First February Miettes

All, for some reason, food-related.

First, the bagel saga continues. A French guy named Patrick, who's spent a lot of time in California has come to town and opened Bagel House, which is, besides a bagel joint, kind of an all-American theme restaurant. What exactly the bulldog has to do with it, I'm not sure.

There's a menu of bagel sandwiches, genuine New York cheesecake, pecan pie, hot dogs, Budweiser (in very elegant metal bottles, but it's still Budweiser) and Miller Genuine Draft. The bagels on offer the day I went were plain, sesame, sesame-poppy seed, and olive, which Patrick says is a concession to French tastes. They toasted up nicely and -- surprise! -- the texture was perfect! At €2 per bagel, though, this could be an expensive habit to acquire, although he swears he's going to lower the price to €1.50. Thursdays and Fridays are American sports nights on the big-screen television, and they're open until 10pm those nights for sports fans.

The place is kind of hidden away in a tiny street not far from the Opéra, but I've been in twice and there's been customers each time. I'm about to become another one, since the Inno supermarket's now carrying genuine Philadelphia cream cheese, and, of course, smoked salmon's no problem in France. Uh-oh.

Bagel House, 6 rue Loys, 34000 Montpellier. Tel: 04 67 67 07 02. 


* * * 


In other news of exotic cuisines, for some time I'd been hearing about an Asian supermarket called, oddly enough, Paris Store, on the edge of town, and last week I caught a ride out there with a couple of Australian Asiaphiles.

It's huge. There's a reason it's out there in warehouseland: it takes up a hell of a lot of space. And there's almost everything you'd want out there to make Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, or Cambodian food, plus some Indian basics, the usual enigmatic Antillean French stuff (I must find a restaurant that does this kind of food, because I have no idea what it is) and a smattering of Japanese and Filipino ingredients. There's a virtual wall of dim-sum, frozen, which could enable someone to open the biggest dim-sum restaurant in the south of France (and, MSG notwithstanding, I wish they would), and, outstandingly, a full complement of all the odd fresh herbs and vegetables you need to cook Southeast Asian foods. As with the place I used to go in Berlin, Vinh Loi, I don't recognize about 3/4 of these things, but they're all clearly labelled and at some point I'm going to get a Vietnamese cookbook and work some of it out.

The Paris Store is part of a chain of stores, most of which are in Paris. (We joked that there's probably a Beijing Store in China selling French food). It serves a dual purpose, supplying individual consumers as well as restaurants: there are big packs of take-out boxes, wholesale lots of chopsticks, and even some decor. It's got an outstanding selection of woks, cooking tools, and dishes, although I'd get my Chinese cleaver elsewhere, from the selection I saw there.

My one criticism -- and to tell the truth, I'm not sure I found everything, the place is so large -- is that there are still some ingredients, specifically some of the cooking pastes and sauces for Chinese food, which I still haven't found around here, things like yellow bean paste and black-bean chili paste. There's a chili paste that's essential for making the dipping sauce for Vietnamese summer rolls I haven't found, and I'm out of it, although I did buy a product that was unfamiliar to me that might turn out to be the same thing. At any rate, I'm mostly restocked now, so it's time to fire up the wok.

I think that this place is accessible by Tram #2, direction St. Jean de Védas, getting off at Victoire 2 and walking to the big commercial center. There are some chain restaurants (and a non-chain next door to the Paris Store where we had coffee, which looks excellent for lunch), a big garden store, and way in the back, the behemoth.

Paris Store, La Peyriere Business Park, Avenue Robert Schumann, 34430 St. Jean de Védas. Open Mon-Fri 9am-1pm, 2:30pm-7:30pm, Saturday 9am-7:30pm. 


* * * 


Man, talk about your best-laid plans. I've been promising myself that I'd go out to a new, inexpensive restaurant as soon as I could justify the outlay. I had a couple of ideas for places to go. And then, one day after I'd been working hard all afternoon, I realized that I had no ideas whatever for cooking dinner that night, and that the smart thing to do would be to go out. And I had the money to do it, as long as I didn't go over €30, which is quite do-able around here. There was one problem.

It was Sunday.

Sunday and Monday, as I need tell no one in France, are dead days. I knew that Bistrot d'Alco was open, but I'd just written about them and getting a miette out of the deal was part of my goal. I knew one place over in Gourmet Gulch I hadn't even seen, but someone had recommended. I headed over there. No go; with the exception of the Chat Perché, which I've also written about recently, nothing was open. I hiked clear across town on a hunch. Nope, those places were closed, too. I knew what I had to do: go to Chez Doumé.

