fournil Ste. Anne and (gulp) including Ortholan, the one on my corner. I'm not nearly the consumer of bread that the average French person is, so this was only a minor inconvenience for me, but there did come the day when I whipped up a big pot of minestrone using "dirty carrots" (yup, that's what the guy at the market had them labelled as), which have been left in the ground instead of harvested immediately. I was curious if this would make a difference. Boy, did it make a difference. No wonder they're a Euro per kilo more than clean carrots. The sweetness and, um, carrotyness of them was astounding. And with such a soup one wants some good bread.

Now, as I mentioned, there are a lot of bakeries around, but most of them are no good. They don't make the bread on the premises, and they actually belong to chains. Ortholan is actually part of a mini-chain, and I discovered during this closing that their fabrication is done out by the Grand M, a traffic circle that sorts southern- and western-bound traffic. Sure enough, on our latest trip, E and I passed it (it's at the end of the Avenue de Toulouse), and there was a portable cooling unit in their parking lot, no doubt keeping their yeast cultures alive while work was being done inside. But at least they're local. I'd been eyeing another bakery nearby on the Clos René with the unpromising name Aux Gourmets, and decided to give it a shot. It was a decidedly ordinary-looking baguette, no doubt of that, and I wasn't overly excited by the prospect of trying it, but I was having minestrone one night and went in and grabbed a loaf. Not only was it cheaper than Ortholan, but the baguette was remarkable: crisp, nutty crust, and a crumb that was notable by being a bit salty, which really fits in not only with the soup, but makes it ideal for eating with cheese.

Ortholan re-opened shortly after the new year, and yet last night when I defrosted a tub of minestrone, I walked down to Aux Gourmets for a baguette. Sold out. The bawdy old ladies who run the joint gave me a lot of attitude for having waited so late in the day and then said "sorry." "Me, too," I said, and they all cracked up. The place displays the logo of the Conféderation Nationale des Artisans Pâtissiers, so despite the kind of goofy atmosphere, they're serious. They have a huge chocolate factory in the rear, and I know they also make their own ice cream, and I bet all of this is delicious. And so the neighborhood opens up a little more...

* * *

The year sure got off to a good start for one guy I saw. I was coming back from the market and one of the many people you see going through the trash (the unemployment here is among the highest in France) had found a box, unopened, from La Poste. He opened it, and it turned out to be one of those "gourmet assortments," with jam, pâté, honey, a couple of bottles of wine, and so on. He was pawing through the excelsior, and his eyes bugged out every time he hit a new treasure. I'm sure there's a back-story as to why this expensive gift was thrown out unopened, but it turned out to be good for someone, at least. Hell, I would have done the same if I'd gotten there before he did!

* * *

Stupid t-shirt season has definitively been over for a while, but there's still stupid business names. It's kind of a truism that in Europe, if you're trying to appeal to young people, you do some of your advertising in English, although in France, you have to add an asterisk with a French translation down the page. (This doesn't always work: in the early internet days, the Paris subways were plastered with huge ads that said DO YOU YAHOO?* which were answered with * Êtes-vous Yahoo? -- not at all the same thing, of course). Anyway, this being a slow news month, I thought I'd report on some other misuses of English I've seen around. There is, for instance, a nearby cell-phone shop called Internity. I've tried and tried to figure out what that's supposed to be -- is the word "internet" involved here? Eternity? Internal? Hard to figure. A bit clearer is the decorators' firm over in Ste. Anne which bears the name Interior Living, which, these days, sure beats Exterior Living, although you don't want to be too interior or people will think you're antisocial. (There's also a sport called Body Fighting, but I haven't investigated it in hopes that I can train for some Mind Fighting). And some business names are totally inexplicable. On the way to E and J's place is a cafe called Le Snake, which I thought was a misspelling brought on phonetically by the way French people say snack, but no, it's got a picture of a snake as well as multiple examples of the word snack. (Snake isn't the French word for snake, if you were wondering). And finally, there was a store on the corner by me for the longest time purveying cheap knockoff sportswear and shoes called Editions ED. I was relieved when they moved on, but the landlord had no problem re-renting the place to a purveyor of awful women's clothing. Its name may explain why I haven't found a French girlfriend yet, though: it's called Crazy Feminity. Feminity? Crazy French people is more like it.

* * *

I've posted before about the paper graffiti artist who calls himself Al Sticking, who has posted his stuff all over France, but lives here. The "enlèvement des tags" guys go after him as virulently as they do hoodlums who just scrawl their names here and there, but he's also invited by real businesses to do work, as the bike shop on the rue Four des Flammes shows. A friend of his has a jewelry business which sells postcards of his work, as well as some of his motifs made into jewelry, and just before Christmas, he managed to do a nice piece all over the front of the place.

I assume the sculpture out front is by someone else, but the two stuck characters are real nice.

Given the city's inability to distinguish between street art and graffiti, I almost hate putting up the pictures I have in this post (except for those immediately above, which I assume were commissioned and will remain up for some time) because these pieces enliven the streets without harming any of the historic beauty of the town. But I spent a lot of time in Berlin shooting street-art, too, and I have to say I get a kick out of it.

Next up will be a raft of short restaurant reviews, dating back to mid-November when my friend John was in town. But I have to get out and shoot these, too, so that'll take a while. Tune in, though; it won't be long.

Ho-Ho, Ho

2012-01-09T15:20:00.001+01:00

We here at Broke Not Poor Kitchens, the French-based gourmet cooking school for the 99%, are constantly looking for useful recipes, but sad to say, the chief cook and dishwasher has a real propensity for pasta. There's nothing wrong with that: there's hardly a dietary staple that's as versatile. But that also means that this is yet another pasta recipe.

Pasta Puttanesca, to be exact, sometimes rather euphemistically translated as "Harlot's Pasta." The hoary (sorry) legend behind it is that Roman prostitutes needed a hearty meal that could be prepared between assignations with clients. That may be as that may be, but more interesting to me is the suggestion that if this is true, most of Rome's prostitutes came from southern Italy: the breadcrumbs are a giveaway.

At any rate, this is a nice hearty winter dish, made quickly and easily, and from mostly cheap ingredients. I guess you didn't get rich whoring in Rome.

(Sorry about the color: the flash didn't go off.) What you need for a dish of this is, clockwise from the top, parsley, preferably flat-leaf Italian parsley; capers; tomato purée, which comes in a box in this part of the world, a dozen or so brine-cured black olives, two anchovies (four fillets if you're using oil-cured ones), some garlic, and two tablespoons of toasted bread crumbs. Oh, and olive oil, which somehow didn't make it into the picture. Dried red chiles are also an option, albeit one I didn't exercise the night I shot this.

You're going to have to pit the olives because I know you're too smart to buy crappy grey-tasting canned pre-pitted olives, right? You can do this with a sharp knife and some patience, or you can do what I did and buy a cheap cherry-pitter. Put the olive pointy-side up in the O there in the bottom and bring down the pitter. The pit plops out the bottom of the device and if your olives are good you'll have something that looks a lot like the crappy canned pitted ones only tastes like olives.

Put the olives, a tablespoon of drained capers, the anchovies, about four cloves of garlic (each clove cut into three or four pieces), and a generous amount of parsley leaves into a food processor. Oh, and put your pasta water on: this moves rather quickly. Process the ingredients until they look pretty well ground.

But wait, I hear you say. I recognize that food processor! It's the fancy Braun that also comes with a blender and a dough-maker! It costs $500 and is only available in Europe! And you're right. You can also do it with a cheaper one, but I didn't have one of these babies for a long time, and I did the chopping with a good sharp knife. It takes longer, but it gets you there.

Next thing to do is to toast your bread crumbs until they're golden. This can be a slightly hairy process, but you should use a dry frying pan and realize that you'll have pale bread crumbs until the moment you don't. Keep stirring them and keep in mind they can go from raw to burnt in seconds. If you're skillful, you'll come up with something like this:

You can also do this with a bit of olive oil, as I've seen in some southern Italian recipes. And you can not toast them at all, if you want. Up to you.

Now, you put a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in your sauce pan and heat it over medium heat. When it's ready, toss in the mixture you've just ground up. This is also when you'd add your dried chiles or chile flakes, if you're using them.

Stir it around and don't let it burn. In a few minutes, it'll be fragrant, urging you to come add the next step. Pasta water boiling? It should be. Go toss in the pasta (penne rigate is what I've always used, although there are actually people who make this with spaghetti) and then put one cup of that tomato purée into the mix.

Stir it in, lower the heat, and let it cook for just as much time as your pasta takes to cook. (De Cecco, which I use when I can't find Voiello, takes 12 minutes for penne rigate). Again, stir it to keep it from burning (can you tell I have burned this recipe from time to time?).

Soon, your sauce will look like this.

On your way to drain the pasta, spill about a tablespoon of the pasta water into this so that it will adhere well to the pasta. Then, bring the drained pasta over, mix the pasta with the sauce, add the bread crumbs, and take it to the table.

Man, I just had lunch and simply looking at this makes me hungry again! Try to eat it slowly; it's got a lot of depth to appreciate. And that other recipe you found for it that uses tuna fish instead of anchovies? Toss it. Anchovies rock.

Religion, Wine and Smoke

2011-12-29T16:34:00.000+01:00

I've still got second-hand smoke in the back of my nose, a smell I can just barely detect after 24 hours. Or maybe it's just the memory. But there's a lot of burning out there, which doubtless has something to do with the way the air is hazy even though the sun is shining brightly. And there's a good reason for this, as I found out yesterday.

E was rarin' to go on another drive, but I nixed Romans this time, even though he's found another good-looking oppidum. I wanted to move ahead in time and start unsnarling the church history here -- which is to say the Roman Catholic history -- so that I could start to make sense of the Catholic heretics and the Protestants, both of whom were big in these parts. The logical place to start was Maguelone.

If you look at a map, you won't find it; you'll find Villeneuve lès Maguelone instead. But just below that, you'll see a round landform in the Mediterranean with a skinny road going to it and the name Maguelone. It's just that nobody lives there. Not now, at least. But for a few centuries, it ran this whole part of France.

The only story I could find starts in the 700s, when the Crusader Charles Martel arrived and wiped out the town that was on this island, which was apparently called Maguelone, and was a "Saracen" (ie, probably North African Muslim) town. Before that, there had probably been a Christian church there. At any rate, Martel reported that the island was clear, and somewhere in the bowels of the Vatican, it was decided that the Diocese should switch from Narbonne (where Christianity had been introduced to the resident Romans by a guy who'd walked around with his severed head in his hands) to a new cathedral, dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, on this island. It went up in the 11th century, and it was where the church was run, along with all its other businesses, which eventually included Montpellier University, until 1563.

"I always wondered about that place!" E said, as we blasted off out of town. It sure wasn't far, although the road there is, basically, one lane, with sand dunes on one side and the Étang de l'Arnel, a small bay, through which the Sète-Rhône Canal goes. As you walk from the parking lot to the church (which is free to visit), you get a good sense of where you are.

It's a pretty extensive vineyard, and, apparently, it's where the cathedral's graveyard was.

Off in the distance, not visible above, are some of the permanent residents.

The flamingoes were everywhere yesterday, busily finding shrimp so they could get pinker.

The cathedral itself is both impressive and disappointing. I rented an audio guide, in hopes that I'd get some insight into the story of what went on there, but, while not quite a bust, it wasn't as helpful as it might be. The British bird who was chirping the narration had an annoying habit of mispronouncing everything, rendering façade as f'SAYD, and, most annoyingly, the adjective used to describe the buildings that weren't the cathedral, episcopal, as eppiSCOPPal. That's just gotta be wrong. Hell, she even misprounounced Montpellier.

But one bit of useful information came out of all of this: this building had been trashed during the Wars of Religion and the Revolution, and then, as a Treasure of France, had been sold by the revolutionaries to a guy with some money. in the early 19th century, a guy named Frédéric Fabrège bought it and began restoring it. Since the original entryway had been nuked by rampaging peasants, he bought bits and pieces of other Romanesque churches and framed the door with St Paul

and St. Peter

and then a lintel with a horrible inscription about how, as you enter, you should weep for all of the sins you've committed and bathe in your tears and I forget what else, and, on top of that, a pretty standard-issue Christ In Glory surrounded by the four evangelists. This particular Jesus has an odd look on his face, as if he's sat on a whoopie cushion.

Inside, unsurprisingly enough, the place is huge.

Upstairs is a dormitory where the monks who kept the place up lived, while the Bishop and his people had their own residences nearby. As with all these churches, people with power got buried near the altar, with some pretty impressive tombs.

The front of the church was once guarded by two defensive towers, only one of which is still standing. The stones of the other, as was the case with a lot of churches around here after the Revolution, were donated to help build the canal.

Today, most of the island which isn't vineyards is a huge park which was put together in the 1890s, and everything is gradually being restored, thanks to the fact that the property is now in the hands of a foundation with some money. It's a huge tourist attraction, particularly in the summer, and is close enough to Montpellier that we saw some folks who'd ridden down on the VeloMagg bikes you can rent from the city.

What happened to the cathedral of Maguelone? Well, as I said, the diocese controlled a lot of stuff in the area, and as Montpellier grew -- there was almost nothing here when the cathedral went up -- the people who'd normally spend most of their time at the cathedral were spending time in town. Eventually, with the University booming and the city growing like mad, and becoming a commercial center and an important center for politics, it just didn't make sense to sit out on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean and try to run things. There was probably a skeleton staff left when the peasants started going nuts and trashing the place. As to why they did this, we had to go to another huge church for the answer.

* * *

On the way out of Maguelone, we stopped for a minute to look at the beach. Rounded stones gave testimony to rough waves out there, and from what I could see from the tiny ones rolling in, there appeared to be a hell of an undertow.

We got back to the mainland and headed towards Sète, from where we'd head to Villeveyrac, our next destination. White smoke was everywhere: wine-growers were trimming last year's growth off of their vines so that next year's would eventually start up and bear the next crop of grapes. Somehow we got lost and missed Sète entirely, but as E noted as we rolled along, it hardly mattered: we were headed in the right direction and the scenery was soothing, the garrigue and its stubby bushes and small trees rolling on in every direction.

"Now, it's really great you wanted to see this, because I've wondered about this place, too. I've driven by it but never stopped," E said as we went into the bus parking lot across the street from the Abbaye de Valmagne. I'd been curious about this place since before I moved here. In Berlin, Galleries Lafayette, the huge French department store, had opened its only non-French branch, and although the prices were punishing, I sometimes went there to shop for stuff I couldn't get anywhere else, and it had a nice selection of wines, of course. I'd look at the Languedoc section, and I realized I could afford the lower-end bottles, some of which were Abbaye de Valmagne. I'd gotten a story in my head that the Revolution had left the Cistercian monks there alone because the wine was so good, and that somehow their vines had escaped the phylloxera plague.

Both parts of that turned out to be false.

The abbey was founded by the Viscount of Béziers, and started out as a Benedictine community, but soon became a Cistercian one. Cistercians are noted for their hard work, excellent farming skills, and innovation with machinery. Nestled in prime wine country, in the grès de Montpellier terroir, with abundant game and farmland given to it by local landowners, it was one fat monastery. Its inhabitants might have been monks, but they lived well.

You can imagine how the local peasants felt about that, especially considering a lot of them were "protestants," which, depending on when you find the term used, meant either Cathar (Albigensian Heresy) or actual Calvinists. To be Roman Catholic was to play along with the French king and the folks in Rome, and was roughly equivalent to being a Republican in America today, while you could say that the "protestants" were the 99%. At any rate, the bishop of the abbey became a Huguenot protestant in 1575 and organized a riot that destroyed all the stained glass and a lot of the other decoration. He was quickly hustled out and a declining number of monks started rebuilding. And I do mean declining: from around 300 in the abbey's heyday, there were only five left when the next bunch of raging peasants happened along with the Revolution. We're lucky that some of the highest-up decorations up front didn't get erased, because they're weird and charming.

Once again, cash-strapped revolutionaries looked for a rich person to buy a national treasure, and found one in a guy named Granier-Joyeuse, who immediately recognized the value of an empty church stripped of all its art and decoration and installed the furnishings it has today.

It's hard to explain just how weird it is to someone who, like me, has been in dozens of old churches of greater or lesser importance to see gigantic wine-barrels lining the sanctuary of a Gothic cathedral.

Other evidence of the virulence of the reaction against the church is piled against the walls of a couple of the rooms off the cloister next door.

They not only smashed the sculptures, but they sanded down the Bible stories and other narrative features on them. That said, the cloister itself is a very nice space, and is probably even nicer in summertime.

Admission to the place is pretty steep: €7.50, but it gets you a dégustation, a wine-tasting, and that's worth it, since these folks make very nice rosés and some decent reds that need to be laid down a while. There are also some lesser wines (check the website) that are ready for drinking right now.

They were burning the trimmings as we walked up to the place and they were still doing it as we left. I was lucky to get a shot of the abbey without smoke, and the smell is probably still in my jacket as well as, as I said, in the back of my nose. I know that in America, people like to grill over vine trimmings, and it's just a shame there isn't more outdoor cooking around here, because I can tell it'd be a great addition to just about anything cooked over it.

As the sun was setting, we headed back to Montpellier, reflecting that if you were pressed for time, it'd be easy enough to drive out here and back in an hour or so. But E got a wild hair and decided he wanted to look at a wind farm that was up on a rise between the abbey and the road back home, so we drove up a dirt road to the summit -- or near enough -- and checked it out.

It was cold, but it wasn't raining, at least. That's going to come to an end, I -- and countless farmers -- hope, so that the crops can get some water and, when the springtime starts to return in March, the cycle can start again.

Christmas Tree Warning

2011-12-25T14:10:00.002+01:00

I really don't have an opinion of whether Christianity was good or bad for the Romans, but I do know that if you don't take your Christmas tree down, you might wind up like the folks in this house.

Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas, folks!

Tunneling Monks, Iberian Celts, Greeks, Romans (Of Course), A Donkey and A Tower (and More)

2011-12-23T15:11:00.000+01:00

This is a railroad tunnel. It runs through a hill somewhere west of Béziers. It was dug in 1854. Big deal.

But it is. It's not just any hill. It's a hill which helped shape the history of this entire region, which had an immense economic impact on this whole part of France. And all because some monks decided to drain a swamp in the 1250s. As they were doing it, they were looked over by the ghosts of villagers who had lived on the hill since Neolithic times, and who had already been gone for over 1200 years. It's a pretty wonderful story, albeit a kind of complicated one, so stick with me here as I try to explain it all.

Let's start with the hill, because that's been there longest. E has lately been obsessed with the Via Domitia, as we saw in my last post here, and recently, when a visitor from Switzerland was here, they searched for a piece of it which leads to the hill. We went looking for it again yesterday, because he'd missed it, and after getting off the A9 at the Béziers West exit, we took the road to St. Chinian, but exited it at a rather sleazy turnoff leading to Nissal-lez-Enserune. The road was lined with truckstops and the occasional prostitute, which is something you don't see during the day around here. There were a lot of trucks, too. At any rate, after Nissan, we took a tiny road and found this imposing structure.

Proof that some French farmers make money, but don't acquire taste along with it. But turning off to the right of the lane leading to this place was a road. E pulled out his extremely detailed map and grinned. "Yes! This is it! I missed it before!" Like the tunnel, the road looked like a road.

But the map left no doubt: this was a section of the Via Domitia. So we parked the car and began to walk. And it started looking more Roman after a while.

Then it got funkier...

And finally ended in a bunch of blackberry brambles. We wouldn't have been able to follow it much further anyway: those trees you see in the distance shade the Canal du Midi. And that's another part of the story.

The Canal du Midi was an amazing engineering project undertaken by a minor noble named Pierre-Paul Riquet beginning in 1667, to connect Toulouse with Agde and Sète, via Castelnaudary and Carcassonne. It took them 14 years, and it almost ended in tears at our hill. But they finished it, it brought a wave of economic prosperity to the southern part of France, and, eventually, it was replaced by more modern forms of transporting goods, like the railroad, and, later, trucks. It was kept up, though, and these days well-heeled tourists can take leisurely cruises down it, stopping overnight at houses transformed into hotels with high-quality food. Even in the middle of winter, it looks pretty nice.

It cut right through the Via Domitia at this spot, though, which was good news; I didn't want to walk much further, because there was still the hill to see.

We walked back to the car using access roads to the vineyard, whose owner was out busily trimming the old growth, and noticed that the vineyard bank facing one direction had a totally different set of wild plants than the one facing 90º in the other direction. I picked an herb that smelled familiar, but couldn't place it, and saw a whole bunch of wild strawberry plants. Moles had done extensive work on the soil, and there were holes where I bet there were snakes hibernating; there are vipers in this part of the world.

Back in the car, we backtracked some and followed signs to the Oppidum of Ensérune. Yup, another Roman Motel VI -- except it turned out to be more than that. We parked and paid the lady €7 each to get in, and sure enough, there were ruins.

In the center of the second picture there, you'll see several ceramic things set into the ground, with round holes. These are silos, used for storing grain, and stoppered with a tight-fitting rock. They kept food available for the villagers all year long. The condition of most of the excavations here only reflects the latest wave of inhabitants, though. It was first settled in an organized fashion by Iberian Celts around 650 BC, although there had been Neolithic settlers before them, and quickly became a center of trade. Greeks started showing up about 200 years later, and a century after that, part of the town was taken over by the Romans as an oppidum for the Via Domitia, and nice sturdy walls were erected to protect it. Then, around 400 AD, the town was abandoned in favor of living at a lower elevation. Certainly it must have been hard to get water up there, although perhaps I missed evidence of a well, and all the farming would have to be done down the hill.

The site's real value, though, is that it has a graveyard which was in constant use for the town's entire existence, probably the best-preserved ancient graveyard in Europe.

Because of the lack of room, cremation was the only form of funeral service, but the ashes were buried with pottery (some of which was smashed in the funeral rites), weapons, and other goods which helped archaeologists, who've been whacking away at this hilltop since at least the start of the 20th century, trace the settlement patterns. The one thing they don't know -- and never will -- is what it was called.

The really big disappointment was the museum, given the excellent documentation of the site itself. One hopes that some of the money the government has used to set up the extremely informative signs around the hilltop will eventually find its way into what is almost a caricature of the lost-in-time archaeological museum. There's no interpretation, and some of the labels are handwritten and faded. The video, though, is pretty good. There's a huge gift-shop and the boss patrols the grounds outside.

But the other thing you can see from this village is one of the weirdest medieval relics in all of France, the Étang de Montady. I tried to shoot it, but it was the shortest day of the year, and the sun was being fickle, so I defer to the mighty BastienM of Wikipedia on this:

If you look closely, you'll see, in the center, a round green area, traversed by what appears to be a road. This depression used to be a swamp, and one day the Bishop of Narbonne decided it should be drained. Some local monks (I have no idea where they came from, except E has determined they were Cistercians) then set about digging a trench. The trench went to the hill, and the monks, not knowing that limestone, which the hill is made from, is a damn poor conduit for water and tunnels dug through it are liable to collapse, dug a tunnel through the hill.

They didn't know it, but they'd discovered that there are different kinds of limestone with different qualities. And, when Piquet found his plans dead-ending at the hill, he despaired: he was already in hot water with the King, who was bankrolling the Canal du Midi, and now he was up against a limestone hill. But some of the local farmers found out about his problem and told him that centuries ago, the monks had done it, so he probably could, too. And so he took a chance, blew a hole in the hill, and the canal's still running through it today.

It's apparently a great place to fish for perch, as two gentlemen were doing as we walked through. Inside, and unphotographable by me, is a little room in the ceiling, which possibly leads to a manhole for emergency evacuation. Or not.

You can see how close the monks' tunnel is to the railroad tunnel in this shot I took which shows their canal and the white pylons in the first picture in this post.

And, since that town on the hill in the distance is Montady, I decided that the monastery which did the work had to be there, and so we set off to check it out.

I was wrong. The closer we got to the town, the more obvious it was that this was just another defense tower like we'd seen in Olargues.

But there was no stopping E, nor did I want to. He snaked up the tiny streets of the village towards the tower, and we were rewarded with yet another astonishing view.

But not as good as these guys got.

The birds launched themselves from the windows in the tower and just hung there. The wind held them motionless for a while, but they inevitably had to regain their purchase on the air, wheel around for a while, and then go back and do it again.

Who knows where the monks who did this colossal feat in the Étang de Montady came from? Who knows what the name of the village which persisted for centuries on top of the limestone hill was? Who can imagine what the Languedoc would have been like if the Canal du Midi hadn't been built? And who knows what further amazing unknown bits of history lie out there for intrepid explorers, armed only with a German automobile, a very high-resolution map, and an intense curiosity to seek this stuff out? Stay tuned; we're already researching the next trip.

Roman Around

2011-12-15T14:08:00.000+01:00

It's been a while, so I was happy to find an e-mail from E in my in-box the other day asking if I'd be interested in going to Ambrussum with him and J. J's had dental surgery, and hasn't been in much of a mood to go out, but her interest in Greco-Roman times around here finally got her out to look at the oppidum over in Murviel-lès-Montpellier the other day, and that coincided with E's interest in the Via Domitia, the Roman road which connected Nîmes with Cadiz starting around 120 BC. Wikipedia lists 11 oppida in France, but I'd always heard that Ambrussum was the good one. Boy, was it ever.

