Unpacking: Miettes and Other Observations From the U.S. Tour '13

For a number of reasons, this year's trip didn't lend itself to being blogged in great detail. Ah, but that's okay. I know you folks don't care about my personal and spiritual journeys, the little epiphanies that make up daily life. No, what you're really wondering is what did he eat? So...that and more follows.

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Actually, I didn't have many more food revelations in Austin, and in fact one evening I even had cold leftover pizza for dinner! Other than that, it was mostly returns to old favorites or stuff that doesn't bear writing about. Some of this, of course, is due to my current dental woes, the next big project to be worked on. 

Odds are, however, that I'll be back before this time next year, so I'll probably be blogging that. 

Meanwhile, what's sticking with me is my journey back to France, which happened over a week ago. I've known for a long time that it's not a particularly smart thing for me to be on the road for over three weeks at a time, and this was no exception. By the time I got to New York on the way back, all I wanted to do was leave. I saw some friends for dinner one night, and that was fun (although several were missing from the usual crowd), but the next day I mostly stayed in the hotel room and counted the hours til I could go to JFK. I was looking forward to Barcelona, and, eventually, to being back here in The Slum. Go figure. 

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I was more pooped than I'd figured, but at least I got out to the Good Friday procession I photographed in the last post. The prose accompanying that was supposed to be zippier, but the so-called high-speed Internet at my hotel was anything but. When I post a picture here, it can take as long as a minute to upload, since some of them are big files. Those pictures took between 12 and 35 minutes each. I complained to the lady at the desk as I was checking out and it appears she listened: she took a day's use off. (And Swisscom, the company that charges an absurd €17 for this "high-speed" service, actually had the temerity to send me a customer satisfaction questionnaire. Which I filled out, of course.) Anyway, between the endless wait for the pictures to upload and my jet-lag, I wasn't as inspired as I might have been. Sorry. 

That first evening, I had the address of a tapas bar that had been recommended to me, but I wasn't about to venture into a new part of Barcelona. Instead, there was a Slow Food-connected restaurant on the corner, so I decided to splurge a little. Mata Mala turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. A huge, spacious room with texts as decoration, selling wine and cooking equipment as well as meals, it also has a tapas bar. Everything is dedicated to local recipes and sourcing, and the waitress not only spoke English, but was extremely knowledgeable about everything. I started with an onion soup that had some cabbage and -- nice touch! -- pieces of pear in it. The soup bowl arrived with the ingredients laid out in the dry bowl, and then the broth -- which was much like the broth of the classic French onion soup -- was poured from a pitcher onto them. A quick stir, and there you go. The waitress also did something unexpected. She asked me if I'd like some bread with it, and then brought a basket of excellent bread. I'd noticed on the menu that bread with olive oil and salt was €3.95. This was €1.00, without the olive oil and salt. The soup was then followed by an incredible rabbit cooked in vermouth.

It was garnished by the biggest green olives I've ever seen, big old mouthfuls, each of them. The vermouth is a nice touch: lots of bars in Barcelona advertise that they make their own, and this seems like it's worth investigating at some point. I know very little about vermouth except that it's essentially a fortified wine, and I've done some cooking with it long ago. (In fact, I just remembered one thing I made that may make me purchase another bottle...) This was rich and complex. It was also accompanied by a bottle of Alonso del Yerro, a 2010 tempranillo, that was just as rich and complex as the rabbit, with undertones of spice and earth that were still developing as the meal went on. And no wonder: I doubt I'd have ordered it if I'd seen the label first. It weighed in at a whopping 14.7%! A magnificent meal and, should one not spend as much as I did on the wine (which was half the entire bill), surprisingly affordable. Barcelona has a bunch of good restaurants in it, so it almost seems like a shame to keep going back to the same ones, but Mata Mala will see me again. 

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In Which I Learn A New Word In Spanish: If only the next day had been as wonderful as that meal was. All that remained was to pick up my ticket back to Montpellier. I'd ordered and paid for it on line once my schedule for the end of the trip, which had never been fixed, became clear. It had been bad enough changing the New York-Barcelona ticket on Delta, none of whose online stuff was working (they even told me to go to the wrong terminal at JFK!), so I figured this would be easy: I had two codes which, when presented with the card I'd bought the tickets with, would result in the issuance of my ticket. I'd even gotten a nice bargain: first class tickets for the same price as second class. So I took the subway to Barcelona Sants Station. 