Chez Doumé is very popular with the locals because it's open when others aren't, and because it's a basic steak-and-potatoes kind of place. I was just hoping for something a little more creative, a little more varied. But...

The place was full, but not obnoxiously so, mostly families, and there was a sign announcing that lunches were now featuring a different dish each day of the week. Given that that week's lunches were mostly variations on lambs' brains (seriously: cervelle d'agneau) I was glad I don't usually eat big lunches. Dinner doesn't have a huge selection, so I ordered from the menu bistrot (€16) and got steak and potatoes. First, though, there was a poireau vinaigrette, a poached leek with vinaigrette and a home-made mayonnaise that was excellent. I could have had another choice from the menu, but one of them was andouillette, a kind of sausage that smells like a urinal which is inexplicably popular in France, and I forget what the other choices were. Nope, it was the pièce de boucher, or steak, with a sauce, of which I chose pepper. And here's another reason people come to Chez Doumé: the steak (less tough than a lot of French steaks, but that's not saying much, and the pepper sauce seemed not to be too full of pepper) comes with fries. Amazing fries. And lots of 'em. They're homemade, not frozen. Some of them still have a bit of skin on them. They're cooked in regular oil, not duck fat, but they're the best non-duck-fat fries in town. I had to stop eating them to avoid potato overdose.

A 1/4 liter pichet of an okay Côtes de Languedoc was another €4.50, and all in all it was a good meal. Not great, not even very good, but it got the job done. I was stuck, and this is the kind of place you go when you're stuck. In the summer, it's light on tourists, too. And it has lamb brains for lunch.

Chez Doumé, 5 rue des Tessiers, 34000 Montpellier. Tel: 04 67 60 48 70. Open daily for lunch and dinner except Saturday and Sunday lunch. 

A Weekend In Spain

One good reason not to stay at the Hotel Doña Lola in Castellón, a small city in Valencia with a fishing and shipping harbor connected to it, is that the bullring is just a block away. Built in the 1870s, its main entrance still has a small pipe which sends a mist of water into the crowds waiting in the harsh sunlight.

Across the street, in a very nice park, there's a statue of a beloved bullfight journalist, sitting eternally looking into the ring, cigar, pencil, and binoculars at the ready.

And if you don't already have the picture, across the street from the hotel is a sculpture saluting all the brave bulls who've died there. I have no idea what kind of frenzy bullfights cause in their audiences, but the hotel might not be the most peaceful place in town when the bulls are happening.

What on earth was I doing here? The answer is simple: Blue Navigator, an Irish fanzine dedicated to some of American folk music's more arcane fringes, had alerted me that the mighty Peter Stampfel was on tour with a guy named Jeffrey Lewis, and asked me if I'd like to do a story. Most of the tour was with a full band in Britain, but there was on isolated gig at the Tanned Tin festival in Castellón, and when I checked, it wasn't that far away. Or so it seemed.

There's actually a direct train from Montpellier to Castellón, but it leaves at 7am. Its return, at quarter of two in the afternoon, is much easier. On the way down, then, I took a train to Salvador Dalí's home town of Figueres, took another train to Barcelona, and then another to Castellón. Trouble was, I had a tight connection in Barça, there was no train number on the big board to help me figure out where to go, and by the time I did figure it out, the train had left. I had 4 1/2 hours in Barcelona, so I stashed my luggage in a locker and, at the suggestion of the tourist ladies, took the subway to Sagrada Familia.

That's about as good a shot of it as an iPhone will allow. My real camera was back at the station. It wouldn't have mattered; when I took it out of its case in Castellón, the malfunction that it had had when I first got it, an inability to stay turned on, had returned. A brand-new dead camera, one day past its return date for Amazon.fr. (Still has its own warranty, though). So all these shots are from my phone. How 21st Century!

Gotta say, I wasn't overly impressed with Barcelona. I wandered around the neighborhood surrounding the church (which costs €12 to go into, so I passed), and eventually got a late lunch of some boring sausages with tomato sauce. All the restaurant/cafe type places were owned by people who looked Chinese, but, I was later told, were probably Filipino. Makes sense.