It didn't take long to get there. "Gee, this is hardly a trip," J said as she got out of the car. We'd headed down the A9 to Lunel, taken the exit, and followed the signs to the parking lot. (Hint: if you go, drive slowly once you're off the A9, because the signs come quickly and aren't obvious). The place was deserted, despite the fact, which E had discovered, that it was free until the end of the year. It was warmish, sunny, and a fine day to see what was going on here.

Oppida were rest stations for travellers, stationed about every 15 km along the Via Domitia. You could get a change of horses, a bath, blacksmith and wheelwright services, a meal, and a room. If you were a postal courier, you could pick up the mail for delivery down the line. Up the hill, there was a settlement with protective walls and shops where you could buy supplies. My guess is that Ambrussum was a pretty cushy place to be stationed. On the other hand, it was abandoned around 100 AD, possibly because of flooding from the river.

Of course, like all places that had to be dug out of the ground, it doesn't photograph all that well. Here, for instance, is the inn, and if you look hard, you can make out, over there on the left, the four guest rooms.

Just past this, a path heads uphill, and as you approach the gates of the settlement (or, rather, where they stood) it gets paved:

(Shoes included for scale. Yeah, right.)

Once up the hill, you're in the oppidum's community, and according to the archaeologists who are still working there, there are entryways to where shops and other services once stood. If the reconstructions are accurate, the houses up here were pretty nice, with the living quarters ringing a shaded courtyard.

The hilltop has ramparts facing away from the Via Domitia towards the Gallic settlements. The Gauls were at peace with the Romans during the time the oppidum at Ambrussum was occupied, but hey, they were French, so the Romans figured they had to keep an eye on them anyway.

And it's true that you're high enough up here: there's a real panorama visible from this part of the settlement, with a nice view of Pic St. Loup and other mountains, and one of the signs said that 180º from this view, you could sometimes see the snowcapped Mt. Ventoux over in Provence, but not yesterday. That's okay; the Languedoc mountainscape was real nice.

I think that's l'Hortus on the left close in, but I wonder what that sharp peak right-center is. Notice also that the A9 is right there, following the ancient route of the Via Domitia. Those Roman engineers knew the best way to get places, and there's no reason to change it now.

Down the hill lies the Vidourle River, with the famous Roman bridge providing access to the site from the Via Domitia. It started being knocked down by the locals in the 14th century, and the river has finished most of the job. If you wonder why, look at the size of that log hanging off the thing: that arrived just recently, and possibly with some force.

This Roman bridge is perhaps more famous than the other ones in the area because before the second arch fell apart in the 19th century, Courbet painted it.

Which puts Ambrussum on another Languedoc tourist route, the Courbet Trail.

As I said, this was free, but normal admission is only €4, and well worth it. There's a museum where you start your trip (and buy your ticket) and it's loaded with information both on the site in Roman times and its excavation and preservation, largely at the hand of the 19th century's platoon of gentleman archaeologists, many of them medical doctors who liked to go digging on weekends. In the museum, you learn that this site was occupied since Neolithic times, and even had some Greeks messing around it -- there's a shard of Attic pottery that was found on the grounds.

And J was, as she admitted, wrong: although it only took about 20 minutes to drive here from central Montpellier, the hike around the hill and the riverbank took a couple of hours. On a warm winter day with plenty of sunshine it was pretty easy going, but I'd say that if you're going in the summertime, you should bring some water along (and take it out: they're pretty militant about not littering this site, and I'm totally in agreement), because that hilltop's going to be nice and hot.

E's already talking about going to another oppidum down by Béziers, and that sounds good to me. And while this nice weather's not going to hold forever, there'll be enough of it to take advantage of it when it appears. Stay tuned.

(Oppidum d'Ambrussum, open daily except Monday, February-December, 2pm-5:30pm October-March, 2pm-5:30 Tues-Sat, 10am-12:30pm and 2:30-5:30 April-December, 9am-12pm and 3pm-7pm July and August.)

Out Of Bread!

2011-12-15T13:11:00.000+01:00

No, not like that. I'm still broke, not poor, but I'm also a little bit poorer today, as is everyone in town. Here's what's happened.

One of the few nice things about living in The Slum here is that, dazed with sleep, I could still throw on some clothes, walk to the corner, and buy croissants and other pastries for breakfast. Very good croissants. Made by the people who also made very good bread, which I bought whenever soup or salad was going to be the main dish for dinner, or when I felt like a sandwich and would buy a loaf, halve it, and freeze the other half. Ortholan is a local chain, with a big store down south on the Avenue de Toulouse which fabricates and half-bakes the stuff, and two other stores, one of which is on my corner, and the other of which is across the Comédie, which finish the baking and perfume the air here between 2 and 3 in the afternoon. And here's what it's looked like for a week:

The only difference is, today, as I was out shooting pictures, the orange sign you can see there went up:

This is good news: evidently, once the "repairs" are finished, the bakery will re-open, being open on Sundays until Christmas, of which there's only one left. I was concerned for the neighbors: I only patronize the bread end of things, but the bakery's main source of income seems to be fancy stuff, and they have a loose-leaf book of seasonal things you can order -- and people do. There are a lot of traditional sweets at this time of year, just like everywhere, and Ortholan makes several levels of bûche de Noël, and king cakes of every diameter, among other things. People pre-pay for these, and having your bakery plotz right before Christmas is a nightmare.

But at least I'm getting my bakery back, or so it seems. There's other bad news for Montpellier bread-lovers, like this poor woman.

Le Vieux Four Sainte Anne was the first bakery I saw in Montpellier when I came here early in 2006 to look around. There was a plaque on the wall just to the left of the woman there which indicated that the baker had come in second in the nationwide baking contest in 2005. My lord, the second-best bakery in France? That had to be good. Unfortunately, every time I went there, there was a line out the door.

Eventually, I moved here, and was able to go there when I wanted. It isn't exactly in the back yard, but there were days I would be walking back from the market and I'd stop in for some sandwich-making material, which was often sold to me by an exuberant West Indian lady. Through the door to the left, one could see the baker going about his routine, with his wood-burning oven and wooden peels and cooling loaves stacked up. I once got a loaf fresh out of the oven, and it was so hot I had to keep switching it from hand to hand so as not to burn myself. (Unfortunately, it was summer; you kind of hope for things like that around this time of year.)

It was very, very good bread. I never tried any of their other things, the pizzas and tarts and so on, but I did manage several loaves of bread. I also love the Ste. Anne district, and hope to get an apartment there one of these days, and was fantasizing having this place as my local. But no: here's what that woman is looking at:

It's hard to read in that picture, I guess, but what it says is "Starting today, the Vieux Four Ste. Anne is closed. Thank you for your understanding." And yes, that's a real Michelin sticker there, from 2004. Bakeries almost never get them (the Petit Fute guide is a pay-to-play deal).

"It's a real loss," said The Other Ed when I mentioned it the other day, and I hope someone knows what happened here. And it's got me wondering, with all the bakeries here, how many really good ones are left. Bread is central to French life, there's no doubt about that, but as with everywhere else, the mass of people are content to buy so-so stuff. There's a big chain called Paul that's made a fortune by making bread that approximates traditional stuff, and to tell the truth, if you're in a railroad station or Charles de Gaulle Airport and you're hungry, their sandwiches hit the spot, but their baguettes are only slightly better than what you get in Mononprix.

Here's wishing Ste. Anne's baker a good retirement, if that's what it is, and here's hoping the spirit of what he accomplished settles on the shoulders of a young baker somewhere here in town and inspires him to open a worthy successor.

December

2011-12-10T13:57:00.001+01:00

I'm glad it's cooling off. Not that Im looking forward to the slightly elevated electric bills turning on the heat will bring (and it's not turned up very high: the African folks downstairs heat their apartment enough so that the rising heat has taken care of me for a while), but if my windows were open, as they are most of the year around, I'd be getting bombarded with Christmas music. That's right, the Hivernales are here, the modest Christmas fair the city moved into the little fake log cabins on the Comédie right after the even more modest wine fair pulled out of them, and now we've got to listen to horrid, mostly American, Christmas music from morning til night. On the up-side, they gave up on the hideous metal tree they've had in past years, and gotten a real one.

This shares space with our local Occupy folks, who started out living in the bandstand on the Esplanade, then moved to the lawn of the park there, and who now camp out just to the right of this picture. They're not properly Occupy protesters, though, but rather Indigné[e]s, according to their sign, thus allying themselves with the Spanish protestors in Madrid and Barcelona who've been at it even longer than the US folks, although I guess that doesn't make the papers in the States. The remaining protestors look kind of iffy, though: what, for instance, is the gigantic teddy-bear supposed to mean?

At any rate, keep walking to the right from this picture, and soon you're in the little village of horrors.

This collection changes from year to year, but not much: there are always the regulars selling stuff that no rational person would want. I can't speak to the jewelry, but it doesn't seem very well-designed. There's wine for sale, but mostly mulled, which is a great way to get rid of sub-standard stuff from your winery. There are ceramics so gaudy they'd radiate ugly through a cupboard door, bric-a-brac and tchotchkes (there must be an equivalent French word) galore, tiny jars of preserves, a booth which takes pictures and -- there's no other word for it -- warhols them into large wall-hangings which mimic Andy's iconic Marilyns and Liz Taylors (except it's your kids), and much, much more. There's food, of course: a stand selling aligot (mashed potatoes mixed with cheese) on which you can get a grilled sausage or an andouilette (a chitterling sausage that smells like a urinal which hasn't been cleaned in a decade, possibly the only outright disgusting food I've found in France), a "Christmas in the Orient" booth selling falafel and North African pastries, and, of course, the local oysters.

I wish these were better, but they taste mostly of salt and have little of the delicacy good oysters have. On the other hand, the folks manning this booth are from Sète, so they also have tielles (little pies filled with chopped cuttlefish in a spicy tomato sauce) and mussel turnovers.

And, of course, there's sugar aplenty, from hand-made artisinal nougat to the utterly disgusting jelly-like stuff that Haribo sells, displayed by the ton, and sold by weight.

Note, between Spongebob and the doll, the panties made entirely of candy, with which a dedicated cunnilinguist can stage a race between orgasm and tooth decay. Only €15.

My favorite of these booths, though, is one of the ones selling absolutely useless items.

The French have a thing for Zen, which they don't seem to understand, using the word to mean anything odd or relaxing or otherwise indescribable. I once checked into an Ibis Hotel somewhere in France where they were touting their service zen. I wasn't able to make out, from the description, what it was, but from what I know of Buddhism, perhaps staying in a place with real Zen service wouldn't be an unmitigated pleasure.

The Hivernales also attract a fringe, people who don't rent one of the little booths, but sell cheap clothing, shoes, and handbags. It's also attracted the bonbon guys, who have carts on which kittens, pygmy goats, and even a black pygmy pig who wags his tail like a puppy when approached with an apple, stand. The deal is, your kid sees these and drags you over so they can pet the animals and the hustlers then try to talk you into buying a box of hard candy from them. I've been warned not to engage with these people, but I don't eat candy anyway, so it's not likely. My guess, however, is that the animals' lives aren't much better than those of beggars' dogs. The weirdest fringe person I've seen was a guy being moved on by the cops yesterday who had long balloons of the sort you make animals from, but was making some rather deranged abstracts, and a number of crosses. I doubt that the wild look in his eye and his unwashed hair were making sales any easier.

And as hokey as this all is, I have to admit it pays off at night.

The "icicles" on the front of the Opéra Comédie "drip," which is kind of corny, but it's all very festive and cheery, and no doubt the people on the shopping streets are opening up their wallets in fine fashion. It doesn't hurt that Montpellier is a place that everyone in the region has to come at some point or another to do administrative business -- renew a driver's license, deal with taxes -- so it doesn't have to depend on its full-time residents to support some of the more luxurious (Cartier, Hermès) outlets.

The broke-but-not-poor, on the other hand, go about life as usual, hitting the markets to get newly-seasonal stuff. I haven't posted a post-market photo in some time, but it's just not that glamorous in the winter. Still, there's good eating to be had:

In the back is a bag of really fine spinach, which they practically give away at this time of year, and in the front is this "mélange japonaise" salad mix, bitter and crunchy. Three type of pears are in the background, and they'll be with us a while longer, and there are some small broccoli heads which proved very nice. Not shown is a piece of pumpkin I bought and forgot about -- I honestly must learn some way of cooking this stuff, because I hate throwing food away -- nor the nice butternut squash I swear I'm going to figure out something to do with, which I picked up today. Also not shown are things which intrigue me which I haven't gotten around to buying yet: one stall at the market has purple and round carrots, which I've got to try, and at some point I'm going to buy some root vegetables to roast, maybe in some duck fat I indulged in recently. (I can't find lard any more, so I'm going to try substituting duck fat in biscuits tomorrow morning. Wonder how that'll work..?)

Yeah, it's December, and it gets worse in the food department. By February I'll be counting the days til I can get to Austin and inhale some Mexican food, because the local scene will have gotten just a bit bleak by then. But at least at the end of this month, they'll pack up the Hivernales and turn that damn Christmas music off.

And, as with all Decembers, it's a hard month for those of us who are in the writing biz: no new work, difficulty getting paid by those who have hired us, and nothing shaking until sometime early next year. Thanks to all who've helped out with the PayPal button over on the right; it's definitely helped a lot. With luck, the book will sell next year and I can finally turn a corner, get a better apartment, and continue to have exploits here that you'll want to read about.

Death For Christmas

2011-12-08T14:48:00.001+01:00

In one of the odder choices by our local photography museum, the Pavillon Populaire, the show which has followed the rather sad Brassaï in America show is entitled Apocalypses: The Disappearance of Cities, from Dresden to Detroit (1944-2010). It's quite the change, fighting your way through the Christmas market to the Pav Pop, the forced cheer giving way to huge, stark images of utter destruction. (For the most part, but we'll get to that).

The short wall essay that greets you after pushing your way through hanging vinyl strips on which Richard Peter's rather ham-handed picture of the ruins of Dresden's City Hall through a skeleton in a nearby museum has been printed makes the point that an actual enactment of the Bible's prophecy of the end of the world was made possible by what it calls "industrial warfare." The first room, hung with huge prints of bombed-out Cologne, makes the point eloquently. The show is chronological, and takes the visitor first through the ruins of World War II Germany, as seen by German photographers, who tended to have a more artistic sensibility than the American GIs whose color photos of bombed-out Nuremberg I've seen. In fact, having seen them made it far clearer to me why the photos here are more than documentary shots, in that time has been taken to compose them, and some care has been taken with the black-and-white printing. Thus, Herbert List's photos of the Munich Residenz, an old royal palace turned art museum which was stomped by Allied bombs, are about the damage to the artworks, and are not without a sense of humor, as the large nude Greek statue lying on its back, frozen there making an odd gesture for someone lying down, shows.

Mostly, though, there's nothing to laugh at here. Richard Peter was a Dresdener who somehow escaped Bomber Harris' firestorm, and set about as soon as he safely could documenting the city's rebirth. In fact, his picture of the Neues Rathaus provides the only other light moment in the show for those who know German: the façade remains, as does a statue, but there's rubble all over the place while a sign declares "Wiederaufbau des Neues Rathaus" -- Reconstruction of the New City Hall. Peter not only shot the utter destruction of the Frauenkirche, which was only finished through a superhuman rebuilding program a couple of years ago, but he also got into the air-raid shelters, where all you Slaughterhouse 5 fans will recall people baked to death or died of anoxia due to the firestorm using up all the available oxygen. Whether Peter's close-ups of screaming corpses is appropriate to a show that deals mostly with the disappearance of the city itself is another matter, but they are horrifying. There is also the inevitable attempt to make Art out of something that already is by the single-named Chargesheimer, who does a good job of turning ruins into abstracts, and then prints the same picture solarized, which makes no sense at all.

From Germany we move to Poland, which is more of the same: Warsaw also got totally stomped, and Leonard Sempolinski's artfully composed pictures of the Church of the Visitation have a hopeful note to them, empasizing as they do the artworks in the church that look over the bricks and stones lying on the ground. The most puzzling pictures in the whole show are a wall of photos of Warsaw by Maria Chrzaszczowska, which are the size of large postage stamps, hardly larger than the 35mm film they were shot on.

No show on the destruction of cities is complete without its Hiroshima, and, after a few familiar pictures of the devastation, including the canonical one of the dome of the surgical hospital, we are in for the best series in the show: huge unframed prints by a young photographer, Hiromi Tsuchida, of objects from the Hiroshima Peace Museum: clothing, a lunchbox, a clump of hair, all with captions in French and English telling their stories, not all of which are tragic.

Unfortunately, the Pav Pop had a lot more square meters to fill, and whether the curators decided there had been enough death and destruction or through the kind of logic only those with doctorates in art history can follow, we move to a section called Phantoms of Cities.

One wall has this ghastly vision of Haixinsha, China, by Mü Chen, and an equally huge shot of Pyongyang by Namsik Baik. Both drew me in, particularly Baik's, which takes in the entire city and the mountains beyond, with the multicolored buildings, most of which are quite futuristic, the new snow, and the endless housing projects emanating a kind of glittery evil while the mountains, which have been there forever, just look on. Two more walls are dedicated to four gargantuan square photos of London, Paris, and New York by the annoying duo of Lucie et Simon, who have painstakingly erased all the humans from the photos but one in each shot. Cute, but so what? Everyone has Photoshop these days. And finally, there are a number of photographs of deserted buildings taken in Detroit in 2006-8 by Yves Marchand and Romain Maffre, which don't hold a candle to the ones by Camilo Jose Vergara, a Chilean-American whose work preceded theirs by a decade. He may have had the hometown advantage, having a wife from Detroit, although it seems to me there are a couple of Italians who've done good work there as well.

After the Brassaï show, too, the curators are to be congratulated for only including one obvious howler. Or, rather, one piece of misdirection. The German photos are mostly on the upper floor, but there are a couple before you go up, and, lonely on one wall, a photo by Lee Miller, "Non-Conformist Chapel, 1941," showing the doorway to a London building with bricks from a Blitz bombing spilling out its front door. The small print acknowledges that it's London, and it is. But you climb the stairs and get hit immediately with a blow-up of it stretching to the ceiling and the word ALLEMAGNE, Germany. I found this both confusing and amateurish: it's easy enough to miss the original downstairs, and it's also the only picture of London's war damage in the whole show. It's a weird slip-up, but it wouldn't be the Pav Pop, I guess, without at least one.

The show runs through Feb 12, 2012.

Mountains, Rain, and a Walled City

2011-11-22T15:21:00.001+01:00

Some weeks ago, my old friend John, who, in the years since I've last seen him, has acquired a doctorate in archaeology, a post at the University of Guam, and a new wife, informed me that he had to come to Europe for a conference and had added some vacation time to that so he and his wife could do some travelling. Montpellier was on the list.

Everything should have been perfect. Oh, it was a little late in the year, sure, and it was neither as sunny nor as warm as it usually is down here, but that shouldn't matter. And then our recent storms hit. More rain than is normal for this time of year. More severe winds than usual. And John had rented a car for three days.

They got in on Friday morning, with intermittent showers, and of course the hotel wasn't ready yet. (He'd managed to score a room at the Hotel du Palais, about which I'd heard good things, which he confirmed: room small yet comfortable, location unbeatable). We walked around town, but the storm held off until we were eating dinner, when it pounded down for a short bit. Fortunately, that was while we were inside, and it didn't start up again until all concerned were back home.

I'd wanted to test out my Languedoc's Greatest Hits tour on someone, and now I had my experimental subjects. Picking up the car the next morning, we did the usual ritual of getting lost getting out of town, but my many expeditions with E. and J. over the summer has taught me a lot about getting in and out of Montpellier despite the horrid one-way tangles and badly-marked roads. Soon we were on our way to the first stop, Sommières, where I learned a valuable lesson: park at the ruins of the supermarket that got done in by the 2002 flood and walk across the Roman bridge into town. It was sprinkling on and off, but the car, a great honking Ford thing, was dry enough, and after we'd run around the town some -- it being a fine introduction to the villages dotted around the area -- we got back in the car, pointed ourselves through the vineyards, and headed to St. Martin de Londres via the road which goes between Pic St. Loup and l'Hortus, with the two mountains appearing and disappearing in the mist from the rain showers which were getting stronger.

We surprised a small herd of wild boars just past the mountains as we headed down into the valley which took us to St. Martin. There, we jumped out of the car, climbed the hill, and looked at the 12th century church and surroundings. This is where the lucky tourist begins to see the magic set in. There's no explaining it, but this tiny once-walled village really has It, whatever It is. It also has a very good little restaurant that makes better-than-average pizzas, and we repaired there for a late lunch.

The next stop was the Pont du Diable and St. Guilhem le Désert, if the rain allowed. It did and it didn't. It was coming down hard enough that we didn't even bother to get out and walk to the bridge (it's visible from the highway anyway) and turned off to the road up the mountain to St. Guilhem in the last gasp of the rainstorm. The Hérault River was in full force, thundering along with plenty of white water, a couple of flash-floods crept across the road, and at one point, a spume of water shot out of a hole in the mountain right by the river, making a dramatic temporary waterfall. This just made St. Guilhem all the more atmospheric when we got there. There's a stream which goes through the town, and it was right up to the top of its banks, making lots of noise. John, as a card-carrying UNESCO consultant, was blown away by the town, its ruins up the mountain, and the near-perfection of the church, a masterpiece of French Romanesque architecture. The absolute lack of tourists, too, contributed to the atmosphere.

So I'd just proved that the Greatest Hits tour worked. John was ecstatic, we'd hit lunchtime perfectly, and we were back in Montpellier by 5:15 in the afternoon, plenty of time for some downtime and preparation for dinner.

The next day, John had two goals. First was to see Nîmes, with its Roman stuff. Second was to go to Aigues-Mortes, a walled city which had once been an important port, not only to see the sights, but to look at the surrounding area, its salt flats, and the way it had silted up, killing the port. He does a lot of work with the archeology of climate change, and he suspected that Aigues-Mortes would confirm a lot of his theories.

We got to Nîmes and did the usual -- the Roman temple, called the Maison Carrée, and the arena -- and would have headed up the hill to the other temple, but we were running out of time, and really, Aigues Mortes was the most important. It's conveniently located between Nimes and Montpellier, and, being a major tourist attraction, it was easy enough to find. And sure enough, it had walls.

We walked in through a main gate and soon found ourselves in the center, where the church that St. Louis used to launch the two last Crusades in 1248 and 1270 is still standing.

As you can see from my typically awful photo, there is lots and lots of tourist tack in town, with lots of souvenir shops open even on a Sunday afternoon. And there were even some (French) tourists!

The big attraction, however, is the Constance Tower, built to defend the king's house from everything else. The King not only led Crusades out of here, he hung out a lot because the town was built expressly to be the French kingdom's port on the Mediterranean. It wasn't until 1481, 223 years after the port in Aigues-Mortes was developed, that the kingdom of Provence joined with the French crown, at which time the combination of the harbor silting up and the far better facilities in Marseille transferred the royal port over there. Some 204 years later, in 1685, the Edict of Nantes was revoked and being a Protestant became a crime. This caused another uptick in Aigues-Mortes' fortunes, because the towers in the walls became prisons to hold Protestants, many of whom were found right in town, while others came from neighboring communities: the entire Languedoc was a hotbed of Protestantism.

The Constance Tower is the one visible in the first photo here with the lighthouse sprouting out of its top, and you can go up it and along some of the ramparts for €7, unless you can provide a magic card which says you consult for UNESCO and get in free. It's a pretty cool building (considering that it was a prison) and has a great view of the town from the roof.

In addition, there are two levels to the tower, and a small window set in its roof, which slightly lessens the gloom -- although today, electric lights also help.

We didn't even go out to the ramparts, becasue once again dark was settling in, and John had his sights set on something one could see from the tower's top:

That's salt, and they've been pulling it out of the salt flats since the first century AD, when a Roman engineer named Peccatus (an interesting name for all you Latin scholars out there) opened the salt works there. Today, in season, you can visit them by driving to the Sauniers de Camargue plant and getting on a little train which takes you around the modern version of Peccatus' enterprise. Salt-water seagrass grows alongside the road as you go there, and John was happy that his assumptions about what had happened there were apparently correct.

From there, we headed to Grau de Roi, which wasn't, as I'd thought, just a summertime beach community, but also had a small working fishing fleet. We walked down a short street to the beach, and the Mediterranean stretched before us as dark came on. I made a mental note to come back some time and check out some of the fish restaurants, which were intriguing and not as commercial-looking as some of the others I'd seen.