First, I stood in the wrong line. Then, I stood a while longer in the right line. The ticket agent spoke no English or French, but he refused to give me a ticket. "Go to France," he said, and then took to ignoring me. Ridiculous, I thought. I'd bought a ticket on Renfe, the Spanish national railroad, in Montpellier, so why couldn't I get a Renfe/SNCF ticket in Barcelona? I went to the Customer Service department. There, nobody spoke English, either, but "No" is easy enough to understand. I protested: I'd spent €80 on the piece of paper in my hand! Where was my ticket? The woman at the counter and her boss stared at me, then extended their arms with the palms of their hands facing down. Putting their fingers at a 90-degree angle to that, they made little sweeping gestures with them. "Fuera, fuera," they said. 

"Get lost. Go away." 

I remembered that, a couple of years ago when I'd missed a connection in Barcelona, the tourist information people had been very friendly and helpful, so I went and stood on that line. The woman there didn't really speak English, nor could she figure out why I couldn't get Renfe to give me a ticket. But I had to wait until her colleague, who spoke much better English, she assured me, came back. This took about 15 minutes, during which I helped a couple of English tourists understand how to get to the airport, thereby helping out the tourist info lady. Finally, the other woman returned, and her English was worse! But a tall, elegant Spanish woman who'd just been helped said, in virtually accentless English, "I speak English. Perhaps I can help." And she did. I told her what my problem was, she translated, the tourist info lady then went off with me to some machines to enter the code. Which didn't work. Back to the Customer Service desk, where the same two unfriendly people were, and they told her that it was impossible. Finally, she deposited me with a ticket seller who told me that the only thing I could do was buy another ticket -- for a little over €80 -- and issued one for me. Same train, same time. But it cost me €160 to get home. Of course, when I was back, I looked at the ticket I'd bought. The first half, to Figueras, was non-refundable. The Figueras-Montpellier ticket was non-refundable after the time of departure. The moral of this was simple: have a hard ticket and don't expect any cooperation between Renfe and SNCF. You don't want to get fuera-fuera'd. 

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The rest of the day consisted of going to the Corta Inglés, the huge department store on the Placa Catalunya, to buy boxes of chicken broth (a product utterly unavailable in France!) and some ham chips to season food with, then hiding in my hotel room from the hordes of tourists until it was dinner time. 

Fortunately, I was in good enough mental shape to attempt a trip to a neighborhood I'd never been to, Born, for a visit to the Bar Celta, famous for its Galician-style octopus. Yes, it's a tapas bar, but the prices were so low I wasn't sure I'd ordered enough. The waiter, though, had good impulses, and here's 3/5 of what I ordered. 

Padrone peppers, ham croquettes, the famous octopus. Let's not forget the anchovies:

Again, those mammoth olives. And, although oil-cured, these weren't those aggressively fishy, super-salty anchovies you get in American pizzerias. Gotta figure out how the Spanish do it. The star of the show wasn't the surprisingly underflavored octopus for which the joint's renowned, though. It was something that, I calculated, I hadn't eaten in 43 years, and I'd already started in on before I thought of photographing and then decided not to. Razor clams! These were tiny next to American ones, but no less flavorful. Quickly cooked, then doused with olive oil, they were sweet and nutty. What a meal! I'll be back to this place, too, next time. 

I had a 6am wake-up for the train, and still had to pack, so I walked back to the hotel and collapsed. The next morning, I was all too ready to leave. The incident at the train station had affected me disproportionately, and made me wonder if I really did want to move to Barcelona. I can't make that decision now, at any rate: I don't have the money or enough information. But it did puncture the fantasy some. Still, isn't that what fantasies are for? 

At least the trains on Easter Sunday were deserted, and I looked off into the Pyrenees as we sped along towards France. Summer wasn't even a hint yet. And the year ahead is more of a mystery than ever. 

Me & Pat: Day Two, Art and Tuna

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!


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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

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!

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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.