Beach & Béziers

Real good news: after a year off, E & J have fired up their jalopy and are travelling again -- and inviting me along. Or maybe they've been doing it all along and not inviting me, for all I know, but on Sunday we motored off to Valras-Plage. I sort of knew this would be fun, because there's nothing like a French seaside resort in the middle of the winter -- seriously! There's nothing like one in season, either, but boy, do you not want to be there then. 

The reason for visiting was a restaurant they'd discovered where they wanted to have lunch, and afterwards, we'd head up to Béziers to the Musée Bitteroise. I'd visited that city three years ago, around the start of this blog, and written some of it up, and figured this would be as good a chance as any to take another look at the place. 

The restaurant was called Le Phare (the lighthouse), and was one of about four facing the beach, any one of which, I bet, is pretty good. Le Phare certainly was: the menu was filled with choices on both sides (it's on an unwieldy piece of board, for some reason), and I have to cop to having chosen somewhat lamely. Of course, this was Sunday, when I normally have a big breakfast, which I was still digesting, otherwise I would have had two courses, and maybe made a more imaginative choice than the "trio" of cuttlefish and squid. The three comes from calling larger critters "sépias" and smaller ones "seiches," and then there were "calamares." They were prepared à la plancha, dry-griddled, and perfectly seared and cooked without getting rubbery. As usual, there wasn't much in the way of side-dishes: three spoonfuls of purées, one of which, broccoli, wasn't very good because to get broccoli soft enough to purée, you have to overcook it to the point where the sulfurous taste comes out. E & J each had a slice of some kind of white fish, slathered with a sauce based on crustaceans, and it was magnificent. It being Sunday, all of the open restaurants in town were jammed, but not so jammed that you couldn't find a seat. All around us, people were getting scrumptious-looking dishes delivered to their places. We're already talking about coming back. 

Le Phare, 4, Boulevard Jean Moulin, 34350 Valras-Plage. Open for lunch and dinner all year long. Phone: +33 (0)4 67 37 38 38. 

If you click on that photo, you can see the beach reflected in Le Phare's windows. You can also see that it's on the ground floor of one of the horrid 1960s beach developments that Charles de Gaulle encouraged once malaria was eradicated at the Languedoc beaches and they became safe for tourism, which tended to head to the beaches of Spain or Italy, whichever was closest. Of course, in these instant towns, the building boom was created by people who never gave a thought to whether or not the buildings would last 50 years, let alone 20, and it's real easy to get a place to live in these beach towns because the housing is falling apart. They're cheap, too, for seaside housing, and there's a reason. But there are also a lot of students living in the ones nearest me, like Carnon-Plage and Palavas-les-Flots, and commuting into Montpellier via bus. 

The beach itself, though, isn't very interesting, and the stiff wind blowing was cold. Still, there were a few people out on it, and I bet that was as deserted as it gets. After all, it's Béziers' beach, and that's a good-sized little city, so it's where the Bitterois, as the people of Béziers are called, go to eat seafood on a Sunday and promenade around. 

We promenaded back to the car and, after a little getting lost, during which we saw the entirety of Valras-Plage, we drove up the hill and into Béziers, and right into a parking lot. That was easy! But then, everybody else was at the beach or at home. I tried to call my three-year-old memory of how to get around into play, and it almost worked. We got as far as the theater, which had been a place where the mutinying soldiers had hung out in 1907, housed some Belgian refugees during World War II, and is also a major hub for what passes for downtown Béziers. It was 3, and the museum closes at 6 on Sundays, so we didn't want to dally. We turned down a street alongside one of Béziers' numerous Hausmannesque buildings, which went up in a frenzy when the locals got very rich because the city had become the railhead for shipping wine north to Paris. Today, they look both clapped-out and somehow beautiful. (The best one we saw I couldn't photograph because we were moving in the car, but there's a wonderful brown stone place all abandoned-looking on one side of the new Polygone shopping mall. My guess is that it won't be there much longer, so if you're in the area, check it out). 

The historical center of Béziers is even more confusing than Montpellier's, because it doesn't have as many open spaces, but we managed to find the covered market (which is actually quite lovely, and I should have snapped it) and the Madeleine, the church where the Inquisition, hot on the trail of the heretical Cathars, burned 7000 people alive -- or so they tell you. Anyone who looks at the church, though, knows that you couldn't fit 7000 newborn infants stacked up to its ceiling. Wandering along, we found ourselves in the shadow of the Cathedral, in the neighborhood known as Petite Jérusalem because it was, historically, the Jewish neighborhood, and from there it was a quick ramble down to the old barracks building in which the Musée Bitteroise is housed. 

Last time I'd had to rush through it because I risked missing my train. This time we only had a couple of hours, but it turned out to be enough, although there were still loads of signs explaining things to read. As I said last time, this is one of the best municipal museums anywhere, and you really get a sense of the city's and the region's history. Among the helpful documentation is a lot of debunking of myths, starting with the 7000 roasted Bitterois in the Madeleine. The museum notes that the population of the city was only 10,000 at the time, and a figure of less than 2000 is probably more accurate, although the army of the Inquisition, always ready to promote its efficiency while giving the impression that there was lots more work to do, sent figures of 20,000 to 100,000 back to Rome. And yes, this was the instance when the abbott commanding the Inquisition's army said "Kill them all; God will know his own." 

Walking through the museum, I got reacquainted with Béziers' patron saint, St. Aphrodite, who had his head cut off by the Romans, but walked back to his church with it in his hands. 

And I also found a model of one of the giant wine casks used on the railroad to take cheap red wine from Languedoc up to Paris, although it wasn't nearly as big as I remembered. (I also remember the image I saw as being on a postcard, so maybe there actually was a bigger cask). 

It's half again as tall as a man, and that's a lot of wine, but not what I remembered. This part of the museum also gives an excellent account of the wine riots of 1907, when the bubble burst, prices to the growers plummeted, and things got so bad that the army had to be called in to Narbonne, where they shot a couple of people dead. One regiment was so horrified that they mutinied and headed off to Béziers, where they hung out, drinking wine (surprise!) and, eventually, being disciplined by being stationed in southern Tunisia, which sounds bad until you realize that they missed the entire First World War by being there. This, and another couple of myths about 1907, are dispelled by another of the excellent signs. And there's also this gorgeous ad, which shows that Béziers hasn't changed much since the early 20th century, although I don't think you can get this brandy any more. 

The sun was going down as we took the back road back to Montpellier, and as we drove alongside the Bassin du Thau, with its row after row of ostroculture frames, we passed dozens of tiny sheds burning neon to advertise their oysters. And as much as I admire a lot of the food around here, I have to say this: Bouzigues oysters are dull. I'd make fried oysters out of them, or a good old hangtown fry, but on the half-shell they're lacking in flavor. There might be a better time of year to get them than the ones I've sampled them in, but I'm just not sold on them. Too bad; they're easy enough to get. 

It was a great trip, a kind of hors-d'oeuvre for the big trip I'll start a week from this coming Sunday, which will take in Barcelona, Brooklyn, Austin, and...well, I haven't planned the second half yet. I'll be photographing and blogging the whole way, though, so keep checking in!

2011: The Year In Pictures

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.

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

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.