Like the ones in Sète, which was our last day's journey. John wanted a plate of raw seafood, and that would be Monday's lunch. To whet our appetites, we climbed the hill in the middle of the town (in the car: we're not stupid) and looked at the panorama from there. There was a bit of haze, so I'm not sure we could see all the way to Montpellier, but there was a great lot of high surf crashing into the breakwaters and the beaches beyond. I'm no judge of these things, but it looked like it was a rare instance of good surfing being possible in the Mediterranean. We walked into the center of the lookout area, where there's a huge cross and a sound installation which was turned off for the season, and John kept staring at the rocks at our feet. "There's a lot of pottery here," he said, picking some up. Then he grabbed another rock. "A stone tool." Really? "Sure. You can get one or two of these breaks naturally, but this has obviously been worked." Great: an unknown Neolithic site right in the middle of Sète. Stupidly, I didn't take the tool home with me, so it's still up there -- along with who knows what else.

We were about to head down, but saw some signs for another panorama, at a site called Pierres Blanches, white rocks. Curious, we headed down the other side of the hill and found a parking lot. It's a nice park, with lots of local cedars and pines, from which you can see a lot that the other, higher, vantage doesn't show, particularly to the west and north. On a clear day, you can evidently see the Pyrenees, which I certainl didn't expect. You can also see all the oyster beds in the Étang de Thau from both of them, so after John paid his respects at Paul Valéry's grave in a dramatic hilltop cemetery, we headed back down for a lunch of local seafood. A great end to a tour of the immediate area, I thought.

So this morning, after a visit to the market to stock up on local cheeses and sausages, they headed to catch a train which will take them to Milan tonight, and, tomorrow morning, to Venice.

Now...who's the next lucky person who gets to take this tour going to be?

Broccoli and the Cascade of Umami

2011-11-14T11:53:00.001+01:00

Over here at the Broke Not Poor kitchen laboratories, where we develop recipes for the 99%, of which we are a charter member, our skills are being tested to the max these days. My book still hasn't sold, an annual magazine that usually takes a piece from me and pays nicely passed me over this year, and there doesn't seem to be any other work out there. This weekend, the cash-on-hand was €.52. Fortunately, during the orgy of spending which followed my €82 royalty check a couple of weeks ago, I laid in some supplies, so daily outlay is at a minimum. It's always important to do this when you have the resources, so that when you don't you can eat well.

That's why I was looking forward to last night's dinner. The first broccoli has come into the markets, which means that fall is on its way out, but I like the stuff so much, with its bitter/sweet ratio so easily tweaked by the flavor the Japanese call umami, that I'm looking forward to reacquainting myself with it and maybe finding one or two more things to do with it. (Umami isn't translatable exactly, which is why it's entered the vocabulary unchanged, but "savory" almost gets it. It's more than just "salty," in any event, and the variety of soy sauces found in East Asian cooking, as well as Thai fish sauce, are major sources of it. For further discussion, of course, there's Eric Gower, the chef who made me aware of it first.)

At any rate, the local supermarket had a recent sale on broccoli, with 500g (one pound) going for €.90, so I picked up a hunk and brought it home. Half of it got steamed as a side-dish for something else, but I also knew I'd be making an old winter standby for the first time, broccoli and pasta. For that, I assembled some ingredients.

Okay, here's all there is to it. Got your spaghetti, parmesan, garlic, olive oil, anchovies, optional red chiles, and the broccoli. (The garlic's sprouting a long stem because I buy it by the braid when I find good stuff: I don't like running out.) There's also a 1/2 cup measure there, for reasons we'll soon see.

The expensive items here are the olive oil (€7.50 for a liter, locally grown and processed in Aniane), and the anchovies. I get salt-cured anchovies, which are nuttier and far less bitter than oil-cured ones, which is what most Americans can get. The ones pictured haven't been split and boned yet, an easy enough process, but the fact that each one gives two halves means that if you're using oil-cured ones, you should use four, not two. And salt-cured anchovies are becoming more findable in America, too. You can even get them from Amazon, believe it or not.

The first thing to do is to cut up the broccoli. First, trim the florets from the stalk -- but keep the stalk, although the bottom half of this one is kind of funky and got tossed.

Next, peel the florets as best you can. The more unpleasant, sulphurous tastes in broccoli are in the skin, and in this partially-peelsed floret, you can see the good stuff where the skin's been peeled away.

Then, cut the florets into smaller florets and peel and matchstick as much of the stem as you like.

Now heat some olive oil in a pan and toss in some garlic.

I took that up close so you could smell it. When the garlic's sauteed for a minute (not much more: you definitely don't want to brown it) take the pan off the heat and add the anchovies, chopped roughly, and, optionally, the chile peppers, cut up.

Stir them vigorously, and the anchovies will start to dissolve. The oil will look a little dirty. There's your umami starting to happen. Return the pan to the heat and throw in the broccoli, stems first, followed by the cut-up florets. Don't "stir" so much as put your spoon underneath this and lift, incorporating the pan's contents to the broccoli and letting it sautee just a little.

Then, take that 1/2 cup of water and toss it in, and cover the pan for two minutes or so. When you re-open it, you'll notice that the broccoli's turned a darker green. It'll also be steaming, which is good: you'll want to boil off as much water, stirring occasionally, as you can. This is a good time to start your pasta, incidentally.

Once most of the water is boiled off, take the mixture off the heat, and lower the heat. When the pasta is done, put the pan back on the low heat and introduce just enough olive oil to make it like a sauce. This helps it mix with the pasta.

When the pasta's done, drain it and put the broccoli mixture into the pasta pot, return the drained pasta, and, once again, incorporate the broccoli mixture by lifting it from the bottom. Sprinkle some parsley and lots of Parmesan as you do so, then dump it into your pasta bowl, sprinkle some more umami-laden Parmesan onto it, and serve.

I forgot to put the parsley in until the last minute, so it's kind of clumped up there in the photo. I should also admit that there was too much broccoli in this to balance the anchovies and Parmesan with perfect success, but it was far from a disaster, and the photos turned out pretty well. Maybe this is because I spent a little time cleaning up the work area for the photo shoot.

As for notes, yes, you can do the exact same thing with cauliflower, if you'd like. And yes, you can use other pasta shapes: I'd say penne would work, as would farfalle.

Tonight, I have some leftovers which have likely gotten better since I made them, so that's taken care of. Tomorrow, as always, is another day. Don't forget, you can help keep me alive until the book sells by donating via PayPal with the button right over there on the right underneath the "Broke, Not Poor" label, your clickthroughs via Amazon on any of the cookbooks make me money (as will that link to the anchovies, above, and although 800g is a hell of a lot of anchovies, they'll keep, refrigerated, until you're out -- and really, they're vastly superior to the oil-cured ones) and my Kindle publications, too, pay off each month.

And now, I think I'll step outside into this glorious fall weather we're enjoying, because stepping outside isn't going to be enjoyable that much longer as the winds come howling out of the Cévennes and winter comes to the Languedoc.

Museums, Mme Merde, and Mmmm: Miettes

2011-11-10T13:46:00.000+01:00

This will come as something of a surprise to those who've known me a long time, but I went to my first live show of the year a couple of Sundays ago. (The one song I saw at SXSW doesn't count). This is a combination of my decreasing professional involvement in music, my extreme fatigue with it, and the fact that here in Montpellier, almost no music of interest comes here during the course of the year. True, earlier this year Wire was in town, but I had no money whatsoever for that one. Last year, except for an impromptu visit by some Austin-based musicians, there was nothing at all.

This show, however, was by someone I've known for a long time, John Cale, who's always interesting. And it was also in the Rockstore, which is the second-closest live music venue to my house. (The closest is the bar-restaurant next door, and Cale is far and away not awful enough to play there. I keep hoping their live-music experiment will fail, which is possible: everything else there has). Except for Wire, they've never had a single act which has interested me, and, as you can see from the upcoming events, that's hardly a surprise. (The Gladiators were interesting when I saw them in the '80s, but as far as I know the original guys are all dead, or there's only one guy left, another of those skeletal reggae bands that plods the circuit, trading on old glories).

Besides Cale, who was having an off night and seemed to be ill, I was curious to see the venue, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and festooned the center city with banners showing performance shots of (mostly French) bands I'd never heard of performing there. It's astonishing how the French could have such a huge rock scene without any of it ever leaking out to the wider world. Well, it is unless you've investigated it and noticed how utterly unimaginative 99% of it is: a journalist friend of mine in Paris once took me to see RCA France's big new signing La Fille du Pirate (The Pirate's Daughter -- great band name, huh?), at the Olympia, the legendary Paris venue, and I remember them chiefly because it was such a dull show. Big money had changed hands, and to such little effect. But the reason all the banners were up was because the Rockstore owners had thrown up their hands a couple of years ago, unable to make the place work any more -- and the city of Montpellier stepped in and bought it from them! Just imagine that happening in any U.S. city!

The Rockstore turned out to be a classic old rock venue. According to the unofficial city historian, it was a Protestant temple (they're not called churches here, and this area was a real hotbed of Protestantism early on), then an auto shop. It also must have been a theater of some sort after that. It's got the classic velvet curtains which, if washed, would probably give up a 60-40 mix of tobacco and pot residues, an unused balcony, several bars, and an agreeably dingy ambiance. Too bad the local taste diverges from mine so much; I felt pleasant nostalgia for the duration of the evening.

* * *

I saw the Rockstore again on Monday, when the pleasant combination of non-rain and having €10 in my pocket sent me to the local laundromat. (I have a washing machine, but it was broken by the idiot movers when I came here from Germany, and is number 1482 on my list of stuff I have to take care of). There I sat and watched as troops of immaculately-clad teens in the latest hip-hop and what they call here "street" fashions were herded in and out of the place, part of what I guess was a video shoot at the Rockstore. The entire street was lined with trucks, but this wasn't a huge surprise because a note had appeared on all the doors on our street warning us that someone called Firstep Productions was going to invade.

I totally lucked out that day: almost the minute I got back to the house with my toasty dry laundry, the skies opened up again. This almost incessant rain has probably been welcomed by the local farmers, although it's inhibited my ability to hit the market to buy what they're growing. But it's also had an effect on my neighborhood. All the windows in my house face across a small courtyard, but one, the one in the bathroom. I frequently look out that one to see what's happening in that direction: remove the buildings facing there, and I could see the Comédie. The coming of the stormy season was presaged by huge winds, and one day as I looked out the bathroom window, there was a lonely straw hat which had blown onto one of the roofs, as potent a sign that summer was over as could be. Yesterday, though, I looked out to see this sign on the same roof:

What on earth could this be? A sign from some demonstration on the Comédie which had blown away? That was the only thing that I could think of, but it sure had landed square, and it had that nick out of its top. Figuring "megots" was some acronym, I checked the dictionary to make sure, and found myself grinning.

Megots means cigarette butts. And this sign was a clearly aimed at la famille Merde upstairs. The entire courtyard is littered with cigarette butts those folks throw out their windows, hundreds of them, and if you remember, it was just a couple of weeks ago that one of Mme. Merde's megots started a fire in some garbage they'd also thrown out the window. And now that I thought about it, I did remember how many butts had collected on that roof over the summer until the rain washed them away. Given how much cigarettes cost here, the Merdes must be fairly well-off. She sits in the hallway at night yelling into her cell phone and smoking, and in the morning we can see where she was by the pile of ashes and butts on the floor.

I salute whatever neighbor put this there, and hope it does some good. There are, however, several more windows to toss butts out of, and they do, so I'm not too optimistic about this campaign.

* * *

Getting older is no fun, but if you're in Montpellier, it does have its advantages. The other Sunday, bored, I went for a walk and noticed that a place I'd been curious about was open, the Pharmacy and Chapel of the Work of the Misericordians. I walked in and read the signs, but wasn't really interested: the Misericordians were a laic order founded shortly before the French Revolution to provide food to the poor, and were interrupted in this by the Republicans, who secularized them. The Montpellier chapter also provided medical assistance, thanks to the local medical school, and had a pharmacy to mix up medicine. As I was reading the signs, the guy who took tickets showed up. I asked him if the sign saying admission was free to those over 60 was true, and he said yes, went back in the office, and presented me with a ticket with three pieces: one to the pharmacy/chapel (which he then gave me a guided tour of -- not all that interesting, actually), one to the Museum of Old Montpellier, and one to the Museum of the History of Montpellier in the 10th to 16th Centuries, also known as the crypt of Notre Dame de Tables.

So there I was, with a free pass to a Sunday afternoon! After thanking the guy for his tour of the ceramic pots in the pharmacy, I headed to the Salle Pétrarque, a fairly ancient building behind a 19th century façade just around the corner. The museum there is a sad, but terribly typical, example of the small-town municipal museum, with odds and ends in its rooms. There were the collections in glass-fronted armoires with hand-written descriptions so faded as to be illegible, corners so dark you couldn't be sure what was in them, and a huge table with a map of the old city, which was pretty interesting.

But I was in a hurry to get to the other third. Notre Dame de Tables was so named because of the money-changers who set up outside, offering trade to the pilgrims on their way to Compostella who needed local currencies. It was also where the city tax collectors sat on tax days and took their shares from the locals. Nowadays the church is long gone, but during the excavations for what is now the Place Jean Jaurès, the foundations and crypt was uncovered, and today a pretty nice exhibition is located there. There are little doohickeys that give you a tour in any one of a number of languages, and I learned a bunch about the local history -- including the connection between the "new" city of Montpellier and the Greco-Roman settlement at Lattera. There's not much on display, because the church got pretty trashed on the way to its final destruction in the Revolution. The narration skips some important bits of early history, at least as far as I've been able to figure it out (I keep looking for a decent one-volume history of this city in French or English, but so far I haven't found a thing). I also noticed, through a hole in the floor, a gigantic number of leg bones, which, assuming some were female, seem to indicate that the long-legged ladies I see around here are part of a proud genetic inheritance.

For those of you who aren't as aged as I am, this threefer is available Tuesday through Sunday for just a couple of Euros, and now that crappy weather is upon us it's an entertaining way to spend a dreary afternoon. Don't expect much out of the pharmacy or the Old Montpellier Museum, but history buffs will be well-served by the crypt.

* * *

In further news The Other Ed and I had lunch yesterday at Omija, the Korean deli/snack bar I mentioned a couple of months ago. They were doing pretty good business, with a young Franco-Asian couple eating there when we arrived, and some black ladies arriving afterwards. We had a platter with some steamed beef with garlic, a bunch of shredded lettuce with some sort of white, garlic-gingery dressing, some rice and beans, shredded carrots, cucumbers, and canned corn (what is it with Europeans and canned corn?), a Japanese chicken nugget, and some fresh mango cubes for dessert. A tiny pot of kimchee served for both of us, and it was pretty tame, but then, this is France, and you can't go all atomic on these folks and expect repeat business. Seven and eight euros for lunch is still a bit rich here in the world of the Broke, Not Poor, but I'm definitely enthusiastic about this place now, and recommend it heartily. The husband of the couple who run it was on duty, and he speaks English if you don't speak French, being half-French, half-Zimbabwean, a combination I can safely say I've never encountered before. I suspect they need all the help they can get, so head on down and chow down.

November

2011-11-03T17:02:00.000+01:00

WHAM!

Well, that woke me up. It was one of the wooden shutters in the bedroom flying open, so I dragged my sleepy ass out of bed to shut it again. It wasn't unexpected: the winds have been mounting to what I now understand is called an épisode cévenol. According to the chart I saw earlier this afternoon, what happens is warm winds blow in off the Mediterranean rather forcefully and slam up against the mountains (which, conveniently enough, are the Cévennes and their foothills around here). Here's the chart:

So far, Montpellier's river, the Lez, is doing okay, although on a previous one of these, the other day, it flooded out the tunnel under the center of town, meaning motorists had to enter One Way Hell, aka the other way through town, and the attendant chaos caused by Tram 3's construction. They've closed off the walkways along the Lez down in the Ironic Fascism District, though, and there's a red alert that's supposed to be going up any minute. I went and did my dinner shopping early, because I just have a feeling...

Which is interesting, actually. I'll have been here three years in a few weeks, and I'm already able to have hunches about the weather. Well, that's not very hard, actually, since there are basically only two modes: insanely beautiful sunshine (allegedly 300 days a year) and stuff like it's doing outside right now. That makes the seasonal rhythm easier to get into.

The market, for instance: I now have a pretty good idea what's going to be there, so I'm not so upset when I can't find what I'm looking for because chances are I'm not looking for something I can't find. The guy from Pardailhan has been seen with his turnips -- just a tiny table, but those famous turnips -- and I'm ready for him. I'm searching out things to do with pumpkin and winter squash, carrots (I'm determined to figure out if those weird-looking red ones taste any different than the ordinary orange ones, although apparently orange carrots were developed for the Dutch House of Orange as a propaganda move), broccoli and even cauliflower, thanks to a Facebook friend I turned on to 660 Curries, a great cookbook, who was raving about a cauliflower and spinach curry in that book that I fired up the other night. He was right!

And, as others have noted, this is the point where we put away the rosés and curl up with those big Languedoc reds. Which is what I did last night.

Yup, I turned another year older yesterday, or, rather, as the great novelist Ted Mooney pointed out in his Facebook comment to me, it was actually "one day older, and the years don't count." I sure hope he's right, and intuitively, I think he is. So I am now officially older than dirt, and will soon take the tram out to St. Jean de Vedas, where they're doing a lot of construction, look at the dirt, and say "Hiya, youngster."

Thanks to the fact that at the end of October I got a nice $82 check from Amazon for my royalties to date (you all have bought both of my digital publications, right? Right?? Well, there's a gizmo just over to the right of this...), and that I got a couple of nice bottles of Languedoc wine from J and E, I decided that, instead of going to a restaurant like I did last year (I don't think the meal was that good, but I still had my non-smelling-and-tasting problem), I could probably do as well at home if I just figured out what I wanted to do, took my time doing it, and used good stuff.

Something I've always wanted to cook with is magret, which is the breast of the ducks they make foie gras from, so at lunchtime yesterday I wandered down to the supermarket to price it. To my shock, it cost less than the tough steaks they sell here. This, then, sent me racing through my cookbooks. only to find stuff that was either too complicated or used out-of-season ingredients. Weirdly, I found what I was looking for in Paula Wolfert's The Cooking of Southwest France, which seemed to me, when I bought it and looked through it a couple of years ago, to be insanely complicated. But there was one recipe for magret in the style of the Bigorre region, which was, well, duck breast and potatoes. Oh, and onions and parsley and garlic. But it seemed simple enough to show off its lowly ingredients in their best light. And that magret, of course.

I went up the hill to the covered market and got a slice of duck pâté en croûte, which is to say duck chopped up three ways, a layer of duck-liver mousse separating two different preparations of duck, all wrapped up in a pastry crust (€3) from an intimidating woman who was also selling magret tournedos filled with foie gras. That was the appetizer course. At the supermarket all the magrets but one had vanished since lunch, but it was the perfect one (€5.60), and there were no loose red potatoes so I had to spend €3 on a bag I'd only use a third of. A white onion, as specified in the recipe, added €.80. I had all the rest, which wasn't much. I got a bag of mixed salad greens for the last course, a salad with pears, roasted walnuts, and Carles Roquefort, which I'd bought a hunk of for €5, at M. Bou's in the covered market the day the check arrived. (I've seen this for sale in Montreal, incidentally, and it may also be available in the U.S. Hellishly expensive over there, but so far superior to the more easily-obtainable brands that it's ridiculous). The vinaigrette for this salad would be made with walnut vinegar, which I'd discovered this summer in the Dordogne and turned out to be available here at a supermarket chain I rarely go to, Casino, where J had discovered it. And, to finish it off, I was going to open my bottle of Mas de la Serrane's Clos d'Immortelles, 2008. It turned out to be perfect for the task, complex, spicy, ever-changing in the way their best wines do. Magic.

So we had maybe €15 worth of ingredients, and if I had bought the wine myself, we could tack another €10 onto that. There is no restaurant on earth where I could have gotten a meal like this for that little with a whole bottle of wine. There were some problems: the potatoes were supposed to be cooked in fat rendered from the breast (which worked perfectly, and the duck-fat-plus-potato groove is a well-known and -loved one here in France) and form a sort of cake at the bottom of the pan (not actually a casserole at all), and these potatoes didn't want to do that. The onion got a little carbonized -- okay, totally carbonized -- but I know how that happened. and there wasn't enough of the persillade, the parsley-and-garlic mixture, to make a difference, so next time there'll be more. Some of this was due to the fact that you just can't cook with any subtlety on a damn electric stove. Some of it was first-time inexperience. But there was enough of the magret dish left over for a light lunch in a day or two, and the best news was, when I was scouting for it, I noticed there were jars of duck fat for sale. Now, without buying a whole breast, I can make roasted potatoes with duck fat. I can't wait.

Not all the news around here has been good. I got a letter from the firm managing the building telling me that they'd raised the rent on the Slum. Only €11, but this place is wildly overpriced as it is, given how little of the space is useable. Here's the view from my desk, where I'm typing this, taken on January 1:

That's 90º to my right. Make it 180° and you get this.

That white post where you can see the Mexican restaurant calendar is the problem: It seals off a bunch of potentially useable space. And a lot of the stuff is still in the boxes I moved from Berlin three years ago; I have no idea any more what's in them. This is a tiny space. The bedroom is big enough for the bed and a couple of clothes-hanging things. (I have no idea what they're called, but there's no such thing as a closet in Europe). The kitchen is small enough that there's not enough room to have another person over to eat. The liar who rented this to me told me it was around 50 square meters, or approximately 500 square feet. It's not: it's 44, including two which comprise the balcony. So I've got 420 square feet here, including the tiny bathroom, kitchen, hallway, and bedroom. Not enough. And not worth €680 a month, let alone €691.

There are a couple of problems, though. First, I don't have the money to move. The book project my agent is trying to sell hasn't sold, which we both find very frustrating, because it's gonna be a monster once I start doing it. Second, it's going to be very hard for me to get a place. Working against me are my age -- I should be retired, according to the French, and I'm not -- my occupation -- nobody but nobody works for themselves around here -- and, unfortunately, my nationality. Not many French people like Americans, at least not the French people in charge. Third, this is totally the wrong time of year to be looking. May, when the students leave, some great places open up.

There's a way through this, though: if I'm willing to put a year's rent in escrow, they'll pretty much trust me. So I've got to raise a couple of tens of thousands of euros by next May and pay the inflated rent until then. So maybe six more months here and then...

No way to tell, so I just take it a day at a time. Got some visitors coming soon, and I'm looking forward to that. I also have money for food these days, and that's nice, although it's not going to last forever. We've converted back to standard time, so it gets dark earlier. And when that remarkable sunshine comes back, the sun's going to be a lot further away than it was six weeks ago. It's really confusing to go out into bright sun and realize that it's colder than hell out there.

I've gotten through worse, and I'll get through this. But this place gives me claustrophobia at times, and so I take long walks. Checking what's happening out there, I've made an early New Year's resolution: don't take a long walk during an épisode cévenol.

We Interrupt This Blog For A Commercial

2011-10-30T13:54:00.003+01:00

Now available from the Amazon Kindle Store in the U.S., France, Germany, and the U.K., a couple of long short stories I wrote some years back, which were long enough that I knew no magazine would ever publish them. The Kindle format turns out to be the ideal way to do this, though: I get to keep the copyright, and, if I ever get a book's worth, I can always publish a whole book, whether electronically or actually -- or, preferably, both.

This is priced a buck less than my last Kindle publication, and you get twice as much reading satisfaction for your money. Tell all your friends and remember that important holidays, like Ike Turner's birthday, All Souls Day, and St. Nicholas' Day (Netherlands and Germany) are coming up, all superb opportunities for giving gifts!

The guy on the cover, I hardly need to remind anyone, is Walter "Buddy Boy" Hawkins, who was probably from Arkansas, palled around with Charlie Patton, and recorded "Voice Throwing Blues," the only known blues record featuring ventriloquism.

Finally, I'd like to thank everyone who's been buying from the widgets over there in the margin. I actually got a check for ten dollars and change from Amazon the other day, which I assumed was for my Kindle thing, but it turned out to be from folks who've been buying books from the widget. Here's the thing; if you click through this blog and then go on to buy something else, I still get a tiny bit of what you spent, so if you're about to buy a Maserati or a refrigerator or something from Amazon, do start your journey here. Until my agent sells my book, these Kindle publications and the Amazon money from this blog are an important revenue stream here at Château Broke Not Poor.

And I did get another check from the Kindle, too, which felt good: this is the first time I've ever gotten royalties for something I've written, thanks to the economics of music-book writing over the years, which has all been work-for-hire.

So put a couple of logs on the fire, pour yourself a snifter of fine Scotch, and have the dog fetch the Kindle so you can curl up with Two Blues Stories. You'll be glad you did!

St. Chinian and the Middle of Nowhere

2011-10-21T15:40:00.002+02:00

As good ideas around here so often do, this one started with a bottle of wine. Specifically, the one we got at the restaurant last week for E's birthday. He'd noted over the meal that he felt like taking another drive, and I was fine with that and said I'd look at the map and see what ideas came to me. He wanted to go to the Cirque de Navacelles, a drive which I don't think I want to do again too soon, because those twisting roads can cause havoc with my stomach when I'm not doing the driving. Also, I'd already been there. Hunkering down with a map over the weekend, I had another idea. I'd looked at the website for the wine we'd had, Les Eminades, and noticed that the winery was in Cébazan, and that was on a good road on the way to St. Chinian. I only knew St. Chinian as a wine appellation, but I also knew it had to be a town as well. Why not go check out some of this huge wine-producing area and see what it looked like, since we were already familiar with Pic St. Loup, the Terrasses de Larzac, and St. Saturnin? Anyway, beyond St. Chinian, the road split, and we could head back via a different route, which also included the villages of Roquebrun and Olarges, which Gerry had recommended from his cycling adventures. E was all for it, so we decided to get an earlier start than we usually do and head out at 12:30.

An hour later, we'd passed Béziers, gotten off on the Béziers West exit, and started off into the hills. Grapes were everywhere, which made sense: the 19th century saw the explosion of the Languedoc wine business, as a direct Béziers-to-Paris train made it possible to send gigantic quantities of not-so-hot, strong red wine to the capital in 24 hours, making wine cheaper than ever before up there. Farmers and négotiants made out like bandits until the whole thing collapsed in 1907 with the army out quelling riots in Narbonne, Béziers, and finally a huge demonstration right here in Montpellier. These towns showed evidence of this in their architecture, and had we gone off the main route, I bet we would have seen more ostentation and possibly decaying old chateaux from the boom-times. Instead, we saw some new ones, and some old ones that had been nicely fixed up. As the day progressed, it became obvious that tour buses were no strangers to this road.

We landed in Cébazan at 1:30, puzzled. E had hit Google Maps for a route to the winery -- his plan was to "buy a six-pack" of the wine we'd had at the restaurant -- and there we were, already in town, the "rue des Vins" noted on the download having failed to appear. We parked in what looked like the parking lot of the Cave Cooperative so we could ask them where it was, but it turned out to be the old CC, the new one being next door, and all shiny with steel and glass. And locks: it would be lunch for another half hour. We jumped back in the car and backtracked, finally deciding that it would be off the road leading south to Cruzy. Then we landed in Cruzy, with none of the well-marked winemakers along the way having been the ones we were looking for. We turned around and went back to the main road. I suggested that we take a turn just before downtown Cébazan to investigate the Abbey of Fontcaude, which was listed as being 11th century, but E didn't take to that, so I suggested that we just drive on to St. Chinian and find a good wine-store which could well have it.

Just out of Cébazan, it became apparent that we'd reached the top of a hill and were about to get hit with a view. And that's just what happened. We pulled over next to a monument to some Resistance fighters who'd been killed there and I hiked back up the hill a few feet to grab a shot of the valley we were about to enter.

There was also a huge sign in French, German, and English which clearly lays out the main growing areas in the vicinity and the soil types of each and how that affects the resultant product. Nothing about the history of the area at all. But who needs history when you have wine?

Of course, we didn't have wine yet, so we wound our way down into the valley, noting that there were big signs for wine-stores along the way. Yup, those tourists again. And boy, was I glad it was out of season. So all of a sudden, we found ourselves in St. Chinian, and parked in a park shaded by plane trees. It was hard to figure what to do next, but I just thought we should hike a little ways up the road we'd just come in on and look at what appeared to be a good wine store. Finding the wine we were looking for among the bottles in the window was a nice piece of luck.

It wasn't a good wine store. It was a remarkable one, the Espace Vin St. Chinian. As you can see on this page of their website, they've got 250 square meters offering heaven only knows how many wines, the vast majority of which are St. Chinian (that's them against the far wall, taking a right turn at the back wall) but with a very well-thought-out selection of other fine Languedoc wines, and the obligatory small selection of €100+ wines from Burgundy and Bordeaux. The woman who greeted us knew her stuff, and when E picked up two bottles of the wine we hadn't found over the mountain, and I grabbed two bottles of Mas de la Serrane's Clos des Immortelles, I asked her to suggest a third wine for the rest of the "six pack" (actually a "case" in France is six bottles), and she suggested a third wine, a Pétale Pourpre from the Domaine Pin des Marguerites in nearby Berlou which had the schist, red sandstone, terroir to contrast with the limestone terroir of the Les Eminades. Sold. We got outside, laid the precious cargo in the trunk of the car, and noticed how early it was: "It's so close!" E said with evident surprise. But it is: just because the landscape's so different from where we live doesn't mean it's another planet.

We walked around St. Chinian, but it's really nothing much to look at. There was a weird sculpture or something above a door

but the only building of note was city hall, which has a very well-stocked tourist info center worth checking out on it's right-hand side as you face it.

But with a glance at the map, it appeared Roquebrun and Olargues were both easy enough to get to, so we took off towards the former, going through acre after acre of vineyards bearing names we'd just seen in the wine shop, some of which I recognized from previous encounters at the table. In fact, we missed the main turnoff to Roquebrun, and took a back route that went up and down a mountain, and when we were too high for grapes to grow, it was worth remarking on. But soon enough we pulled into Roquebrun, one of those villages that hangs on a mountain.

And which actually looks like this.

What is most notable about the place is that it's also got rocks that look like buildings. This seems to be a feature of the local mountains, many of which sprout similar formations.

About half-way up to the tower, which we didn't even attempt to get near (not to mention the admission-only garden up there), there's a church, which was nice, but locked. (The garden is all about the local micro-climate, which doesn't cool off much in winter, so a xeriscape exhibition of plants thrives there for those who want to climb up the hill. For those who don't, there's the local wine, which is apparently fantastic, part of the St. Chinian appellation.)

When we got up there, we decided to head back down the hill. There was a nice view, and someone was burning off some vines by the side of the Orb River.

It was no problem getting to Olargues, either: it was just up the road. It was a fortified city, and much earlier we'd passed a sign on the road informing us we were in Cathar country. Roquebrun didn't have the signs of a fortified village, nor did the church appear that way. Olargues, though, might have been, but I'm not sure. The entrance to the old town is guarded by a double gate in the wall (the construction sign is modern; you'd think I'd learn how to use the damn zoom on the camera, wouldn't you?), through which a stout piece of wood could be slammed to deter invaders.

The big attraction here, too, is a tower, but a different sort than the one in Roquebrun. You reach it via an enclosed staircase which sends you up through the middle of the old village

and then you hike a bit up the hill and are confronted with this:

Which consists of this ruined bell-tower

sitting in the middle of a bunch of rubble which extends over a lot of the hilltop, which has breathtaking views of the Espinouse Mountains.

This whole area is referred to as le castrum, with castrum being a Latin word for a fortification. Nothing I've been able to find points to a Cathar connection, but I'm still not sure what the whole thing is about and the museum half-way up the covered stairway was closed, so I'll either have to go back or find a reference that makes some sense about the place. Anyway, that gated thing in the first picture is locked tight, and looking through the gate just heightens the mystery of what it is. It looks like a chapel, but has a legend on it I couldn't quite make out which seems to say it's a tomb.

That's what it looks like through the gate, anyway.

It was getting late, and we were a ways from home, so we headed back to the car and prepared to leave. Didn't happen. E has a peculiar habit of keeping the car key loose, and putting it on the seat before he sits down to drive. Which isn't a problem unless the key hits the upholstery and bounces by chance into the space between the seat and the stick shift assembly. He's a fully-qualified engineer with a doctorate and everything, and between the two of us it took us 30 minutes of pulling the driver's seat back and forth and sticking hands in where we couldn't see what we were doing and finally I spied part of the key emerging from underneath the track the seat slides on and managed to retrieve it.

The drive home started off beautiful, with all the mountains stretching into the distance, but we missed a time-saving turnoff in Bédarieux, the first of a series of seriously ugly towns we came upon, and thus climbed over a bunch of hills to Lunel and finally Lodève before we chould head down to the freeway back to Montpellier. The odometer showed we'd gone 260 km during the trip, which is a bit much, but right up until the end, when that stretch of nasty industrial towns started, it was gorgeous the whole way.

The moral? There's nothing wrong with drinking and driving, provided you do one one day, and the other the other day. The label on a bottle of wine had provided us with a fine adventure.

Oh, and the kicker: the lady at the wine shop in St. Chinian told us how to get to the Eminades winery. That road leading to the old abbey? You turn up there and there's a sign near the graveyard. Oops!

OLARGUES UPDATE: E wasn't happy with our lack of information about Olargues, and did some research the next day. It turns out that most of the original settlement was on the hilltop and it was a fortifed village whose main group of structures dated back to Romanesque times, but that in the 16th Century, Louis XIII was becoming concerned with the amount of power the individual nobles had, so he ordered all the communities like the castrum of Olargues to be razed. Even that didn't stop them, so after the Duke of Montmorency, governor of the Languedoc, proved to be too much of a pain, he was beheaded and, eventually, all the governors had to live at court in Versailles and not among the people they governed.

The other thing he researched was something I'd forgotten (probably because I didn't take a picture of it), which was there was a bright red railroad bridge running across the road into town which, a sign informed us, had been built by Gustave Eiffel. It's now part of a hiking trail, as nearly as I can figure out, but it dates from 1889. There's also another bridge which I think we would have driven into town on if we hadn't come from another direction, yet another Pont du Diable, from the 11th century or thereabouts, whose connection to Satan I can't seem to find.

Slapstick and Sumptuousness

2011-10-15T13:32:00.000+02:00

I think yesterday must have set a record for ridiculous contrasts.

First, there was the latest salvo in the ridiculous war against the telecom I got rid of last summer, when it became evident that they had lied to me from the very start of my contract wtih them. Remember the name, folks: Free.fr. Not free. Very French. Out of the blue, in July of this year, I got an e-mail from a collection service saying that they were coming after me for the debt of €540 I owed these frauds. Seeing as how I had formally cut off the contract and returned their equipment a year previously, this made very little sense to me. I wrote the collection agency (in French) and asked them just what this bill was all about. I have never gotten a response, but I have gotten three letters warning me that they will soon turn the case over to a judge and then bailiffs will come. French customer service at its best. There must be some agency somewhere which protects people against this, but I have no idea what it is.

Anyway, I tossed the letter into a pile and went on with my day. Around 3, I was sitting at my desk with the windows open and I smelled smoke. Was the tram station on fire again? I walked out onto my balcony to see if I could figure out what direction it was coming from, but once out there, I couldn't smell it.

Now, I don't know if I've mentioned my upstairs neighbor, Madame Merde. She's quite young, and has two kids, one a boy about 6, and the other an infant, maybe a year old. I guess the father is a teenager-looking kid I see her with, although I don't know if he lives there or not. She's gotten her name by the fact that her way of dealing with just about every situation is to yell, and the last word in the sentence is just about always "merde." She's quite eloquent with it, although her accent precludes my understanding most of what she says. She also yells "arrête!" and "Dépèche-toi!" at the older kid a lot ("stop" and "hurry up," for you Americans). I'd like to pretend she's more colorful than she is, but she is distinctly unfriendly, and has never thanked me when I've helped her carry the baby vehicle up the stairs. She also has the habit of flapping her bedding out the window every morning and flicking her cigarette ashes out the window, too. I've got more ashes on my desk than I did when I smoked.

So I'm sitting at the desk, having already had to close the window once because she was apparently scrubbing the windowsill and water was splashing me. And the smoke came on again. And again I went to see what was happening and heard her yelling something out the window real loud. She was yelling at the violin-makers across the courtyard, and they were answering her. Suddenly, I saw some ash -- going up. Aha! I went back into the bedroom and onto the balcony and saw what was happening. People in our building can't access the courtyard, which has a couple of staircases coming off of it. Directly below me is one that's become filled with trash, largely thrown out the window by Mme. Merde's oldest kid, but some dating from the era of Les Lunkheads. She had flipped a lit cigarette out the window and it had started a fire. Big surprise, but she wanted the violin-makers to put it out. She snarled at them, disappeared from the window, and came back with a saucepan with water in it, which she dumped out without looking at what she was doing. It missed half the fire. I remembered that I had a mineral-water bottle out on the balcony that dated from when I thought I could actually grow something there, and so I grabbed it and -- hey! -- it still had water in it. I uncapped it, stepped over to the end of the balcony, and within seconds, I had put out the rest of the blaze. The violin-makers were walking over to the fire with a large bowl filled with water, and suddenly Mme. Merde unleashed a second pan of water -- right on my head. The violin-makers cracked up, and I don't blame them. I looked up at Mme. Merde, and she said "Attention, monsieur" and disappeared from the window. What a charmer.

So there was nothing else to do but to change my clothes. But I was going to do that anyway, just not at that moment. Because there was more going on.

* * *

Monday I'd hiked all over the centre ville with J, scouting restaurants because it was E's birthday and she wanted to take us all out to dinner. I gave a pretty good tour if I do say so myself, and she took notes with a little camera so she could do further research at home. A couple of days later, she said "Let's go to Le Pastis. I've made reservations for 8. And let's get a drink beforehand." I was delighted: the place is inconspicuously nestled in the Ste. Anne district, probably the part of town I most would like to move to, and the menu, which I've checked from time to time, looked amazing. It was one of those situations where the menu is affordable, but the wine list was another matter entirely. I swore I'd get there some day, however.

Thus, after changing into dry clothes, I awaited their ring on my doorbell at 7. I had an idea of a place to have a drink, and boy, did I hit the jackpot with that! I don't go to bars -- my financial situation doesn't allow it, obviously -- but I do observe the city, and there was an old street just off the Rue Foch where there seemed to be a couple of bars. Three, in fact, meaning it's probably not a place I'd want to live too near. One seemed less populated than the others, though, so we went in. There, we were presented with a wine list -- it was a wine bar! No wonder the clientele looked older than the usual binge-drinking student crowd! And lordy, what a wine-list! And one reason it wasn't so heavily populated was that half the tables were reserved, it being Friday night. No matter: there was indeed a table for us, and we sat down.

One problem I've found with wine-bars here is that there are very few by-the-glass choices. Not here. It turns out that E has spent most of his life drinking white wine, and knows nothing about reds. Well, he's landed in the place where a post-doctoral eductation on the subject is possible, and this looked like a great classroom. He got a Pic St. Loup (I forgot to take notes, dammit) and I got a Terrasses de Larzac, and, as I'd figured, his was big, fruity, and complex, and mine was more austere, mineral, and the fruit was way back in the taste. A better example of terroir is hard to imagine: we'd driven to both regions, so he knew what it looked like out there, and now he was seeing what the difference made to the taste of the wine.

The place filled up quickly after we got there, so we were right at the perfect moment. Plates of tapas came out of nowhere to various tables, and I regretted not having read that part of the menu, but they looked good. A huge dog ran around with the grace of a ballet dancer, not disrupting anyone. Clearly it was his place, and for me, it's a place to go back to again. Soon. You're welcome to join me.

Oh: it's called L'atelier, and I'll dispense with my usual listing because all the info is right there on the website.

* * *

It was just a few blocks to dinner, and when we got to Le Pastis at five minutes to eight, we were practically the only people there. This changed very rapidly. If we had reservations for eight, I guess most people reserved for 8:15 -- or, come to think of it, there is the famous quart d'heure montpellierian. No question: they were ready for us. I'd already read the menu and had decided that as long as someone else was paying, I'd just order all of it. It really was that tempting. (Note: the link there leads to whatever today's menu is. What's up there as I post is what we had to choose from last night. What you'll see depends on whether you go there today or months later.)

Fortunately, we all had different stuff, and the extremely helpful waitress also helped me make a good choice for the wine. It wasn't on the list: the one I'd settled on was sold out, but she suggested instead another St. Chinian (since I decided that that terroir would be an excellent half-way point between the two we'd already had), a Les Eminades Cebenna from 2010. It was pretty huge, but still had loads of sunshine, subtle fruit, a little tannin, and less of a mineral presence that the Terrasses de Larzac, but just enough so that it wasn't too smooth. E, with his limited experience with red wines, says he finds a lot of them "scratchy," which is a wonderful word for badly-made wine: it scratches your throat on the way down. There was no scratchiness tonight.

J didn't have an appetizer, but E had a ballotin of chicken, stuffed with foie gras and artichoke heart. It's definitely one of those don't-try-this-at-home dishes, where you debone a chicken and then stuff it with whatever you're stuffing it with. There are those who say it's easy, but I'll get mine here, thanks. My starter was less successful: an "ingot" of tomatoes in a jelly of espalette pepper, with a little ball of avocado ice-cream next to it. I had a memory of a weird bar in New Orleans I'd been taken to ages ago by Bunny Matthews, where people gambled on horse-racing slots downstairs and upstairs a couple of gay Brazilians made odd, great food, where I'd last had avocado ice cream. But the espalette was nowhere to be tasted and the tomatoes themselves were only vaguely there. I guess I made a mistake, and it was too late in the season for the tomatoes, but there's no excuse for the espalette, which is right in season, although the ice cream was lovely and subtle. Too bad: I should have had the grilled sardines stuffed with pesto.

J definitely won the main-course race with four huge scallops, crusted with persillade (parsley and garlic, finely minced) sitting in a celery bouillon on red lentils. E came in second with a hunk o' hake sitting in a horseradish sauce, accompanied by an odd construction in which beets were peeled very thin and stacked with slices of conté cheese, which I bet tasted great if you like beets, which I empatically do not. I had a couple of pieces of local lamb, which were just delicious, but the advertised sauce "fortified wtih garlic" wasn't much in evidence, and the "lead-shot and preserved squash" turned out to be some small potatoes -- very richly flavored -- and, um, zucchini. The other two dishes at the table proved these folks can cook extremely inventively and skillfully, and like I said, mine was fine, but just not as creative as I was hoping. We all got little glass jars filled with steamed seasonal vegetables -- cauliflower, romanesco, red carrots -- which were very nice. The reason J hadn't had an appetizer was so she could get dessert, which turned out to be figs and violets on shortbread and a rosemary-honey ice cream. Dang.

Le Pastis is a major find, and clearly not for everyday eating (well, not until I sell the movie rights to this blog or win the lottery or something), and I would like to thank E for having a birthday so we could discover it -- and to urge him to have another soon!

Again, details of opening (they do lunch, too, and their by-the-glass wine selection is superb) and all can be found on the opening page of their website, so just click and discover.

Oh, and sorry, no photos: J's camera wasn't up to it, and I wasn't about to lug my big black monster to the table. Go experience it in person: technology's nice, but you still can't upload those odors!

Texas For Breakfast

2011-10-06T15:04:00.000+02:00

Being broke, but not poor, means that there are some exotic things that you have to give up. And living overseas means that no matter how much money you have, you're likely to have to do that anyway. But one of my favorite things has always been breakfast tacos, something I discovered in Texas during my very first visit (at the famous La Reyna Bakery on S. 1st in Austin, which used to be in the little frame house on the northeast corner of Mary instead of on the northwest corner where the behemoth its success has turned it into stands today) and have pursued every time I've gone back.

And, of course, learned to make at home. When I lived in California, it was easy: potatoes, eggs, flour tortillas, salsa. The flour tortillas got fresher and the salsa got better after I moved to Texas. And then I wound up in Berlin. For a while, there was a Mexican restaurant near me owned by friends, where I could buy a few uncooked flour tortillas, but that didn't last long: it was deemed too hard for the kitchen to deal with. And then I made a discovery: I could make my own. It was easy.

What wasn't easy, though, was getting salsa. Unbelievably enough, my neighborhood supermarket carried Pace Picante Sauce for a while, even the hot variety. They got wise to that: the Germans aren't big on stuff with flavor, so it vanished. Then, on special occasions, I'd get Paul Newman salsa, which was incredibly expensive. And, in the days when you were allowed to carry glass jars on airplanes (ask your parents, kids), I'd return from trips to Texas with a jar or two of something good, and visitors from Texas would also be asked to bring some with them. Then I moved to France, and the salsa problem got worse. The French like flavor, but only specific kinds of flavors, and salsa ain't one of 'em. (Amazingly, Doritos sells a hot salsa that's almost good -- certainly better than all the Old El Paso crap -- but it doesn't really make the cut except in extremis.) Then I made another discovery: I could make salsa, too. Better than Paul Newman. And better than Pace.

I made this discovery through a care package a couple of Texans who were then living in London sent, which package included a copy of Robb Walsh's Tex-Mex Cookbook. I knew Robb in Austin; he took over my cooking column after I left, and now he's a star of Texas foodways. But, I'm sorry to say, I'm not going to print his recipe here. Nope: you're going to have to buy the book, because I'm very sensitive to copyright issues and authors needing to make a living, and if you'd ever met Robb you'd see how emaciated and hungry he looks all the time, so I'm not going to take food out of his mouth and the mouths of his children -- especially when I can put it in my own by urging you to buy a copy of the Tex-Mex Cookbook off of that Amazon.com gizmo over in the right-hand column (the one headed "My Cookbooks"), which not only pays Robb royalties, but deposits a dime or so in the fund Amazon's keeping for me from purchases people make from this blog. And if you need a Ferrari or a washing machine or something (does Amazon sell Ferraris yet?), buy it while you're buying the cookbook, because the click-through also pays me and I get a piece of that action, too.

People in France should be aware that there are two ingredients in Robb's recipe which are unavailable here, once again, as with the powdered rosemary in the pastafazool recipe, because they're below French standards of edibility: dried onion and dried garlic. Horrid stuff which I don't use anywhere else, but boy, the salsa doesn't taste right without them. Seriously. You can get them in Germany, natch. Also: that vinegar you use to de-scale your coffee-maker? You'll need some of that.

Anyway, where were we? Ah: you've made the salsa, and you've done it the day before, because you have to let it rest overnight. I toss in a bunch of chopped cliantro to make it even better, and I recommend that, if you can't find jalapenos (and you can't in France), you just use the largest green chiles you can find at your neighborhood "Asia" grocery.

Okay. Now, with the salsa made, it's time for breakfast. This is so simple I can do it before I even make coffee. I also do it before I take my shower, and here's why:

You need, for six big torillas:

1 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2-3 tablespoons lard (preferred) or vegetable shortening
1/4 cup water, more or less.

I use a food processor for this, but it's not essential unless you're as smazed as I am in the morning. Whizz those dry ingredients together, then add the fat. When it's integrated, add the water, and soon the mixture will tighten up into a ball. You want slick, but not sticking to your fingers. If it's falling apart, add more water, tiny bit by tiny bit. If it's too gooey, add tiny bits of flour. You'll soon figure out when it's just right after you make it a few times. Then you take the ball and stick it in a plastic bag and seal it tightly and let it rest for at leas a half-hour -- an hour is better. That's when you take your shower and all.

Keep your flour out and handy; you'll need it.

The next thing is to get a big potato (or several small ones, duh) and cut it into 1/4" cubes.

Heat some oil -- about 1/4 cup, minimum, in a non-stick pan (this is important for later) and fry these cubes until they're golden brown all over. This will take about 20 minutes if done right. Don't worry about how much oil you're using: you'll recycle it in your own special potato-oil can and use it over and over. Well, until it goes bad, which you'll know when you heat it and it doesn't smell too good. Oh, and turn the oven onto low. Anyway. Next, break three eggs, like these beauties I get from the guy at the market, and scramble 'em with some milk.

The Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning is to sprinkle on the fried potato cubes once they're drained of oil, but you can just use salt or your favorite seasoning mix or make some out of powdered chipotle and other good things. You do want some salt in there, though. So: drain and season the potatoes, then toss in your eggs and watch them set -- it won't take long.

Plate them and stick the plate in the oven. Put your pan back on the heat and raise the heat a little.

Now grab a rolling pin, and the fun begins. Dust some flour on your cutting board, open up your dough, and twist off a little ping-pong-ball-sized hunk and roll it into a sphere.

Then, take your sphere and put it into your flour and shake so it gets covered with flour.

Plop it down in the flour on the board, flatten it gently with your hands...

And roll it out as thin as you can. I flip it with each pass of the rolling pin, and apply pressure from the center of the tortilla-in-making so that the edges are good and thin, too.

Then put it on your (non oiled) nonstick pan and pay attention. As you may be able to figure out from this exclusive Blur-O-Vision photo, bubbles will appear after a little while. It's your signal to flip the tortilla.

(I discovered that the smaller that photo is, the better it looks). Anyway, now you flip:

You only toast that other side very briefly, or you'll wind up with something like matzoh (albeit matzoh made with lard). You then put it someplace that'll keep it warm without heating it. I use aluminum foil, but some of you may have specialty tortilla warmers you bought on the border and never knew what to do with.

Texans will know what to do now, but here's an illustrated guide for those who've never tried this astonishing delicacy. Here, all your ingredients are in place: salsa, eggs, tortilla.

First, stick some eggs on the tortilla, leaving a good margin around the edges.

Knock some salsa on there...

Now, the part I couldn't photograph because it requires two hands and I was also scared of drooling on the camera: you turn a flap up from the bottom of the tortilla, folding it over the eggs. Then you make right and left "wings" from the other two margins, roll it up and stick the fourth quadrant of the breakfast taco in your mouth.

For absolute authenticity a la La Reyna, you need small cans of orange juice poured over ice (I could never figure that one out) and pretty lousy coffee.

Most Tex-Mex restaurants also feature bacon and egg, sausage and egg, (Mexican) chorizo and egg, bean and egg, and other breakfast tacos. These flour tortillas can also be used in other border delights, like carnitas (which some friends made in Berlin: no problem finding pork there!) or chicken-and-avocado tacos... But there is no reason to pay some huge international food conglomerate €3.99 for eight flour tortillas made with god knows what additives, which'll go bad the minute you open them if you don't use them immediately, when you can make your own for about €0.35.

You can also use the salsa, heated, for huevos rancheros, with a dusting of sharp cheese. But the tragic truth is, genuine corn tortillas are pretty much unobtainable by consumers in Europe: the supermarket may offer something called corn tortillas, but they don't look right, and no wonder: they're 75% wheat flour with some corn flour added for coloring. So yet another thing to smuggle back from Texas or ask your visiting friends to bring over. They freeze just great for about six months, although they eventually absorb too much water and get funky after that.

So bon appetit, y'all!

The Frustrations of Aniane

2011-10-01T15:12:00.000+02:00

E has relatives visiting this week, and in preparation, I helped him devise a day-trip from Montpellier that'd wow them. It's the one I, ideally, use on my visitors when we can get our hands on a car. He'd already done bits of it, but for the record, it goes like this:

Drive to Sommières, then take the road that leads to St. Martin-de-Londres. This takes you between Pic St. Loup and l'Hortus, and makes your visitors' eyes pop out. If you've left at the right time, and depending on how hungry you are, you can break in St. Martin for either a tasty snack from the excellent bakery there in the square, or a pizza -- also quite good -- from the place serving food. Sit out under the trees, enjoy the fountain/horse trough, and afterwards climb up the hill to check out the tiny Romanesque church. Back into the car, and head to St. Guilhem-le-Désert, either by via the road to Caisse and thence to the D4, or down the D32, better maintained, but less scenic, to Aniane, but not going into town and turning towards St. Guilhem via the signs there. Ideally, you do St. Guilhem via the visitors' center at the Pont du Diable, which, during high season, provides a little shuttle bus to get you there and back, and also has trilingual displays about the area's history, terroir, and ecosystems. When you've done that, get back in the car, drive to Aniane, take a wine-tasting at the local cave cooperative to get a sense of the amazing terroir of the Terrasses de Larzac, and maybe visit a winery or two. There's a great wine map of the area available at the Pont du Diable visitors' center. Then you drive back to Montpellier for a fine dinner. At the end of the evening, your visitors say "Okay, now I know why you like it here." So that's my routine. Or my ideal routine; I've never done the whole thing.

Last time we tried this, it was a Monday, and we got distracted after St. Martin, which was okay, but this week, E really needed to see the big sights, so we decided to head straight to St. Guilhelm and really do the place. Even I hadn't done this, because six years ago when I was there it was high tourist season, and the Big Attraction, the UNESCO-listed Abbey of Gellone, was holding church services. The nerve! So this time we decided to do it on a Tuesday, so that we could be sure that everything would be open. Sounded like a plan.

It got off to a rocky start. My first royalties from my Kindle article (you have bought a copy, haven't you?) were due in, plus someone had deposited another small check in my account which was supposed to clear that morning. I set off to the market in a jaunty mood, figuring to buy some nice stuff, then meet E at 1:30 for the trip. I got to the cash machine and it said I didn't have a cent. I stormed back down the hill, and sure enough, the check hadn't cleared and the Amazon dough hadn't shown up. Well, at least I had the trip to look forward to.

And it was a good day for one, even if we did get mildly lost getting out of town (I swear, one thing Montpellier is is drivers' hell) and onto the wrong road. No problem: instead of heading due north, like we wanted to, we were going west, and just got off the highway at Aniane and grabbed the road north instead of going into town. We got to the Pont du Diable, and I realized that the parking lot there was deserted, so I suggested we press on to St. Guilhem. As the road rose above the Hérault River, I noticed crumbling stone towers, which, I later learned, were the ruins of mills. We parked the car (note for tourists: do not park at the canoing place -- the rates are exorbitant -- but either drive straight on, or, better, turn left towards a parking lot that has actual shade. Rates in both are the same, neither will have space in high season, so use the shuttle) and walked into town.

St. Guilhem-le-Désert has one of those Plus Beau Villages de France signs as you drive in, and for those of you who don't speak French, that means "fully equipped to separate tourists from their money." You got your glass-blower, your potteries, your local honey-dealers, your ice cream shop, your knights-of-old shop for the boys, your doll shop for the girls, and your obvious ripoff lunch joints offering a "Menu Médievale" that should, by rights, be a hunk of meat and some bread, but isn't. It's also got your ready-for-photographing shots, like this one:

That's a thistle there on the door, something you see a lot in this village, for reasons I'm not entirely clear on. You not only see the real thing, like here, but it's also carved out of stone, painted on souvenir pottery, and the like.

We walked uphill, and I began to wonder where the dang Abbey was. It seemed to me the last time I'd been here it was right in my face, and although we'd seen its backside, I didn't see a way in.

A narrow street, though, announced that it led to the plaza, and once we got there, I realized that six years ago, when I'd been here last, we'd parked in the shaded lot and had been right there. The Abbey does, in fact, face onto the main square, where people were eating lunch, and some intrepid butcher had set up his trailer and was selling meat, cheese, and charcuterie to the locals.

I must say that, for all the historical importance of this place, its interior isn't so interesting. That said, the story is quite something. Guilhem (William in Occitan) was a friend of Charlemagne's, and when he decided to set up a monastery in the middle of nowhere and make it a major stop on the pilgrim road to Compostella, Charlemagne helped him out by giving him a chunk of the True Cross to use as a magnet for the pilgrims. He apparently had quite a good community going there, and was buried (and sanctified) in due time. The place did well enough that four or five centuries after Guilhem's death, they knocked down a lot of the old church and built the one you see today, with a nice big cloister for the monks to walk around and plant medicinal herbs in the center of so they could use them on sick pilgrims.

I wasn't actually focusing so much on the cloister here as I was on two of the other attractions of St. Guilhem. If you look at that mountain off there in the distance more closely, you'll see two ruins. The one to the right, which is just to the left of part of the monastery's roof, is called the Giant's Castle, and was used as a place the people of the village could go in case of attack. It's way the hell up the mountain, about 30 minutes by arduous foot journey. But above that is the remains of a structure, a ruin known as the little windows (les fenestrettes). I have no idea what this was, but I do know that recruiting the labor to build these two buildings couldn't have been easy. It got mighty hot in the summer then, as now, and those two things are way the hell up there.

The cloister is a reconstructed ruin: most of it is, improbably, in New York and is one of the cloisters around which the Metropolitan Museum's famed branch museum The Cloisters is arranged. This guy must've been astonished when George Grey Barnard walked in and opened his wallet to buy it.

At any rate, there just isn't much to see except for the crypt, which has remains of the original 9th century church, and a museum just off the cloister, from which I was shooed because despite the signs, it costs €2.50 to see and that was currently beyond my means. Didn't look like there was much in there anyway.

We took a turn around the square, and then headed back down the hill to the car. Our next stop was the Pont du Diable, the bridge made to connect the abbey in Aniane with the one we'd just seen, so that the pilgrims could stop in both places and spend money. Oh, and do religious stuff, too, of course. The legend from which the bridge gets its name is that the monks worked on the bridge all day and then woke up the next morning to see all their work undone. St. Guilhem, of course, knew what was going on: the Devil was trying to keep the faithful from doing their thing. So he had a meeting with ol' Satan (and, if you think about it, this brings up all kinds of questions, but anyway...) and got him to agree to a deal: Old Nick would let the monks finish the bridge, and then he could have the first soul which crossed it. The monks finished the job, the Devil awaited his payment, and St. Guilhem took a dog, slapped it on the rump, and sent it across. Happy ending for dog-lovers: Satan was so unhappy that he'd been outwitted that he jumped off the bridge.

Nowadays, it's a major swimming hole, and you can walk across the old bridge or drive across the new one, and there's some village you can walk to where they -- surprise! -- make pottery. Betcha they also blow glass.

Anyway, it was past 4 by the time we'd admired the bridge and the visitors' center, so it was time to press on to Aniane to investigate the wine scene. I'd seen a wine shop on our way out of town, and I was also curious about the local olives, since I've been buying olive oil from there ever since I've lived here, and it's cheap and wonderful. In fact, I just bought some today, and noted that it's had its name changed from La Colombe to Le Jardin de Saint-Benoît. Benoît, or Benedict, was Guilhem's chief competitor in the region in days gone by, but Aniane doesn't rely on him for tourism. Instead, it seems to be an agricultural hub, with the wine and olive buisnesses front and center. We followed a sign to the olive factory (I'd thought -- and still do -- that there's a retail outlet/tourist trap called L'Olivier, but we didn't find it and I thought this was it) and wound up nearly colliding with a semi-truck being loaded with enough olive oil to last me at least six months. The courtyard was filled with black plastic barrels of olives, but this was an industrial site -- the one that produces the oil I use, though -- and not for visits. Okay, on to the wine. We managed to find a place to park, walked over to the wine shop, and it was closed...on Tuesday! Arrrggggh! Looked like some good stuff in there, too. (Note: it's open on Monday, and also Sunday morning until 1pm). We then went to the cave cooperative and looked around, but the tasting room was much smaller than I remembered from six years ago, and since we were both broke, we decided against doing a dégustation. There weren't as many wines on offer as last time, either.

By now I was obsessed. I wanted to figure out something about this place! We wandered around the tiny, winding streets of the village, which looked nice enough, although very disorienting because the streets were so narrow and the buildings were so close together and the main square seemed to be outside the village proper. I'd seen a sign, though, and it was still fairly early: we were near Mas de la Serrane, my favorite winery in this region (that I've discovered so far). I wanted to see it. This turned out to be on the road to St. Martin, conveniently enough, so we drove out of Aniane, onto this road, and soon we were bumping up a long driveway.

This ended at a farm building, overlooking the fields from which some of the greatest wine I've ever drunk was ripening in the late afternoon sunshine.

There were grapes just growing underfoot.

And there was a cellar, an actual bunker dug into the hillside, where there were tastings available. All we had to do was ring the bell. The sign said that English and German both were spoken. But...

"We don't have any money to buy the wine if we like it," E reminded me. And he was right. "We can come back!" I thought for a minute about a day that would have started with me buying fresh food at the market and ended with my buying a nice bottle of my favorite wine right at the winery. This was not that day.

We got back in the car, drove to St. Martin, and soon enough we were crawling back into Montpellier. I checked my bank account right away, and of course all the money had cleared.

Just a warning, Aniane: I'll be back.

Miettes: A Way of Life

2011-09-30T13:01:00.000+02:00

Nothing of the sort, of course, just needed a title for this next batch.

As autumn creeps in on the rest of Europe, we're still nice and warm and sunny down here. This unchanging state of affairs shouldn't be mistaken for boredom, however. I mean, things do happen from time to time. For instance, about a month ago, I was coming back home and there was a great to-do at the Comédie tram stop, with all kinds of flashing blue lights. Apparently, the notice board which tells you which tram is next and how many minutes until it arrives had blown up. Smoke was pouring out of it and people were gathered all around.

The real news, of course, is that was a month ago and as of today it still hasn't been repaired.

* * *

The nice warm weather means that stupid t-shirts continue to be worn by our citizens, and since, as I said, I don't carry a notebook around, I've only recorded the ones I've remembered long enough to get back to the slum and write down. We may, in this batch, have a winner, though, for the worst t-shirt slogan ever.

It wasn't on the young guy I saw yesterday, who was walking along wearing one which said

THIS IS
A WHITE
T SHIRT

because (surprise!) it was, except for the black lettering. Nor was it the Chinese gentleman whose shirt declared

I LOS
T MYS
ELF

There was also a young Japanese girl whose shirt made me think.

GIVE PEACE
THE CHANCE

Does she not want to enrich Yoko Ono, or is the change of word a complete-the-sentence game?

Some men seem to like to display testosterone, like the guy I saw whose t-shirt simply declared

HUGE TACKLE

He had a young woman draped all over him, so who knows, it might have been true. Then there was the guy with the enigmatic slogan

STRESS FUELS
MY CREATION

which definitely had me thinking all the way home. If stress fuelled what I did, I'd be working 24 hours a day, although I can't say I'd guarantee a quality product.

No, the winner in our really stupid t-shirt contest so far this year is the impeccably made-up woman, very classy-looking, around 50, who had a shirt with one of those leggy female silhouettes which were once confined to truckers' mudflaps, and the words

LADY
VIPIMP

Should I have asked her for a job, or run away? She vanished into the crowd before I could decide.

* * *

Going through this part of the broke-not-poor cycle, I haven't been able to eat out much, but one very notable food happening has occurred around here recently. A defunct sandwich shop suddenly sprouted a nice new sign and a lovely interior and opened as Omija, a Korean deli.

Now, this is notable because of the specificity of its mission. This is not an "Asia" place: it's 100% Korean. It serves lunch for €7.50, either a dish of the day or one of those lovely rice-with-stuff-on-top dishes called Bibimbap. There are also soups and other dishes, like bulgogi, available at the whim of the chef. The freezer has some Japanese stuff like gyoza and edamame, and there's Japanese and Korean beer available. I forgot to ask about kimchi, although it's inconceivable that it's not there.

I spoke with a young woman named, I believe, On, who was very happy to speak English ("Much easier!"), and who was optimistic about turning the French on to her cuisine. It sure would be nice if it caught on, and so far there seems to be an enthusiastic crowd at lunchtime. There's also free wi-fi if you're hanging out at the outside tables, and apparently the omija the place is named after is a drink made from a Korean berry, which I have yet to try. I wish them luck, because they're going to need it!

Omija Coffee House, 8, rue Boussairolles (a block off the Comédie). Open Mon-Sat, hours still being determined. Phone: 04 67 92 70 18

* * *

Finally, the Montpellier Opera has just announced its new season, which is mostly the same old same old, with one notable exception: Philip Glass has been working on a revised version of the piece which made his name, the collaboration with Robert Wilson which premiered in Avignon in 1976, Einstein on the Beach, and this new version is having its world premiere here in mid-March. No idea why Montpellier was selected, but this should be fun. Unfortunately, it's happening in the middle of SXSW, so no way I'll be here. Dang.

Broke Not Poor Cuisine: Pastafazool

2011-09-27T13:08:00.002+02:00

There are always questions about pastafazool. The first one I was aware of came in third grade, when a new kid, James Mastrobuono, was seated behind me. He weighed around 300 pounds and was about 14, and was the latest immigrant who'd been brought over to work for, um, the local businessmen's association. Sort of a charitable deal. Jimmy would kick the back of my chair rhythmically, and say "Hey, Emmun. Hey, Emmun." (The teachers all called us by our legal given names, at least until Evelyne Thomas Durnford had an audience with one after a particularly severe playground thrashing). "Hey, Emmun. Hey, Emmun." The whole point was to get me to say, "What?" which, in order to get this obese moron to stop kicking me, I'd usually do. "You mama make you pastafazool?" he'd say, and then collapse in helpless laughter. So would some of his friends. (Revenge, of course, came with puberty: nobody with a name like Jimmy Mastrobuono was going to escape verbal savagery, even if, by then, he weighed more like 600 pounds. The last time I saw him, he was heaving his bulk on and off the back of a city garbage truck.)

But a word had been planted in my head, and it took a while to process. I figured out a couple of things. First, it was a dish. Second, the word pastafazool was Southern Italian (like the kids I grew up with) for the more refined pasta a la fagiole. Third, there are about a hundred ways to make it. Is it a soup? Is it a stew? Is it a sauced pasta dish? The answer is yes. It's also so humble you'll probably never get it in a restaurant -- or even get most chefs to admit they make it. Not me: pastafazool, the way I make it, is a staple of broke-but-not-poor cuisine, and yet it's so good that once riches and the infinite possibilities they offer shower down on me, as I fervently hope they will, I'll keep making it. It's that good.

Now, Americans have an advantage: they can make pastafazool with Italian sausage. The words may indicate otherwise, but Italian sausage is an American dish. It's what Southern Italian salsiccie has evolved into in the New World, and it's better than any of the original I've had. And I've had the original, first from a Berlin restaurant whose proprietoress had it shipped up from Naples, and, then, from an Italian deli in Berlin that started stocking it. Nope: American Italian sausage, redolent with fennel seeds and hot peppers, is the real deal. Around here I make do with a product called chair à saucisse, which is like basic sausage meat with very little seasoning. Or do without, when I'm really broke (but not poor).

Anyway, here's what you do. First, assemble your ingredients:

What we have here is, on the lower row, a can of white beans, some fennel seeds, some crushed canned tomatoes, and an ingredient I have to smuggle in from Germany (although it's also available in the U.S.), namely powdered rosemary. The upper row has an almost-invisible bay leaf, some Japanese chiles (aka chile hontaka, chile japonès or basic dried chiles in the States), an onion, and some garlic. Also some salt and pepper.

So chop your onion and garlic, heat up some olive oil, and start sauteeing the onion. When it's just starting to turn yellow, toss in your garlic and stir-fry for a minute or so. There are four cloves of garlic here; I kinda like garlic.

Now, if you're using Italian sausage, this is the point to add it and stir it around some. It's best if it's loose, but it's also okay to use coins if it's too hard to get the casing off. Stir it around until it's not pink any more. Otherwise, this is the point where you add your chiles -- there are seven in there -- and about this much fennel seed. You might want to do this in lesser quantity even if you do have Italian sausage.

Also add the bay leaf and stir this around some. All three of these flavorings are dependent on the release of oil and a quick toss in the olive oil helps start that process.

Put in your tomatoes. Mine are so dense that I also add some water, about a quarter-can's worth, which'll evaporate during the course of cooking. Not doing this risks burning the sauce. With tomatoes, you do not want to burn the sauce, trust me.

Now sprinkle in your rosemary powder. This is about enough:

Now you add some salt -- a bit more than you would if you were going to use it as is, because you'll be adding beans -- and let it stew a while. Meanwhile, drain your beans. You can also do the whole routine of cooking dried beans -- or even fresh beans if you've got access to them. This takes a while, though, and with the canned product being so cheap I can't be bothered. I also tried making this with the local cocos, white beans that come in the pod, and undercooked them and gave myself one hell of a stomach ache.

I always rinse the glutinous crap they're packed in -- although it's only bean water -- from the canned product. It'll thicken your sauce unacceptably. Anyway, you've got about 30 minutes to wait, because you're anticipating the point where some oil separates from the cooking sauce:

At this point, stir it a bit just to keep it liquid. You've already started your pasta water, right? Because we're about ready here. Add the beans and stir. You won't cook them long -- just long enough to get them hot, although a little longer won't kill anyone.

Right. Now your pasta's going, and you get the garnishes ready: parsley and Parmigiano.

That parsley mill is a bog-standard French supermarket one, a copy of the equally useless Mouli herb mill. What you want, if you can find it, is the plastic one made by the Swiss company, Zyliss. It does a better job and, unless you try to grind tree twigs in it, lasts longer. Or you can, you know, be primitive and chop the parsley by hand.

Anyway, you've cooked the pasta, tipped a tablespoon of the water into your sauce for good luck, and drained it. You've put half the sauce into your pasta pot (assuming, of course, that you're dining alone, as is the lot of the broke-but-not-poor, although this recipe makes two servings), dusted it with the parsley, returned the pasta (which, of course, is fusilli, because that's the right kind with this sort of a sauce, but you knew that, right?) to the pot, stirred it, added a bit of Parmesan, stirred it some more, and turned it out onto the plate, where you dust it with more Parmesan. And then you go eat it, because that's what pastafazool is for.

I gotta say, I decided to document this particular batch and it turned out better than average. Real good, so check those proportions. And the leftovers were, of course, better than the first time around, because the sauce had had a few days in the fridge to mix all those flavors together.

Pastafazool: it's what's for dinner!

The next broke-but-not-poor cooking segment will feature a breakfast that will get you going in fine style. But there's other stuff to post first, so go buy your beans.

Me & Pat: Day Two, Art and Tuna

2011-09-24T15:23:00.001+02:00

The first time I went to Sète, I wasn't too impressed. I wandered around with my then-girlfriend, observing, it being high tourist season, families on vacation who brought back memories of tension-filled similar events in my past. The whole town shouted "beach vacation!," and she was shouting "beach!" because she wanted to parade around topless, which was fine with me. As we drove out of town, the weirdness of the huge long beach which stretches between Sète and Agde became apparent. It's all beach, all sand, but if someone's built a bunch of cabins across the road, the beach is crowded as hell. If not, it's empty beach. We found a nice spot with no one in sight, she did her thing and ran around picking up shells (note from the trip back: please wash your souvenir shells and be absolutely certain the remains of the inhabitants are no longer in them), and then we went back into town for a nice coquillage and a bottle of Picpoul de Pinet from one of the touristy places along the harbor.

But I knew there must be more to the place, and we'd gotten a hint earlier in the day, when we'd stopped to take a look at the place before heading into the mountains. The parking situation was out of hand, and so we'd deposited her Smart in a parking lot near the Moroccan customs dock: Sète's harbor not only features a horrifying ferry service to Tangier, but is a port of entry for ships from Morocco, Tunisia, and, until recently when I guess the boycott shut it down, Israel. At any rate, we were walking into town, and passed a harborside café where the staff was at one of the outdoor tables, smoking and drinking coffee, when an enormous tuna boat pulled into the slip and honked its horn. One of the waitresses jumped up and returned with a blackboard on which was written "We feature fresh tuna."

So when, for the second day of the Patrimoine weekend, E and J decided they wanted water, that was the destination. Those two are as assiduous as I am about research, and so by the time we'd parked, the Google map printouts were out and a visit to the local tourist office was underway. (At one point, J stopped some locals to ask where it was, and they pointed to it and informed her that it was closed because it was Sunday, so not to bother. She responded that it was Patrimoine weekend, so it must be open, as, indeed, it was. These guys have only been here a few months, but they've already learned that the real motto of France is "pas possible.")

Sète just isn't big enough that the visit to the tourist office was necessary, but it was a nice enough stop, and we learned that we were just a short hop from the place in town I most wanted to see: MIAM, the Musée Internationale des Arts Modèste, or Museum of Modest Arts. I'd seen a video about the place on the Michelin website (I get a newsletter from them from time to time), of all places, and was excited to see more. There was, unfortunately, a guided tour underway, but it proved easy enough to navigate around it. MIAM is extremely hard to describe. It's sort of a collection of collections, which change from time to time, and the current one (only up until October 2, so get down there if you possibly can) is a pip. What's there at the moment is a collection of hand-printed Brazilian booklets, some outsider art including some great paintings on cardboard by a gardener named Germain Tessier, a collection of a kind of American folk art I never knew existed, to wit Chicano prisoner handkerchief art which is being produced in New Mexico, Texas and southern California, absolutely glorious in its over-the-top depictions of religious and romantic scenes, some paintings from Bamoun, Cameroon, some of which can be seen at the bottom of this page, and, finally, works by Bernard Belluc, one of the founders of the museum.

Belluc is one of the strangest artists you'll ever see. He collects things. If flea markets in France aren't very good, he's probably the reason: he collects things in quantity. He then arranges them in installations/tableaux with a theme. The visual assault is beyond belief, and it must be even more powerful if you're French, since so much of the content is boxes and cans and bottles and posters and other detritus of the everyday life of some years back. Toys are marshalled in army-like quantities, ink-pens explode from the center of a piece dedicated to the production of visual art, a large piece dealing with vacation-time asks the question "the mountains or the shore?" with enough crap that the answer seems logical: anywhere but here. MIAM has also displayed these pieces in claustrophobic proximity to each other so it's impossible to stand back: you're forced into the maelstrom of objects. In a way, Belluc's work reminds me of Laura Kikauka, in Berlin, with far more content than her simplistic "kitsch is kitschy" message. Belluc is after something serious here, although just what it is besides a demand for respect for the artifacts of the past and the work of the people who created (and designed) them is hard to say: the piece dedicated to the French electrical system is almost moving in its homage. MIAM has too much here to absorb easily or quickly, but you should at least attempt it. If Belluc is exhibited anywhere else (and I'm not sure he is), it's worth going to see what in the world he's up to.

Our next goal was directly across town (not such a great distance, to be honest), the CRAC, or Centre Régional d'Art Contemporain. On the way, E announced he could use a snack, and, fortunately (compared to what happened when we launched ourselves into the mountains a couple of Mondays ago) not only is there an amazing local snack, the tielle sétoise, but there was an amazing tiny place called Paradiso selling them. In case your French isn't that good, a tielle is a little pie filled with finely minced octopus and cuttlefish in a spicy tomato sauce, and it's just amazing. Furthermore, Paradiso not only had tielles a good twelve inches across (as well as the more traditional little ones), but a mussel turnover, several small pizzas, and a tomato-and chèvre tart. I was still stuffed from breakfast, so I turned down E's offer of one (stupidly enough), but E inhaled his (and J her tart, although I wasn't envious there, my violent allergy to goat cheese being always on my mind), and I'm real glad these people don't have an outlet in Montpellier. Which isn't to say that I won't seek them out next time I'm in Sète.

CRAC turned out to be everything MIAM wasn't. Or, maybe it's more accurate to say it wasn't anything MIAM was, like interesting, challenging, or fun. On display was a show by Philippe Ramette, a contemporary installation artist, with a sound installation by Denis Savary, random sounds on an organ piped into the various rooms by little chartreuse trumpet thingies designed by Ramette. Ramette's work itself was without any unifying concept, and to be honest I've forgotten almost all of it less than a week later. I saw it as the curse of the state-supported avant-garde, although I've got to say that the CRAC facility is top-notch, and if anything interesting ever gets in there, it'll be displayed in style. This ain't it, though.

There's one more museum in Sète, the Musée Paul Valéry, which we saw as we went to the last sight of the day, the view from atop Mont St.-Clair, a huge hill on which the town is built, which gives a really panoramic view of the surrounding countryside, most of which is flat. In fact, although I didn't get a chance to really see, I think it's possible to see a bit of Montpellier from there. I'd have used my camera to figure this out, but the battery was on strike, which is why there aren't any pictures in this blog post.

Anyway, I'm glad to find out there's more to Sète than I'd thought, and since I've been introduced to an American photographer who lives there part time (but is in the States until late November) I'm sure I'll be back to check out what MIAM does next -- and get me one of those Paradisical tielles!

* * *

MIAM, 23, Quai Maréchal de Lattre de Tassigny, 34200 Sète. Open April 1-September 30 every day, 9am-7pm, October 1-March 31, every day except Monday, 10am-12 noon, 2pm-6pm. Entrance €5. Free first Sunday of each month.

Paradiso, 11, Quai de la Résistance, 34200 Sète. Products also available at Tielle Ciani, 24, rue Honoré Euzet, and the Halles Centrales (central covered market). Large orders and catering: 04 67 74 26 48.

CRAC, 26, Quai Aspirant Herber, 34200 Sète. Open every day except Tuesday 12:30pm-7pm, weekends 3pm-8pm. Entrance free.

Me & Pat: Day One, Searching For Nostradamus

2011-09-23T13:37:00.000+02:00

Note: because I paid my phone bill before the end of the month, my phone was turned off for a week. I hadn't even gotten the next month's bill! But apparently, if you don't pay immediately, you get cut off now. Thus, last weekend's activities haven't been blogged yet, and there's a new post from the Broke But Not Poor Kitchens with an exciting recipe all waiting to go up. Don't expect this kind of prolific activity too often!

* * *

One weekend a year, France has the Jours de Patrimoine, or Heritage Days. I think other European countries do this, too, whether on the same weekend in September or not, I can't say. Basically, it's a good idea: buildings and other properties having historical value, but which may be in government or private hands, are opened up for supervised public visits. Often, a guided tour is the only way to see these places, but the general feeling is that this keeps the French people in touch with their history and culture. All very lofty.

The reality can be different. Besides the odd private residence or property, all the museums are open for free, and they're jammed. People who wouldn't normally engage in this sort of activity seem to feel pressured to do it, and to haul their kids along. The prospect of saving five euros' admission to some place is irresistable, and lines snake out of attractions that are pretty much open all the time.

E and J were planning to do something on Sunday, but hadn't quite worked out what. I had no plans at all for Saturday, but it was a really gorgeous day, so I did my bit for my living environment and took a bag of DVDs I'd borrowed from Judi at the English Corner Shop back down there. We talked a while, and I began to feel the tug of patrimoine. There must be something I hadn't seen within walking distance, and so I left the store.

First stop was St. Roch church. As many hundreds of times as I've passed it, I'd never gone in, mostly because it's not particularlly distinguished architecturally and dates from the 19th century, a counterfeit of a much older style of church. As I figured, there's nothing much inside (except some bits of the saint, which get paraded around on his saint's day here in August, but they're not on public display). The organ was getting a workout, mostly because they're trying to raise funds for it, and to that end, some homemade jams and jellies were for sale at a small table inside the sanctuary, all proceeds going to restoring the organ.

Unsatisfied by this, I wandered on. The Chamber of Commerce building is old, and used to be the local stock exchange a few centuries ago, but that was locked up. I turned up the hill, past one of the oldest buildings in town, a former palace for some minor nobleman now in private hands (and divvied up into rentable apartments), but it, too, was closed. Coming onto the Rue de la Loge, I noticed a huge line snaking out of the entrance to the crypt of Notre Dame des Tables, the church which had stood in what is now Square Jean Jaurès. I haven't taken the tour of this subterranean bit of Montpellier history, but I sure wasn't going to do it now.

Up at the top of the hill is the Préfecture, the building where the French government offices are. If you need your drivers license, or naturalization papers, or political asylum, or many other things, here's where you go to hand in your papers, which will subsequently be lost, causing you untold grief. You enter in the rear, where cubic stone and glass houses most of the offices, but the public face of the building is a mid-19th century pile, which, along with its contemporary the central post office, graces the end of what is now Avenue Foch, which was cut through the center of town back then to divide the two parishes and provide an opportunity to build a bunch of Haussmannesque structures to line it. Astonishingly, people were standing in line to get to go into this part of the Préfecture, whereas most people I know would pay good money to avoid having to go there at all. Ah, well, no accounting for taste.

I ducked around the side and into the older part of that bit of the hill and wandered around some, seeing nothing much. Finally, I wound up at the Cathedral. I remembered being utterly unimpressed with this the one time I'd been in it, on a patrimoine past, but decided to give it a second chance. But no, it's chock full of lugubrious late 19th Century Catholic crap, except for the organ, which is gigantic. If those pipes up front aren't just for show, that sumbitch can thunder when it wants to.

Back out on the street again, there was really only one thing left to do: hit the medical school. The early medical faculty is literally joined to the Cathedral, although the buildings which are open to the public are far later than the school's founding around 1000 AD or even the earliest bits of the Cathedral (most of which dates from the 1850s), which I believe are 13th Century. But this time I had a goal: I was carrying my iPhone, and wanted to sneak some pictures here.

Just to the left of the entrance, there's a door which is closed except on this weekend, which leads to the faculty board rooms. This is where the faculty of the medical school still meets -- I've seen them there during the winter when the rooms are lit up. Mostly, though, it's a repository for old books and paintings, and that latter is what interested me. See, part of the perks of high office once upon a time was getting your portrait painted. This happened a lot with city governments, which is how we have the only authenticated picture of Bach (Kappelmeister of the Thomaskirche was a Leipzig city office), and it also happened with important municipal organizations, which is where Rembrandt's Night Watch comes from, but also its many, many cousins on display at Amsterdam's City Museum. There are three rooms of these portraits at the medical school, and there was one in particular I was looking for.

Montpellier's ancient university and medical school has attracted its share of weirdos over the years, and, like it or not, they, too, are part of the patrimoine. I pass a plaque commemorating where Rabelais lived when he was here, for instance, almost every day. But the guy nobody wants to talk about is Nostradamus. And I had heard that Nostradamus' portrait was one of the ones on the wall, in the oldest section, where the paintings are all black. So I went in, pointed my phone at the wall, and figured I'd find out Nostradamus' real name when I got home and then correlate that with the picture to show you folks his portrait. I also went into the later room and snapped the era when men wore wigs and hats with red pompoms on them. And the really, really important ones got sculpted busts.

You'll also notice up here in the center a guy named Magnol, a member of a family of great distinction here in town who did a lof of important botanical work, including discovering a plant he named after himself, the magnolia. That's sort of a tradition: there's another Montpellier botanist family named Begon.

The place was jammed, and it was all the poor administrators could do to keep the crowds under control. In one of the thesis defense rooms, someone had put together a slide show about the anatomy museum, a treat I've managed to miss (and which I think is being renovated at the moment), and there was a huge line for that. In the courtyard a youngish man with a bad rug was conducting a bunch of older folks in some songs, and the audience was joining in. What this had to do with medicine escapes me, but I eventually found my way upstairs, where there's a huge library of old medical books and a small museum displaying some of the choicer manuscripts, many of which deal with alchemy and other tangentially medical subjects, as well as a selection of prints, many of which are anatomical in nature. This, I believe, is open all the time.

On my way back downstairs, I managed to shoot this, one of a pair of sculptures, showing a severe medical condition being induced.

I have no idea why this place should have twin sculptures of guys being eaten by lions, but maybe back in the late Middle Ages, lions roamed the streets of Montpellier where today binge-drinking American students prowl for a different kind of prey. And I left without glancing at my favorite part of the huge entry hall. On the walls are two very large marble plaques, on which are inscribed the names of some of the earliest known doctors to graduate from Montpellier University, along with the dates of their being granted the title. What's remarkable about this is that the names are not only French, but also Jewish and, a few of them, Arab. Then, early in the 1400s, this stops. The Jews have been expelled and the Arabs have retreated to Northern Africa. It would be over 600 years until this changed.

I left the crowds and went back into the streets and up the hill, eventually wandering over to the other big church, Ste. Anne, which is now an arts space. It has a bunch of large abstract paintings of no great distinction sharing space with some circus-y installation kind of things. One quick circuit and I was out.

Back at my desk in the slum, I logged on to Wikipedia to get the skinny on Nostradamus, whose picture I had certainly captured in Blur-O-Vision with the phone. But…no. Turns out that, far from heading the medical college, ol' Nostro had been tossed out as a student for the crime of selling drugs. Rather, instead of engaging in pure research, he'd maintained a pharmacy business on the side, and that was against the rules. The other interesting fact was that his family had been Jewish and had taken the name of the day they'd converted -- Our Lady, or Nostre Dame, in old French.

Ah, well. Tomorrow was another day, and lord knows France is full of patrimoine.

Into The Unknown, On Monday

2011-09-13T13:49:00.002+02:00

So E contacted me because he wanted to take a drive. He's got visitors coming, and was looking for short day-trips, and I have one I do for first-timers which involves going to Sommières, then driving to St. Martin-de-Londres, which takes you between Pic St. Loup and L'Hortus, the limestone escarpment "across the street" from it. From St. Martin, it's off to the famous St. Guilhelm-le-Désert, the Pont du Diable, and Aniane for education about the Terrasses de Larzac terroir. Turned out E and J had never been to most of that, so we decided to do it on Monday.

Note to people who've never been to France: France is closed on Mondays. True, the post office and banks are open, for the most part, but basically, France is closed.

So yesterday when I got to the train station, where I was to join them, E was alone; apparently J had decided to stay home. He had planned to pick up a couple of quiches to eat, so we wouldn't really have to stop for lunch, but I told him that one thing about this part of the country is that just about any bakery you stop in has some local specialty for sale, and it's always better to try that. I was remembering my last trip to St. Martin, when I'd ducked into the bakery on the market square there and come out with some fantastic pastry with ham and cheese in it that set me back €1.50. I don't even remember what it was called. So he didn't bother with the quiches. (Fine with me; cold scrambled eggs doesn't do much for me).

One of the huge disadvantages of Montpellier is getting out of town. It takes forever. But once we got past Castelneau-le-Lez, we were in the clear, and rolled on to Sommières. Fortunately, E had been there several times, so we didn't need to stop and do the tourist thing there, and, once we got to town, we went left instead of going across the Roman Bridge, and headed straight to the road to St. Martin.

The mountains performed as expected: it really is an awe-inducing sight, and this time I concentrated on looking at l'Hortus instead of Pic St. Loup going through its changes. The trip to the Dordogne had made me more aware of prehistoric dwellings, and I was wondering if l'Hortus' Neanderthal site was visible from the road. I saw a couple of suspects, but nothing definite, and then something utterly unexpected: a fort of some sort built into a corner of the mountain. This came and went so quickly I didn't really have time to check it out, but, not for the first time seeing old fortifications, I found myself wondering who was defending what from whom. That there was a commanding view there was no doubt. But what were they looking for? Given the history of this region, there's certainly more than one answer.

At any rate, we got to St. Martin, parked the car, and hiked up the hill to the famous Romanesque church. For the first time in all the years I'd been coming there, the church was open (it closes at noon, opens again at 3), and its interior is gorgeous, albeit pretty much unadorned; the proportions alone give off a wonderful feeling of comfort. Adding to that were four little old ladies, who were singing unison hymns of some sort. They seemed to be in some sort of French, and totally acappella. Amateurs all, they still knew how to fill the space with their sound, which comes with a fairly robust echo for such a small space. Just your typical magic moment in Languedoc.

We went back to the town square and noticed both bakeries were still closed. This might have had something to do with it being Monday. Did I mention that most of France is closed on Monday? We walked back to the car, and I said we'd get our lunchtime pastry in St. Guilhelm. The question was how to get there, so I unleashed E's super-detailed map, and was looking for the way to the road there when two young guys came up and unlocked the car near us. "Where are you going?" they asked, and I said St. Guilhelm. "If you go there via the road to Montpellier, there's a lot of construction," one of them said. "You'd be better off taking another route. Hey, I know: why not go via St. Jean-de-Buèges?" He grabbed the map, and sure enough, it was kind of the long ways around, but there was a little town up there. "That's where we're going: just follow us!" Hell, why not? We had no plans. So we did.

We went up. We went up a lot. We went over a mountain ridge. We started going down. Then we went up some more. Limestone towers poked out of the woods. I'd seen these sorts of rock formations before, when I'd gotten lost somewhere else not far from here, and recalled that there are also natural bridges in the vicinity. I knew that below us was the Hérault River. Somewhere: it was a long ways down. Finally, we crossed it, and started going up again. I had no idea whatever where we were. I also knew that that wasn't a problem: I had a basic idea what direction we were going in, and could steer us towards the Mediterranean -- and the freeway -- if I had to. Plus, we had a map. A very detailed map.

So the only thing to do was groove, stay on the road, and trust that it would take us to St. Jean-de-Buèges. Finally, the landscape opened up, and there, right by the side of the road, was a picnic table. We had no picnic, but surely there was a bakery where we were going. And man, was the view amazing. Off to the left was this:

Look, a vineyard! We were near civilization! And over to the left...

Wait! Was that a village poking its head out next to that huge piece of limestone? It was indeed. Was it the village we were headed to? It was indeed. And so, heading down, down, down, we found ourselves headed in just that direction. We stopped outside of town, and I grabbed a couple of shots.

I kind of like the picture-within-a-picture aspect of this, but it's also the best shot I had at the Château, the fort/whatzis on top of the hill. The two guys we'd met in St. Martin had arrived, and were walking into town, having left their car well outside. As we drove in, it turned out that there was a lot more to St. Jean-de-Buèges than was immediately visible, though, and there was even a parking lot. This was well signposted, but E did something I thought was silly but turned out to be a good idea. He asked a local woman with a blue blouse who was sitting on a bench where the parking was and she said "Just a little ways up this street and to the right." Just where I thought it was, in other words.

It was also next to the local cave cooperative, where the local winegrowers brought their grapes. It wasn't in operation (did I mention that France is closed on Mondays?), but there was much evidence of what the building was:

Those of you who have enlarged the photo to look at it will see the grapes that didn't make it into the trough, to be screwed into the crusher. None of you, however, will be able to smell it. This is really too bad. There was a kind of tourist center-cum-grocery store across the street from this which had a plaque which gave a weird version of the history of the village, although the one on the village's own website (French only) is much better. I wanted to put my fist through the window (the place was closed, it being Monday) and grab a bottle of Château St. Jean-de-Buèges, since the odor of the grapes was still with me, but I restrained myself.

We wandered around the town. It was another world. As you can see from the town history, it was once a center of silk production, but that got zapped by frost in 1956, and it never recovered. No, it would appear that the major industry here is gîtes, which is French for B&Bs. Pretty much anything that isn't a gîte is for sale. Because the Buège is a river, it's been tamed to run through the town, and the place is mighty green and cool as a result. That, plus the thick walls, meant that when we stepped into this street to walk to the church, the temperature dropped a good ten degrees Fahrenheit:

The church was as old as the one in St. Martin, but it was closed.

We wandered around some, but there wasn't much more to see. On the way to the car, we met some recently-arrived tourists who wanted to find the source of the Buège, which was a ways out of town. When I looked at the map to see how to get us to St. Guilhelm, I saw the road there, and by chance, as we drove out, we saw them again, and stopped to show them the map. Someone was behind us, though, so I told E we'd better move on, and he pulled over. Within seconds, the woman with the blue blouse was there. "Okay, where do you want to go?" she asked the tourists, and they told her. "Now," she asked us, "where do you want to go?" and we said St. Guilhelm. "Over the bridge," she said. Like there was another road.

But I realized that these people, these older folks you see sitting around these villages in twos or threes, it's not only polite to say hi to them as you pass, but it'll mean that they'll come to your rescue when or if you get lost. (These people are sometimes also joined by a cat, but it's no use cultivating the damn cat, because you'll get treated with the same contempt cats always treat people with).

At any rate, there seemed to be only two roads: the one we came in on and another one. So we took the other one.

Hoo boy.

It's called the D 122, and it will take you to places you've never been before. On my map, it's mostly a red dotted line, which, in the comfort of my slum apartment, I see is Michelin's way of saying "difficult or dangerous road." It's one-lane, and it's about 20km long. It ends in a town called Arboras, so keep that in mind: it does end. There is nothing there. E mused that, although his car is in good shape, an accident or a flat tire or something would be, um, a major inconvenience. It winds ("Don't worry: I learned to drive in Switzerland!"), it goes up and down, and, if you have the luxury of looking, it has some of the most spectacular scenery I've yet seen here. Far-off peaks, walls of limestone, forest and garrigue, and not one single person. Well, that's not right: after about an hour, we passed a house perched in the middle of nowhere with a post box. Given how long we still had to go, we decided he must be the most hated person in the region as far as the post office is concerned.

Every fifteen minutes or so we'd pass a sign indicating we were on the D122 and there would be a number, lower each time. But that number was a kilometer. Fifteen minutes of winding crazy road to travel one kilometer! At long last, we were dumped in Arboras. As we took stock of which way to go, E exclaimed "That was great!" So if you're going to do this, do it with a Swiss person who loves twisty dangerous roads. As with the Cirque de Navacelles, I'm glad I did it, and I'm glad I wasn't driving.

As we got closer to the end of the road, vineyards started appearing, some with familiar names, and this just increased as we twisted down into St. Saturnin, through Montpeyroux. Occasionally, one of the tiny trailers behind a diesel-stinking tractor would hold us up, another carefully-selected bunch of grapes going to the crusher. This seems to be the height of the vendage, and the word I've heard is that it's a small, but superb, crop this year. We'll find out soon enough, but the few vineyards we saw that were unpicked sure looked good: big fat dark grapes hanging in classic pyramidal form.

Okay, we missed St. Guilhelm-le-Désert and its UNESCO church (which was probably closed anyway because it was Monday), and the Pont du Diable down the hill from it, and we also missed Aniane, where I've still never been when it's open (it was Monday, after all), where I want to check out the wine scene (it's the gateway to the Terrasses du Larzac, one of the best-kept local secrets in terms of amazing wine) and visit the olive oil mill, because that's where my olive oil comes from. But instead we hit the freeway and zoomed back to Montpellier, very happy indeed with what we had seen. I mused some about St. Jean, its tower which was supposed to be protecting someone from somebody (but who would march over all that landscape to get 300 people making wine and silk?), and how one lives in a place like that year round. But it was a magic place, and when you're leaving, I suggest going back up the hill the way you came and finding the fork in the road that'll take you to St. Guilhelm. Unless you have a Swiss at the wheel.

First Sunday: Wet Tomatoes and Nailing Heads to the Wall

2011-09-05T13:35:00.000+02:00

Long-time readers will remember that a couple of years ago, I went to the Tomato Festival in Clapiers, an all-but-inaccessible suburb of Montpellier, and, thanks to the astonishing display by Eric the Tomatologist, saw this astonishing fruit in all its multiple forms and glory. I missed it last year, but with E&J newly moved here and always looking for cool stuff to do, I'd been babbling about it for some time, and finally started seeing notices about its impending arrival yesterday, so we made plans to attend.

Only one problem: as the week wore on, threats of heavy rain kept appearing on the weather forecast and then getting pushed forward. We agreed to meet at the train station and then see what seemed to be the right thing to do.

Once there, it appeared that the worst was over, so we piled into the car and headed to Clapiers. There were some intermittent showers, but no big thing. We parked, walked to the park where the event was...and the heavens opened up. "What's that rock festival..?" E asked and I knew immediately what he was thinking: Glastonbury. Off at one end, an oboe band tootled bravely, while the various merchants hustled to cover their stuff up with thick plastic. This was Glastonbury with tomatoes.

Amazing tomatoes, it should be noted: the same long table, but pretty much every variety was different from last time. A huge amount of tomatoes was for sale, too, although not the more exotic varieties he was displaying. Still, very impressive, even if the ground was liquefying under our feet. Eventually, the rain let up somewhat and we made a dash for the car. It wasn't quite 3pm, and already a guy from the city was cutting down the signs directing people to the festival.

Back in the car, E said "Well, want to try something else?" Sure, but what? He had the answer: "Let's go to Lattes." Specifically, to the Lattara site. I wasn't quite sure of what this was, having confused it with another local Roman site which had just reopened, but it was absolutely the solution to the day.

* * *

Lattes lies south of Montpellier. In fact, as I discovered, at one point it more or less was Montpellier in terms of its domination of the local population and economy. It's just that it was all over 900 years before Montpellier got invented. It was huge, and was the natural outgrowth of the human settlement which had been there for 5000 years: there was a small display of Neolithic pottery and such, but the buildings you can see from the museum there are from the Roman era:

(Pardon the raindrops over on the left: you can only view the site through the windows).

From what I could make out, Lattera was populated by Gauls, Celts, and Romans, and administered by the Romans, who, in the great tradition of Romans out in the boondocks, went pretty native. Unlike the ones in Cologne and Mainz, though, the Latterans were kept somewhat in check by their higher-ups in Nimes, who really weren't that far away on the Via Domitia, the Roman superhighway that connected Spain and France.

What they did in Lattera was pretty unsurprising: they made wine and olive oil for export. The Greeks had started all of this, although there doesn't seem to have been much of a Greek presence in Lattera. But the Romans took full advantage of the ideal conditions for producing both. The wine got exported in amphorae

which stacked nicely in the holds of the smallish ships used to transport them, while up on deck were the much larger vats of oil.

Sorry, lady, nobody home.

There were also plenty of grains and fruits for the locals, and there was a chart on the wall showing the kinds of fish archaeozoologists have discovered in the trash from this era. Latterans ate well, and lived in houses with nice decorations: there's a reconstructed mosaic floor from a well-to-do house, as well as this charming, albeit downscale, mosaic made from seashells:

But the harbor, the source of all the action, began silting up and eventually, about 200 AD, it had to be abandoned. The Latterans moved elsewhere, until there was just a tiny village left. Then, the population center turned slighty to the northwest, the site of current Lattes, and around 400, a church went up, and the more or less modern history of the place started.

All of this is documented on the top two floors of the four-story museum, which would be worth a visit anyway, but one of the great things about this place is that the bottom two floors host year-long exhibitions. I'm still pissed that I missed the one about the wine business that ran when I first got here, because that would have filled in a lot of gaps in my understanding of the area. The one they have now is pretty spectacular, albeit not as well focussed geographically.

It's called Of Rites and Men, and is about some of the rituals, both private and public, practiced by the Celts, Iberians, and Greeks in Provence, Languedoc, and Catalonia. One of the big surprises was that Castelneau-le-Lez, the bourgeois suburb north of Montpellier where people move when they've made their money, the main street of which is one real estate office after another, had a major Celtic archeological site dating from the 8-9th century BC. I wasn't even aware there were Celts down here; clearly I've got more reading to do. Apparently one of the things they really liked to do was to take the heads of particularly gallant warriors they'd defeated back home with them and nail their heads to the wall in the village or exhibit them in their religious spaces. They also did this with their own heroes who fell in battle, and enjoyed carrying the severed hands of their enemies around, all strung together. Lovely folks otherwise, I'm sure.

The attempt to draw such a large and diverse geographical and cultural area into one themed exhibit sort of strains the show at its edges, and I found it a lot easier just to take each site as its artifacts are displayed and move on to the next one. Part of the problem is that not much is known about these rites from ancient texts because they weren't particularly significant in anyone's big picture. Only the Greeks had writing, so what little we can surmise about these artifacts and the rites which produced them comes from them. The rest gets inferred from the disposition of the artifacts around the site.

In 2186, when they finally finish Tram 3 here in Montpellier, Lattes will be an end-point for the line (and maybe I'll finally be able to get a senior discount from them), and the Lattera site and its attendant Henri Prades museum (named for the archaeologist who started the modern excavation of the city) will be a short walk from the tram-stop. It's also accessible from Bus 18, from the Le Stade stop. Either way, it's well worth your time and attention, particularly once the weather changes and it's not so damn sunny outside. We got a taste of that on Sunday.

Oh, and one more thing: I'd been aware of it from the Fabre Museum here, but apparently all the local museums and so forth are free on the first Sunday of the month, which makes me want to research what else would make a good destination next month. Lattera's only €3.50 to visit, but hey, free's free!

Post Heatwave Miettes

2011-08-28T14:30:00.001+02:00

Been meaning to phone home a little sooner than this, but the past week has been pretty awful. Again, apologies to my friends in Texas, since nobody should have to endure what they've endured this year, with a heatwave which has seen daily temperatures hovering around 110°F (that's 43.3° C, folks) for weeks on end. Still, around here motionless air around 90°F (32.2° C) with high humidity hasn't exactly inspired me to go out and snoop for stuff for the blog. It's the weather pattern here, and I'm quite sure there's a French word for it: either the winds are off the Mediterranean coming from Morocco or whatever bit of Africa is down there, and, thus, hot and damp, or they're coming from the Cévennes Mountains, and are cool and dry. The turnaround tends to involve violent winds, and when it goes from hot to cool, it's a welcome phenomenon indeed.

Still, one must go out from time to time, and hot muggy weather is prime observation time for Stupid T-Shirts. I don't carry a notebook for this, and there were days when I saw so many I forgot them all. Just enough of them stuck in my feeble brain to report a few classics back here.

Naturally, summer brings thoughts of water and the beach and all, so there are a lot of fake souvenir shirts for California beach towns made by the big designers. Someone has also come up with one that reads

SURF
IN
WAVES

In case any of you are thinking of taking this advice, may I add that most of the time surfing on the waves is far preferable. I guess shooting the curl is surfing in the wave, but that's not the usual way you do it, and is recommended for advanced practitioners. Maybe Mike will correct me on this.

Unsurprisingly, men wear the vast majority of stupid t-shirts. Some of this is because women's ts tend toward simple messages (I LOVE BOYS) or graphics with one word (FASHION or CHIC) -- or with no words at all. Men have to let it all hang out. One exception I saw recently was a teenage Japanese tourist girl whose shirt had the message

MY BLOG IS
MORE FASHIONABLE
THAN YOURS

My immediate reaction was to get offended, but on solemn reflection, without having seen hers, I'm afraid I had to agree. I'm not sure how to make this blog more fashionable, but will entertain suggestions.

Men's ts also tend to have more aggressive messages on them, or, rather, teenage boys' do. One I saw had a picture of a black guy's hand with a huge ring on it grasping a sheaf of $100 bills and the message

MONEY
POWER
RESPECT
TAURN

I think it's a shame to live in a society where power and respect and taurn are all equated with money. Especially taurn. Whatever that is.

But the hip-hop ethos really does drive young French men, especially the white ones, and especially the white ones who don't seem to understand English very well. That's what I had to conclude when I saw

GHETTO
FABULOUS
MOB

I dunno, dude. Sounds kinda gay to me. It's the Ghetto Absolutely Fabulous Mob you want to watch out for, though.

And finally, the other day, a wonderful summing up of the whole teenage male ethos, a picture of someone breakdancing (still huge here) with the words

WHEN I DIE
MAKE IT LOOK LIKE
I WAS DOING
SOMETHING COOL

Um, okay.

* * *

Montpellier is currently in the midst of a serious crisis, one which involves me as much as anyone. The huge French supermarket chain Monoprix has, apparently, discontinued its free pink bags for groceries. You can still buy sturdy reusable plastic bags for €.15, but they're not the same. The old ones were flimsy, but actually stronger than they looked. I kept a steady supply of them for use as garbage bags in the kitchen, and I wasn't the only one by far, to go by the bins where the neighborhood chucked its garbage. Sure, the 9% beer crowd tossed theirs on the ground, and so did others, but I'd still say a large percentage of my neighbors reused them for various purposes.

Which is what recycling's about, right? And when I went grocery shopping, nine times out of ten I'd take a cotton bag of my own (thanks, SXSW) to use, because I hate waste as much as the next guy. But now they're gone and they've been gone for a couple of weeks. I'm on my last garbage bag (looks to be something I brought back from Staples in New York), and I'm not sure what I'll do when that gets full and has to be tossed. Monoprix is a perennial candidate in various European green prize initiatives, and they've done many wonderful things in terms of making organic food available at sane prices (and packaging it so it looks different so you know it's organic) and trying to source locally (although what's with the Mexican garlic and Tasmanian onions?), but they seem to have forgotten the other end of the chain.

UPDATE: Aug. 30. Yesterday, pink bags were everywhere at Monoprix. They're back. Just in time for my next bunch of garbage, too! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, again we see The Power of the Blog In Action! (Well, if such a thing were true, they'd have taken down that fake Brassaï by now).

* * *

Another crisis seems to be the Estivales this year. This has always been fun: a bunch of local winemakers, many of whom are pretty obscure, set up on the Esplanade Charles de Gaulle, and you buy a tasting glass and three tasting tickets for €4. The pours are generous, there are loads of stands set up selling "tapas," ie, charcuterie and mussels and fake Indian and Japanese food and who knows what all, and the city sets up long tables and everyone hangs out, enjoying the nice summer evening.

Or at least that's how it's been. My first Estivale this summer involved my meeting a friend at 10pm, and it was the first time I noticed any tension: some guy was haranguing a server in one of the wine tents and things looked like they were getting a bit out of hand. I noticed a lot of rather, um, overserved people wandering around that evening. My second one was perfectly civilized, but started earlier. Then, two weeks ago, I met Kirsty and a friend of hers from the States for a tasting and, along with our glasses, we were handed a little flyer from the city suggesting the use of public transportation. Unnamed "incidents" were mentioned, and I remembered hearing about something in the local press through the grapevine. What was really telling was that, by the time of our last glass, workers were dumping piles of cellophane-wrapped thingamajigs with the city logo and instructions on how to use "Le Ballon." I should have grabbed one, just to see how a do-it-yourself breathalyzer works, but I didn't. There were also cops everywhere, and I do mean everywhere.

It's weird, but it's something I've noticed: in comparison to America, where alcohol consumption is considered something apart from daily life, as close to a civic sin as seems possible, in Europe I've always been gratified by the way it's integrated into the fabric of society, from my first visits to England when I saw people bring their kids to the village pub, to Germany, where the hotel vending machine had beer in it (and so did McDonald's), to France, where wine is almost a sacrament. The American attitude leads to binge-drinking: the drunkest people I've ever seen in public were in the parking lot of a "bottle club" in Tyler, Texas, a "dry" city with circuitious ways around the law. American students on year-abroad programs come here and slam down the cocktails, and apparently that ethos has crossed over to their French peers: around the corner from me is a "shooter" bar, serving nothing but flavored rum shots to college students.

I have no idea if there's a sea-change underway, and, to tell the truth, I kind of doubt it. Adults seem pretty balanced on this sort of thing, and it may even out. It's just that I suspect it wasn't always like this, and I'm surprised by the aggression and stupidity involved. On the other hand, apparently there are those people who, when they die, want it to look like they were doing something cool.

Salades Composées #2: Tortellini Salad

2011-08-21T17:10:00.000+02:00

It's too hot around here at the moment, and the humidity is way up there, too. I beg the indulgence of my friends in Texas, though: this is nothing like what they've been suffering this year. That's just off the charts.

But it doesn't mean that 90° temperatures in the kitchen are any easier to bear, given how temperate and nice it's been here, or that the lack of breeze doesn't make the air any lighter. So it's time for another salad. This one's an oldie-but-goodie, one I've been making for ages, and one of my favorites. The recipe is simple: the Italian flag.

Green, white, red.

Easy enough. So the first thing you do is make my all-purpose balsamic vinaigrette, which dresses something like 90% of the salads I make. I have this nice little bowl I make it in which I got at an "Asia" store. So first thing I do is crush a garlic clove and wipe it all around the bowl.

Then you add some cheap balsamic vinegar

And then the three essential herbs, right to left, thyme, basil, oregano, in 1-2-3 proportions, using a finger-pinch as measurement.

Then a bit of Dijon-style mustard...

Then you whisk in some olive oil til you've got about this much dressing.

You can do this anytime. It just gets better as it sits there, trust me. After a week at room temperature it's really good. But this batch was doomed to be consumed the same day.

You'll want good tortellini if you can get them. In a pinch, those dried ones out of a bag can work, but I find their fillings taste a bit like dust. They've improved over the years, but fresh ones are best, and good supermarket brands are next best. Save the dried ones for snacking right out of the bag.

This guy kind of gives me the creeps, but he makes okay tortellini and ravioli and stuff. The cooking time is three minutes, and you should never cook them at a rolling boil or they'll disintegrate, so cook them at a moderate boil and -- the first secret of great tortelilni salad -- overcook them. I cooked these for five minutes. The rationale here is simple: as with any pasta salad, as the pasta cools off, it also loses water.

Okay, red-white-green number one. We can't get regular old green onions here most of the year, so I used one of these "sweet onions." I also wanted a nice pepper salame, but couldn't get one -- limited funds -- so I got some plain old saucisson sec, which is a salame even if the French don't want to admit it. In Germany, I'd get inch-thick slabs of salame and dice it fine back home. Cut the saucisson and the onion white up into small bits and toss in a bowl, and when the tortellini are done, drain them thoroughly and while they're still hot, throw them into a bowl with half your salad dressing and toss like crazy. Another ingredient (white) I'd put in at this point if you an get it is a good sharp Provolone, cut into cubes, but France doesn't believe in Provolone. Or most other furrin' cheeses. Anyway, here's where we are now:

Off to the fridge, covered with plastic wrap, for at least three hours to cool this mess down. Some hours later, the rest of the flag gets set up. I'd really like an avocado here, because that's a great (green) addition. Some of you might like green bell pepper, but not me. I do have some roasted red peppers from Spain here, though. The greens from the onion, a tomato (cherry tomatoes are an even better idea, or grape tomatoes), parmesan, and, to take the place of the Provolone, some balls of crack that Boursin's been plugging of late, both tomato-basil and garlic flavor. Little flavor bombs.

Not as inspiring a line-up as it could be, but overall it turned out okay. Throw down some greens, scatter the crack bombs in them, and ring the tomato around...

and then dump the stuff from the fridge onto it, season with Parmesan, grab that baguette you brought home from the corner bakery, haul the bottle of rosé out of the fridge and...

...notice half-way through the meal that Mr. Rani's tortellini are bigger than you thought. If I'd been thinking, I would only have used half and put the rest in the fridge for another one. I wasn't thinking, however, but I was still able to pack what remained away. Not as good as if I'd made another fresh, but there ya go. Plus, it was good to see it in the fridge after last Friday's Estivales. Which is another matter to be taken up by the next batch of miettes sometime later in the week, along with ridiculous T-shirts and more.

Anyway, bon appetit, and stay cool.

Dordogne Diary, The Return

2011-08-18T13:11:00.000+02:00

After many, many horrifying experiences, including a trip across Germany in a super-fast ICE train with no air-conditioning in the middle of the summer standing up for five hours, I have a hard and fast rule about rail travel: never on weekends. So I felt all smug and happy making a reservation for Monday instead of Sunday. Well, of course, if I returned on a Sunday, the stores wouldn't be open, and I'd done a pretty good job of emptying the refrigerator before I left. But Monday! Nobody travels on Monday!

Except when it's the Feast of the Assumption. Which, I'd forgotten, is celebrated in France, but not in Germany. My radar's up for Pentecost now, a holiday I'd never even heard of before moving to Europe, but the one the Germans call Maria Himmelfahrt, that was a new one on me.

Brian called in a favor from a friend, a Dutch woman who looks after properties in the region when their owners aren't living there, and she came to pick me up. I bid Brian and the farmhouse good-bye and watched it disappear as we went up the driveway, through the farmer's yard, and on to the tiny road that led to the somewhat larger road that led to a real road that eventually dumped us off in Les Eyzies. And from there, the little tram-like train to Agen, and a long wait for the Marseille train, which would stop in Montpellier.

This time it wasn't the TGV, the fast train, but a regular train, packed to the gills, and with a guy sitting in the seat I'd reserved (I've found the little box that gets you "direction of travel" on the website!) who wouldn't make eye-contact and pretended not to understand me. The worse problem was that the air conditioning was broken, and it was well over 90° Fahrenheit in there, simply stifling. But things worked out: he got off at Carcassonne, and as I took my place, I noticed cold air coming up through the vents by the window. Before I knew it, I was seeing familiar landmarks.

It was a lot warmer than where I'd left. The crowds eating at the kebab joints along the rue de Verdun were larger than normal, so I knew a lot of restaurants were closed both for Monday and for Assumption. A quick check of the mailbox found a New Yorker and a form letter from the telephone company informing me I could use direct debit from my bank account instead of paying by cash at La Poste. That's it. For a whole week. The apartment was refreshingly cool for having been shut up for a week, but I opened all the windows anyway. The scents and sounds of the neighborhood came in. I was back.

And I was: I overslept on Tuesday, so that the market, when I got there, was almost stripped bare: no good tomatoes, no eggplant (!), no peaches. I was lucky to find a melon, and the guy was trying to close down so he gave me another. An e-mail from my agent told me eight publishers had passed on my book proposal, but there were still more he hadn't heard from, which could mean that they were trying to figure out an offer, but could also mean that the editor who'd turn it down was still on vacation. My apartment seemed tiny after the place I'd been staying for the past week -- and that was a converted pig barn.

It took me a couple of days, but I've readjusted. It's probably just that I haven't had a real vacation -- an escape -- in, well, I can't remember how long, especially one of this duration. There's a sense in which living in a place so unlike the one I grew up in is like being on vacation all the time -- just walking the narrow streets between the 16th century limestone buildings is still a wonderful experience, even when, as they are now, they're clogged with tourists. I wish I could do this more often, and who knows, maybe I'll be able to before too long.

But for now, it's back to the usual: trying to raise money to live, trying to find work, and maybe holding a little of the peace of the past week inside me as a reminder that things can be otherwise.

Dordogne Diary, Day 6

2011-08-15T10:40:00.000+02:00

And so it came to pass that a day came when nothing happened. Well, nothing much. A light rain settled on the countryside in the early morning hours, and was still misting down as I rose to walk to the bathroom attached to the main building. Good thing it's there and not in the pig sty: nobody could get me out after I'd barricaded myself in.

I still hadn't been to a market and now necessity was moving Brian to go to one. Rouffignac, he assured me, was low-key enough that it wasn't overrun by tourists looking for the charming and quaint. Which turned out to be the truth: it was utterly no-nonsense, and in some ways a mirror on the market I'll go to on Tuesday once I'm back home. There were people selling saucisson sec, the French version of salame (and a couple who also had some Spanish ones, which really looked good), there was the guy with commercial fruits and vegetables that were of a far higher level than the ones in the supermarket, but were, still, commercial. And there were the little farmers with whatever had come in this week, hanging out and chatting with their regular customers. There were a couple of non-familar stands, one manned by a guy in chef's whites, selling croissants and pie-like things stuffed with ground meat, ground chicken, or pâté.

What was unusual was that the stuff I take for granted at home wasn't as prevalent: only a few people had peaches, which are either over here or haven't started, there were far fewer people selling eggplants and tomatoes (although we stopped to buy a couple of melons from some people who had tomatoes I'd never seen: utterly white! Too bad Brian won't eat raw tomato, because they were huge). We also stood in line at the local bakery to get bread, and I noted gigantic 1.5 kilo rounds (€3) that made me want to throw a dinner party.

Back home, we heated up the chef's ground-meat-and-hard-boiled-egg pastry, which certainly was weighty (and at €5 each, should have been), and tossed a salad. The pastry turned out not to be all that interesting, but his croissants were made with salted butter, and I thought they were magnificent. No wonder they sell out early, as he told us.

The rest of the day was spent figuring out my departure. Brian's wife, Melinda, and Harry the Kid had decided to stay on another day in Paris, and Brian doesn't drive, so there went my ride to the station for Monday. I debated staying on another day, but...no, I'd already imposed on these folks enough. You can always tell when it's time, and it was time. Also, if I didn't catch the Tuesday market, I'd be unhappy: being here has somehow given me another look at the French attitude, one I can't quite articulate at the moment, and I want to see how I can make it play out on familiar ground with ingredients I know, and without having to drive out of the deep countryside to make it happen.

Eventually, Brian reached a friend in Le Bugue, and she agreed to come by and get me. We then jumped in the car and headed off to Les Eyzies to pick up a ticket I thought I'd reserved on line. The agent couldn't find it (or understand my accent), but it all got settled in the end, so now I have a train at about 2:30 which'll get me to Agen, and from there to Montpellier, getting in at 9:01 at night. I'm going to have to find a restaurant open on Monday at that hour. I do love a challenge...

The rest of the day was spent catching up on the news, lazing around listening to these guys snore...

and eventually defrosting a large chunk of phenomenal lasagne Melinda had made last week and destroying it utterly.

So tomorrow I leave, to go back to Montpellier and a little bit of work, plus the tension -- which has never really left here -- of waiting to hear that my agent's gotten a bite on my book proposal. Life as usual, but, I think, changed a bit for the better by the window into some other people's lives here, and the possibility that perhaps I might be able to do something similar some day, once my financial state improves, and on the slim chance that there might be someone out there who wants to share the adventure. Stranger things have happened, but I bring myself down to earth by reminding myself that it's about putting one foot in front of the other, and the next step begins at Les Eyzies station tomorrow afternoon and ends at my familiar slum apartment at 9 in the evening.

It's been nice, though. No getting around that.

Dordogne Diary, Day 5

2011-08-14T12:38:00.000+02:00

Yesterday wore me out. That was too much solo travel. On the other hand, I was damned if I was going to let today slip by. Blogger, however, helped, by balking at photo uploads and stalling out from time to time. It took almost three hours to put up yesterday's post!

After that was finished, it was necessary to worship the French god Lunch, and sandwiches were prepared, some with an amazing pepper-coated salame from Rouffignac. But after that...ummm, what?

"St. Léon sur Vézère is a nice village," Brian offered, and I figured that, instead of madly rushing from pre-determined point to pre-determined point, I'd head off there, take a look, and then improvise from there on. So that's just what I did: I punched the village into Paddy, plugged him in, and blasted off. On the way there, there was a sign pointing to Le Côte de Something, and I decided to investigate. Over Paddy's stern cries of "Turn around as soon as possible!" I drove down a wooded road, and found a place to park in a gravel lay-by. I parked and walked over to what looked like a sign. There, ahead, was a vista all over the Vézère valley.

(center)

(right)

(left)

If you know what you're looking for, according to the key on the sign, you'll see some prehistoric caves, and a bunch of troglodyte dwellings. This was the second bunch of these I'd run into, so I was getting curious. Maybe there'd be an answer once I got to the village.

So I got back in, Paddy got happy and I went into the village. Which was en fête.

This seemed to be happening a lot this weekend. Monday is the Feast of the Assumption, which may have something to do with the fact that, as we saw, Belvès was getting all dressed up, as were a few of the other villages I passed through on Friday. But then, nothing was happening. Today, St. Léon was...bowling. Well, not bowling per se, but playing boules. This game, sometimes called petanque, is all over southern Europe. Italian immigrants brought it to New York as bocce, and I wouldn't be surprised to encounter it in Spain or Greece. A small white ball is placed on the green, and larger metal balls are thrown in its direction. The closer you come to it, the greater your chances of winning, unless one of the other players knocks your ball away. It's custom-made for the French: deceit, argument, very little exertion, and lots of time to sip something while the throwing, deceiving, and arguing is going on. I wanted to see the church, which was a stop on the route to Compostella, only to find the entire area around it being used as boules greens.

It's a lovely church outside, but after carefully moving around the perimeter of the games, there was not much to see inside, except, I now remembered, a black Madonna, which Brian had mentioned. This is a mystery to me, although there's one in Montpellier (right on St. Guilhelm, actually, which gets dipped in the Lez when there are droughts), and one in Prague, and others scattered all over Europe. I'm sure there's a scholarly literature out there somewhere.

There was a sign to the troglodites, so I got back in the car, noting that not everyone was en fete. This was good: in my part of France, "village en fête" is apt to mean a running of the bulls is in progress, which makes driving through town a bit more interesting than I like.

The troglodyte site turned out to be a burn: some farmer with some land on which he'd erected some plaster dinosaurs, a parkour course, and, oh, yeah, you could visit, or look at, the caves. There was enough information that I deduced that the people who'd lived there hid out from the wars which raged over the region in medieval times in these caves, waiting out the conflagration and returning to their homes when things cooled down. I didn't, however, spend €12.50 to see these things, even though the plaster dinos were part of the ticket. Sorry, Marie.

Back in the car, I wandered aimlessly north, when a sign for a Cro-Magnon site caught my eye. This turned out to be Le Thot, a site affiliated with Lascaux, the most famous cave-painting site in the world. It looked legit enough to pay for, so I went in and was handed a text explaining the place. It took a bit of work, but I finally figured it out: there is an actual Le Thot cave, but you can't see it. Instead, a museum with scrupulously accurate reproductions of some paintings from Lascaux that aren't on display at Lascaux 2, the reproduction site which has been the only way of seeing the paintings since the original cave was closed down due to fungus and damage from visitors' breath began to endanger the originals. Le Thot, though, is laid out in reverse order. Towards the end of the short visit are three videos projected on screens the shape of the cave wall on which the paintings in the video appear. A narrator guides you through speculation of how and a bit of why some of these paintings were made, which makes it much, much easier to look at them. The narration is also in French (hello, administration! It doesn't cost much more to add on other languages and give foreigners a little radio thingy to wear), and the one I sat through was so thorough that I had to go back and look at the piece again. Another shows a rare human figure, apparently screaming as he dies and is being taken to the sky. It would no doubt irritate the hordes of kids to have to sit through these films, but if you speak French and visit this place, I strongly recommend just striding through to the end and watching the films first. Le Thot costs €7, and a combo ticket with Lascaux 2 is all of €12.50. I should probably have sprung for it.

Le Thot also has a somewhat interesting addition in the form of a collection of animals depicted on the cave walls, although I should warn you that 4pm is feeding time. I especially wanted to get pix of the rare horse breeds for b, but all I saw was their hind ends as they chowed down. I had to do with a small herd of reconstructed aurochs, which, actually, was pretty cool, since they were reverse engineered after extinction (the last female was shot in the 1600s) by German scientists in the 1930s.

The baby, up front, is inexplicably named Ghengis.

From here on, the day wasn't quite so interesting. My idea was to head up to Montignac, where Lascaux 2 is, but not go to the cave. Instead, I wanted to drive through some of the north of the country I've been living in this past week, and there was, actually, a bunch of nice stuff, although I didn't stop and photograph it. There was a chateau not far from Le Thot with a fortified gateway, leading to a courtyard, with the actual house quite a ways in. There's probably a story there, although the French rarely put up roadside signs to tell you these stories. Later, as I pulled into Azerat, there was a place that was almost a copy of the White House, except that it was made out of grey stone and loomed off the side of a hill. A very curious building. By now, I woke up Paddy, and, like any good drunk who wakes up in a strange place, he knew the way home, and in far less time than I'd anticipated, I was rocketing down the driveway.

I was glad not to have gone too far afield. Brian was intending to barbeque some chipolata sausages we'd bought at the market in Rouffignac, and roast some potatoes in duck fat. Me, I was going to dive into that huge box of produce from the night before and make a ratatouille. The recipe I'd been using called for three separate frying pans for the onions and peppers, eggplant, and zucchini and tomatoes, but since Melinda is Australian, her household guru is a woman named Stephanie Alexander, whom I'd never heard of. Given that there were three skillets in the house, but none of them had covers, which is essential for the traditional making of rat, I was happy to discover a one-pot variety in The Cook's Companion: The Complete Book of Ingredients and Recipes for the Australian Kitchen, which was lying around. It was ready in about an hour, had the added oddity of some coriander seeds crushed and added to it, which really brightened up the taste unexpectedly, and I added a couple of twigs of thyme and a fresh bay leaf from the basket of goodies. With a nice rich Cahors, this was as close to a perfect meal as I'd had up here.

Sadly, tomorrow would be Sunday, and time to start thinking about leaving.

Dordogne Diary, Day 4

2011-08-13T12:37:00.000+02:00

I was beginning to get itchy. A whole new area of France, and yet I hadn't seen much of it! Rouffignac, Plazac (yeah, I found it on the map and it's not called Prozac after all, although, as I may have said the suffix -ac means "place of," so that Bergerac would be the place of shepherds), and the farming country around the house here were all very nice, but I had a car and I wanted to see where I was.

The idea yesterday was that Brian and I were going to go to Le Buisson to the market, but although we both got up in time, he was mooching around on the Internet and the appointed time came and went. I knew what was going on: with the distractions of the wife and kid out of the way, he had time to focus on stuff he wanted to do, and wanted to use that time. But eventually we set out for the market. As we left the property, we were surprised by two young men on dirt bikes who weren't from around here. It was probably okay, but Brian remembered that he'd left the house open and I realized that this computer, with most of my brain (and work) on it, was in the unlocked house. Somehow as we plunged along the rural roads, the worry evaporated, but it hung on nonetheless.

And so it was that, as we approached Le Bugue, a new plan formed: traffic in Le Bugue was insane, rush hour in rural France! "All these people are tourists going to Le Buisson," Brian said. On the one hand, I found that hard to believe. On the other, what were all these French peasant farmers doing driving right-hand-drive Vauxhalls? Le Buisson was jettisoned, and Lemeuil, down the river, was the new destination. It's a village on a hill situated where the Dordogne and Vézère rivers meet, and was an important trade town in medieval times. There have been settlements in the area since the Paleolithic.

It was easy enough to park, but not terribly easy to photograph, being both compact and sprawling over a steep hill.

There were the obligatory glass-blowers and potters, the obligatory red-faced Dutch families dragging their kids up the hill, and some not-so-picturesque old buildings. We may not have gone far enough into the town to see what the fuss was -- we passed several official signs on the way in declaring it "one of the most beautiful villages in France" -- but we descended, stopped by a sort of ratty organic vegetable stand where I bought some tomatoes, and drove out of town.

There was a reason for this, though: I'd spotted a late 12th Century church on the way in, and wanted to take a look.

The graveyard, as you can see, is still in full use, but the inside of the church doesn't seem to be. Which is fine: there are some nice frescoes in there that might've gotten painted over:

The bikers were still on our minds, so after stopping at a world-class bakery in Le Bougue (if you're there, it's over the bridge and has a fake windmill attached to it) for bread and croissants for tomorrow, we headed back. A short stop at an archeological site we'd passed on the way in (where people were working and some tourists were standing around) revealed that it was closed for the daily worship of the French god Lunch -- and didn't seem all that interesting anyway. Naturally, all was as we'd left it back at the house. Sandwiches were had and I started to think of what to do with the rest of the afternoon.

The idea of bastides fascinated me: medieval fortified villages which dot the landcape south of Le Bougue, some of which were built by the English as a way of staking a claim to this part of the country during the disputes over just how much of modern-day France the English could lay claim to. (You'll have to hit the books on this one: it's complicated). The entryway to bastide country is Belvès, which I'd gone through on the train to Les Eyzies, so that was my first destination as I set out solo.

A lot of the drive looked on the map like it duplicated this morning's at first, but I had a new companion: Paddy. Paddy was the Irish voice programmed into the GPS by Melinda, and as the day developed he seemed intent on proving an ethnic stereotype. But he started me off okay, finding a way to Belvès that actually went around the larger towns. Suddenly, there I was. A railroad viaduct had been painted in bright colors: Saturday was the annual Medieval Festival! This is the sort of thing where both historians and people with insight into the kind of behavior alcohol provokes tend to leave town, while the town square fills up with credulous tourists. But I was at the perfect moment: the decorations were up, but the stupidity had yet to start.

There's obviously a large story to this town, and it involves the church (there's a large fortified cluster of church buildings down a fortified street just to the right of that tower there)

from which there's a nice view of the surrounding countryside, which was probably more strategic than charming once upon a time

and, despite the nice buildings which surround tiny squares

there's a whole complex of "troglodite" dwellings underneath the town.

This place clearly demands another visit, but I was anxious to get to a bastide, and so I asked Paddy to get me to Monpazier, and off we went. Looking now at the brochure I picked up at the tourist office, I see that Monpazier is called "La Belle Anglaise," making it one of the English towns, dating from the 13th Century sometime.

My photos don't really convey the way the blocks of buildings fit together around a couple of larger market squares, but the whole place gives a feeling of always being on the defensive. Which, given the circumstances in which it was put up, it is. All these towns seem to have a covered market building, which you can see here.

Belvès is fortified, but Monpazier is socked in. There's enough tourist-oriented businesses, though, that I didn't spend a lot of time there. Instead, I jumped back into the car and set Paddy for...errr...was it Monflaquin? It was a bit of a drive, anyway, especially since Paddy started going to sleep and, upon awakening, seemed to have switched over to believing I was looking for something entirely different than I actually was. At any rate, along the way we passed another impressive chateau which might or might not have been occupied...

It was about 5 by the time I arrived in Monflaquin, and I parked right in front of the tourist office in the market square which had the usual covered structure, this one with a raised bit with three pots with spigots on them, long since unusable. No idea what they were for. This was a French bastide, built in the 13th century by Alphonse de Poitiers, brother of St. Louis, who was the King of France, for what that was worth, and creator of the first Crusade. I suddenly realized that there was little if any variation in these villages, interesting and atmospheric as they were, and I was beginning to experience something I hadn't felt in a decade. Back then, it was Temple Burn in Kyoto, with too many temples in too short a time. Now I was feeling Bastide Burn.

Fortunately, this being a French bastide, it had to have a very impressive French church.

Unfortunately, maybe during the French Revolution, someone had decided to use Jesus for target practice.

There was nothing much inside the church except a couple of folks who were very happy to have survived the devastation, whatever it was.

I had in mind that Janet and Patrick, a couple of New York folkie/beatnik types who were friends of Brian and Melinda's, and who lived somewhere around here, were coming for dinner, and I hadn't put any minutes into my cell phone so I couldn't call and say I was on my way back. I programmed the farmhouse into Paddy, and set off. Now, if we're going to call up stereotypes, we would say that our virtual Irishman was drunken and lazy. There was, of course, no smell of alcohol in the car, and I don't know enough chemistry to speculate what would make a silicon and metal person drunk, but I would get to a crossroads and Paddy would be silent, or I'd be driving along, not sure I'd made the right choice, look at Paddy, and find him trying to find a police station in Basque country. I'd patiently reprogram him, and...that would be it. Still, by following signs to Paris (!), I eventually found myself coming into Le Bugue along a vaguely familiar road and soon saw the bakery from the morning come into view. From here I didn't need any help, but there was Paddy, guiding me along the way I'd have taken anyway.

Finally I roared into the driveway, and a few minutes later, Janet and Patrick showed up with the results of a little garden clearing:

A ratatouille in the raw is contained there, and I suspect I'll finally get to do some cooking here! But not all the goodies were from the garden: Janet had invented a dessert that was a dome of chocolate zucchini cake surrounding a white chocolate mousse. I don't eat dessert, but I had to make an exception here. This was extraordinary; had Patrick not kept joking about "Boy, sure is a lot you can do with zucchini!" I'd never have known that it was there.

A full moon came up over one end of the deck, and the talk was of the impending meteor shower, but they had a ways to drive and I, too, was pooped. The meteors may have showered, but I missed them. And I knew one thing: the next day? No bastides!

Dordogne Diary, Day 3

2011-08-12T13:33:00.000+02:00

The morning was spent getting Melinda and Harry the Kid packed and into the car for the trip to Périgeux to catch the train to Paris. Me, I was getting itchy: I'd already been here 24 hours and hadn't seen anything of where I was. So, after all was settled, I blasted off in the other car to Les Eyzies, destination the Museum of Prehistory.

History is everywhere in Europe, prehistory not quite as much. Lacking buildings, language, and metal, the remains of the earliest humans are harder to detect, older, and harder to preserve. It was in the town of Les Eyzies that a guy named Magnon went into a cave on his property and found human remains and evidence of settlement. If I'm not mistaken, his coining the term préhistoire started the ball rolling. At any rate, caves galore have been discovered, as well as what they call abris, living-places underneath large rock outcroppings. And around this part of the world, they're all over the place: the Rouffignac cave is just down the road, and if I've figured out where we are right, the Magdalenian site is even nearer.

The place to get the grand overview is in the nearby town of Les Eyzies, unfortunately. There, the central French administrator of prehistoric sites maintains an office and visitor center, and the wonderful Museum of Prehistory, which has been there forever, but just got a magnificent makeover, will give you the big overview. There were, for me, two big downsides. First, Les Eyzies is a tourist-trap in the classic manner. Any place whose main street is one souvenir shop after another just sets off bells in my head. The other problem is more one of the material. Anyone with a deep interest in prehistory will be fascinated, following the evolution of hominids into humans, noting the gradual evolution of toolmaking skills until by the Magdalenian you have people whacking fish-harpoons out of flint, and watching the birth of art. Less than that, and it'll be less than fascinating, because there's a lot of stuff in the museum, and I don't know about you, but there just so many flint chips I can look at before my mind starts to wander. The incisions which form the first pictures, too, are kind of hard to get a grip on, although once you see them, they're darned impressive. Obviously, no paintings have been moved to the museum: they'd have expired in transit. So for that you have to go to the caves.

This is something I'd have considered any time but August, but by some sacred decree, every person in France, Germany, Holland, and Belgium goes somewhere else, and among the places they go is the caves. The waiting lists are weeks long, although you can buy tickets on line, that kind of tourism just doesn't appeal. Maybe if I come back off-season. Brian attests to the amazing feeling seeing the paintings in situ gave him, and yeah, I'd like to do that. But the roads and the sites are packed right now.

At any rate, the museum goes from the ground up, and on the top floor, you're released into an abris,

as well as some fantastic views over the valley.

Enlarge that by clicking on it, and you'll see an abris and a bunch of caves.

It didn't take me long to do the museum and as I walked back to the car, I remembered that Brian had said there was a British guy, Tim, who had a really good wine-shop where he sold some of Marc Dalbavie's wines. I figured I'd stop in and see him, and we had a good chat. He opined that the reason Marc's wines are go good are a) they're from young vines, and b) they're organic. The first flew in the face of tradition (not to mention that some of the best California wines I've had have come from vines well over 100 years old), and the second might be true. He said that the flavor of the grapes comes from the first, oh, meter of subsoil. Old vines make good wines because their roots have found a dependable deep source of water, but young vines have young roots in the most nutritious part of the dirt and they're very efficient at finding the good stuff. "The winemakers point out all the rocks in the soil, but what good are rocks when you're looking for water? Listen: 1961 was a legendary year in Bordeaux, one of the greatest wines ever, right? And that's because in 1954 there was a frost that wiped out all the vines and they had to start all over again: those plants were seven years old, no more!" And the organic wines he feels are better because there's no outside chemicals playing with the taste. I didn't have any dough to leave behind, although I noted that the two wines we'd had were €11 and €8, respectively, so next time I'm up I'm going to pay attention. Tim's joint is the only reason to go to Les Eyzies if you're not doing prehistory: it's the only wine shop that's not pushing foie gras and beans and colorful peasant crap at you, and it has a bilingual sign. It's on the way out of town towards the PiP parking lot (the visitor center for the prehistory stuff). Say hi if you make it in.

It took me no time (and no use of a map or GPS) to get me back to the house, and I realized that Brian was using the downtime to do a lot of internet surfing and so on. I wanted to take another drive after lunch, and it turned out that the next evening there were going to be guests and he needed to buy some food to cook for them. That entailed a trip to Rouffignac, where there's a really good butcher. He agreed to submit to some random driving around to see if there was anything cool before we hit the butcher and baker and headed back, which was nice, so we set out, and I again saw a chateau I'd noticed the day before. We drove to a good place to photograph it, but it's in private hands and you can't visit it. Still, it looks neat sticking out of the countryside

Very zoom-lens, though. We then drove around and got semi-lost in the middle of nowhere with nothing but rolling hills and fields and the occasional wrong turn. We saw one of France's rarest birds. I don't know what it was, but it must have been rare, given its behavior. We'd driven into a farmyard and turned around and this bird was transacting business in the road. Despite a fine set of wings, it tried to outrun us. A bird that thinks it can outrun a car is an endangered species, I'd say. He eventually remembered his wings and took off.

Rouffignac turned out to be not so scenic: a young guy working with the Resistance had killed a local Nazi and the Germans retaliated by pretty much levelling the town. The only semi-old thing standing is the local church, and it's not so interesting:

Clearly, this thing's been trashed before. But that view down the alley on the left looked nice...

So, loaded down with chickens and chipolata sausages, plus pastry for tomorrow's breakfast, we headed back to the farmhouse and ended the day with me watching the first two episodes of a U.S. TV program I'd been intensely curious about called Tremé, set in a neighborhood of New Orleans where a friend of mine has a place. It was interesting, but I'm having a hard time suspending my suspicion that every single person in New Orleans is as deeply invested in a musical tradition that basically ended 40 years ago as the program makes them seem. Still, I'm glad it's a hit.

Tomorrow, I told myself, would be a day of some intense touring around, and I whipped out the map and the two guidebooks I'd bought. I now have a plan. Let's see how it works out.

Dordogne Diary, Day 2

2011-08-11T10:11:00.001+02:00

And on the second day, nothing happened. Well, not nothing, entirely.

Much of the day was spent with Melinda getting ready for the next day's trip to Paris with Harry the Kid, and a family with three kids who were coming for lunch. This was the high point of the day, since Brian made an astonishing salad with fresh croutons and a dressing made with walnut vinegar. I knew that walnuts were one of the more important things produced around here, and I'd bought some (very expensive) walnut oil in the past to use on salads, but this was made with olive oil and walnut vinegar. I'm not at all sure how this is made, but it's by Maille, which is a big company, so I may be able to find it back in Montpellier. Wasps attacked the ham spread out for sandwiches, and I was fascinated that they actually managed, at great effort, to haul off proportionately huge hunks (about 1/8" across) and fly off with them.

We sat out on the deck in the sun, talked, the kids spent tons of time in the pool, and suddenly Melinda realized it was almost 6:30 and she had to get to three stores before 7, as well as fill the Volkswagen I'd be using with gas. Also I was to drive back from the store and learn how to use the GPS. And figure out how to get back to the house. The other family waited for us to get back, and we drove them to the nearest big road, so now I had two of the three ways into the house covered.

But it still wasn't a big deal. We were stuffed, since lunch took about three hours, Brian made an arrabiata sauce for pasta and we had some, another bottle of Marc Dalbavie's wondrous wine, this time Les Joualles, was opened, and the evening ended watching first the ITV reports on the British riots, which seemed skewed pretty far right, and then the BBC's which was alarmingly better and far more balanced. After that, Batman came on -- the first one -- but I was tired and so repaired to the piggery for another night's sleep.

In short, I spent the day feeling like one of the critters who can be observed sunning themselves on the rocks here.

Cute little thing. Pretty camera-shy, too.

Today, once the departure to Paris is finalized, there will be action: I'm going to catch the Prehistory Museum in Les Eyzies before lunch, when the tourists will be otherwise occupied. After that, I'm not sure, but I have maps and books. Stay tuned.

Dordogne Diary, Day 1

2011-08-10T11:46:00.001+02:00

One thing I'll happily admit to is an utter ignorance about French geography. I really don't know, except for large hunks of Paris and much of the landscape surrounding where I live, where anything is, at all. But I'm making a bit of progress at the moment, thanks to a couple of friends from New York, who have a, well, I guess you'd call it a cottage, in the Dordogne, and who've invited me up for a couple of days. Since I have nothing to do in Montpellier at the moment except to obsess over when my agent's going to sell my book, I can do that just as well from up here. Wherever it is.

As far as I can tell, here's where I am: I got on the train in Montpellier at 9 yesterday, and at first, the route was familiar. When we got to Narbonne, however, we headed north, and I actually got to see La Cité, the famous medieval fortified section of Carcassonne, out of the corner of my eye as the train came into the station there. We continued northish (I don't have a map in front of me just at the moment) and I got off in Toulouse at noon. There, I had an hour's wait, but there was nothing much calling me to explore. It was, however, a bit colder than where I'd just left, which was a bit ominous: I hadn't packed for cool weather, figuring it was August, high summer, and it was warm all over the place. But maybe not.

One thing I've always wondered about European train travel is whether people actually enjoy riding backwards. I'd found a Senior Bargain Fare to where I was going, which cost four euros more than second class and got me into first, but even there, 3/4 of the riders were going backwards, on the TGV, at high speed. I eventually spotted a seat aligned to the direction of travel and went and sat there. Anyway, the hour passed while I watched the cops rouse a sleeping skinhead with a bag of 9% beer and sent him on his way, and finally the train to Agen, my next stop, was ready to go. An interesting phenomenon presented itself just before we left in the form of a somewhat well-dressed beggar who hit the two first-class cars saying very quickly that he hadn't had anything to eat all day and needed a coin or two. I felt like telling him that all I had in my pocket was €3.80 (my friends were going to refund my fare when I got to where I was going, wherever that was) and bet him that I had more on me than he had. But the nature of his hustle was that he had to work two cars very quickly between the arrival of the train and its departure: getting caught on the train would be a very bad idea. And, much to my utter surprise, he scored with one of the passengers and scooted off.

The ride to Agen was astonishingly boring. I realize how important it is to French people to eat what's grown locally and as we passed field after field of sunflowers, I began to worry. I mean, sunflower seeds are okay for a snack, but... There was also no place to right myself during the two hours to Agen, and although we slowed down quite a bit for construction on the way, we picked up towards the end and I was nauseous by the time I got off the train. Here, I was going to spend the money I had left on a sandwich. Of course, that required my finding something better than the buffet du gare, which looked skanky. I rolled my bag around the immediate area, but there was, much to my surprise, nothing but real estate agents along the street. Was I in France? Where were the bakeries? I never found out; I walked over to an old church, but there was nothing around there, either, so I reluctantly went back to the station and claimed a ham-and-cheese sandwich. It was quite good, although French ham still puzzles me, a subject for further discussion some other time.

The train to where I was going, a town called Les Eyzies, was barely the size of a Montpellier tram, and similarly shaped, almost a capsule on wheels. The monotony of sunflower fields (I should have noted that a few weeks ago this would have been a more cheerful monotony, but sunflower fields all die at the same time, with the heads all pointing the same direction, which is creepy, although the farmer, who's after the seeds in those heads, finds it convenient) gave way to a more varied landscape, with hills and the odd astonishing structure whizzing by. There seem to be a lot of old chateaux and castles and churches out there, and I'll have a chance to find out more before long.

At any rate, by this time I'd been travelling for six hours, and was ready to just be somewhere. I was counting down the names of the towns: Belvès (which was clearly the Belgian Elvis), le Buisson (the drink), le Bougue (the bug: obviously the drink was absinthe), and, finally, my destination, Les Eyzies. (Yes, I know those "translations" are bogus, but you have to keep yourself amused). I spotted my friends Brian and Melinda immediately although the 12-year-old with them was unfamiliar: last time I'd seen him he was pretty much a newborn. He was busy filming stuff; apparently he has a movie in mind. We jumped into the mini-van and blasted off. The countryside we'd come into on the train was of huge limestone cliffs with gaping holes in them. Yes, these were caves, and yes, they'd paid host to cavemen. One of these caves -- I'm not sure where it is -- is called Cro-Magnon, and that's where some unusual skeletons had screwed up the nice linear progression of human evolution. Les Eyzies itself is basically a tourist-trap devoted to prehistory, although it's a serious tourist-trap, and I intend to return.

Still, we headed away from there, and up over here, and down there, and the road got smaller and smaller to the point where it was no longer possible for me to figure where we were. We plunged down a small lane and there were huge, tan cows, the color of some of the people in Montpellier at this time of year, mooching around a field. Then the road plunged more, and we were where we were going, a small farmhouse where Melinda has spent time for the past 20 years, kindly allowing Brian there after meeting him. I'm on the back porch right now typing this.

That's the main house, but I'm not staying there. Instead, they put me into the former pig-sty.

Worse, the sanitary facilities are next door, on one end of the farmhouse. It's private, but just look:

It's an outrage!

We went to dinner in a neighboring village which may or may not be named Prozac, and just went to a bar on the main street. Not where I would think to go, and the menu was pretty thin. If, that is, you discount the €12 dish of duck confit with fries cooked in duck fat. I'd never had this before, and it's duck that's been slowly cooked in its own fat, then preserved in it for a while, then reheated. In other words, it's like velvet duck (not the Chinese dish). Man, was it good. Served with a small red pepper stuffed with, um, something delicious on the side. In order to maintain its reputation, though, the bar served the worst red wine I've put past my lips in ages. We made up for that back at the farmhouse by opening a bottle of organic grenache, BarleYrolle put up by the composer Marc Dalbavie (brother of my old friend Christian Dalbavie, who appears way earlier in this blog at Vinisud 2010), about 20 miles away. Astonishing nose of ashes, coffee, and, um, dirt.

Pig-sty or not, I slept like the dead, despite the sounds of something eating the roof. Brian told me they're called fouines, they're nocturnal, they're sort of like weasels, and they're protected by French law. I just pretended they were the folks upstairs, and by the time I woke up this morning, they'd been replaced by lizards sunning themselves on the rocks. Too bad I don't like to swim: the pool looks nice.

Anyway, I'm trapped here for the next few days, although not exactly: Melinda's off to Le Bougue right now buying a battery for the other car, and I'll be allowed to drive around and see some of the local sights once it's running and she and the kid, Harry, are off to Paris for a few days. There are caves, there are all those chateaux and so on...

I think I'll survive this .

Stay tuned.

Germans in Nîmes

2011-08-04T14:44:00.000+02:00

I got an e-mail a couple of days ago from E & J asking if I'd like to go to Nîmes ("the city with an accent," as their current tourism campaign has it) to see the Albert Oehlen show at the Carré d'Art, the Norman Foster building which incorporates the city's contemporary art gallery and its public library. Since it sure beat sitting in front of the computer waiting to hear if my agent's sold my book proposal or not, I said sure, and also notified Gerry, the only person I know in Nîmes, that I was coming.

It's an easy drive on the motorway to Nîmes, and I hadn't been there since about six or seven years ago when it was raining hard all the time and I stayed in the scariest hotel I've ever stayed in, a whorehouse run by a former AP correspondent from the Caribbean. Yesterday, in contrast, was sunny and very warm, and the place seemed to have sprouted dozens of restaurants since I was last there -- or maybe they only come out for tourist season.

I was disoriented at first because the parking structure we parked at was being torn up in a big way. If it hadn't been, I'd have known where we were instantly, so after a bit of confusion we made it to the museum and Gerry was waiting.

Naturally, my photo does no favors to Foster's building, but when E offered to buy us some coffee, we went to the café on top of it and there was a nice view of Nîmes' historic center. That's where the picture of the spic and span Maison Carrée at the top of this post comes from. Last time I was here it was decidedly greyer, but on the other hand you could just walk in and see the miscellaneous antiquities. It's a former temple to Caesar the Romans threw up, and part of its renovation has involved a multi-media show of some sort, which is why there are so many people there on the front porch: limited access -- and no longer free unless you live in Nîmes.

Gerry had business to do before he left town for a visit to Quebec, but we went about doing what we'd come for. Oehlen interested me because he was a student of the late Sigmar Polke, who was probably my favorite contemporary German painter, mostly because of his sense of humor, something many of the guilt-wracked postwar German artists lacked. Not that Polke couldn't be serious, it's just that that wasn't all he could be. To me, that makes a difference. Oehlen has traces of Polke's influences in his work, and in his abstract (and semi-abstract) work from the '90s, he shows a real flair for color, one of the few non-pop artists I've seen who uses actual dayglo in his work and uses it intelligently, peeking out of a corner or coming through a window-like structure that's showing itself through another layer of paint. The next decade brought in his grey paintings, not as interesting, although there's a certain tension between representation and non-representation. It also brought the paintings which are the only out-and-out clunkers in the show, early primitive computer graphics, obviously from something like an Apple ][, blown up to ridiculous size. The things I liked best were paintings with the FM label, short for Fingermalerei, or finger-paintings. These consist of blinding white canvasses with smears of paint, sometimes very bright colors, streaking along them. They look like they were done very fast, although it's also possible Oehlen spent hours worrying over the next move.

Some of them are done over photos, like the one excerpted for the exhibition's posters, which takes a huge photograph of an old woman at a swimming pool, slices it so her face isn't recognizable and then turns it 90° on its side and takes up the right hand of the canvas. Running along the bottom, in some kind of joke, are three stripes in the colors of the German flag.

The pictures are big, but there really aren't any blockbusters here. I suspect his best work is to come.

Downstairs, the permanent collection is a surprise. One kind of expects mediocrity in provincial museums, and one is almost never surprised, but nestled in among the so-so works here (one of which is a long text-driven set of photographs by Sophie Calle, who I'm beginning to suspect might be France's answer to the over-adored German Josef Beuys) are some very pleasant surprises -- many of them by German artists like Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter. They show they're aware of recent trends, since there's a Big Photo by Massimo Vitali of a beach, and a couple of nice Andres Serranos, and, in a dark part of the museum, a really amusing work by Hans-Peter Feldmann which casts magical shadows from really mundane sources turning around on little carousels, and, in the final room, a very subtle work by Christian Boltanski, who has made a career out of obsessing over the losses of World War II while creating works of such deep humanity that you never feel like you're being preached to. I'd say that the curators of the Carré d'Art in Nîmes are doing a good job, given their budget, focussing in on the best stuff they can get. Oh, and the latest acquisition? A FM by Oehlen that's one of his best.

We wandered around a bit afterwards, stumbling on the École des Beaux-Arts that Gerry's wife Shoko is attending, which has a nice staircase in it.

Then we found Nîmes' most enigmatic Roman ruin, which doesn't show up on any of the tourist maps and isn't marked in any way. It is, however, right on the ancient Via Domitia, the Roman road which went through a lot of this area and can be seen marked on the motorway at various points as well as in downtown Narbonne, so who knows what it used to be?

Then we drove back and I got home to find a message that another publisher had turned the book down. Ah, well, there's always another day!

* * *

I'll really be getting out of town next week, heading to Cro-Magnon country to get in touch with my roots. Meanwhile (and utterly irrelevantly), here's a link to me talking about meeting Little Richard.