The only bright spot was that I stumbled on the Sagrada Familia market hall. Man alive! Or, rather, fish dead! I saw fish I'd never encountered, even in books, species of shellfish I was previously unaware of, and gleaming examples of fish and shellfish that I actually recognized. Razor clams, for instance. I was hoping to get some of those were I was going; it had been ages since I'd had any. Over on the vegetable side, a lot of the vegetables looked better than I see here in Montpellier. Some of this has to do with factory farming: there's no way all those luscious black tomatoes were coming in from fields at the end of January. There were also little peppers that looked like jalapeños called padrones. I'm told one dry-fries them and dips them in olive oil and that sometimes you get one with vootie. I was hoping for some of those, too.

But the delay had screwed my plans up. I'd heard that people ate late in Spain, so getting in at 10:30 might not be too bad, but unfortunately, I had to settle for the hotel's grease-pit of a restaurant. I even forget what I had, it was so unmemorable. But, as in the place in Barça, the beer was phenomenal. Spaniards, unlike the French, like beer that tastes like beer! The festival's sponsor, Estrella Damm, is just lovely, and I had enough to make that judgement.

I woke up early on my first full day in Castellón, and realized, from the map they gave me at the front desk, that the place just isn't big enough to get lost in. It doesn't sprawl as much as Montpellier does, and although it's the usual maze of streets you find anywhere the Romans didn't build in Europe, it's pretty hard to get lost. So I set out with my camera to shoot the central market, only to have it poop out when I tried to shoot the bull statue. Never occurred to me to use the phone until I was already out of the market, which, at 10 on a Saturday, was rocking and rolling, with two eating areas where the merchants and the locals were enjoying plates of appetizing-looking stuff. It was the same as at Sagrada Familia, only bigger. Same weird fish, same gorgeous vegetables. Lots of stands selling pork products, with five or six grades of ham. Ham is like a religion here: I later cruised the huge supermarket in the basement of the huge ugly department store near my  hotel and they had five-year-old Iberian hams wrapped in fake velvet selling for €450. And that was the supermarket; lord only knows what some of the superstar hams at the market went for at charcuterias that felt like chapels. I later noticed it as an appetizer/tapa on menus going for €23.50 and up per plate of a half-dozen very thin slices. No, I didn't try it.

After the market, I just wandered, and came into a lovely plaza with an ornate pavillion in it surrounded by chairs and tables, an outdoor bar/tapas joint. Just past it was a lovely red building which turned out to be the Teatro Principál, the venue for the festival. There was a door marked Prensa/Invitados, so I went in to see if my press pass was there. There was a sound-check going on and a uniformed guard who spoke no English. This was a problem: the Spanish spoken in this part of the world sounded nothing like any Spanish I'd ever heard before, which, of course, was mostly spoken by Mexicans. Not that I can even speak Tex-Mex. But it was early, around 11:30, and nobody was around. An American guy who was with Faust, one of the big-name acts at the festival, helped me out, but it was clearly too early for the press folks, who were coming in from Madrid, so I thanked the guard and wandered around the city some more. Finally, I wound up back at the hotel. A couple of hours of using the wi-fi in my room, though, and I was bored again.

More walking brought me to the stage door again. I went in, and the guard was utterly surprised. With sign language and some talking, he let me know that this was lunchtime, and nobody could be expected to be anywhere except at lunch. It was true: the theater was utterly silent. I took the hint. Did the guard have a recommendation? He gestured: just walk around until you find something. So I did: directly across the street was this place:

I looked at the menu. A couple of the small plates would make an excellent lunch. I went in. A friendly, stout guy pointed me at a chair by the bar (just the other side of that window there, in fact) and handed me a menu. I ordered a beer. Just going on familiar-sounding words, I ordered. First up were pimientos del piquillas, which the menu said were peppers stuffed with seafood. The stuffing was a puree with potatoes and olive oil, and the peppers were in a saffron, olive oil, and garlic sauce:

Sorry, I inhaled one of them before I remembered to shoot this. Trust me, you would have, too. Next up was gambas ajillo, perfectly-cooked prawns in olive oil infused with garlic, red chili peppers, and garlic, garnished with garlic and red chili peppers. Yes, folks, this is a cuisine which agrees with me.

All of this was served with slices of lightly-toasted bread, and much sauce was soaked up thereby.

The rest of the afternoon was spent walking this off, noticing the apartment-building lobbies and garages where little old ladies set up modest quantities of oranges and tangerines for sale, hanging out in the hotel, and waiting to hear that the guys had arrived. Finally, about 6:30, I went back to the theater and met the publicist, Noemi, who had my pass. She took my number and said she'd SMS me when the guys got there. I wandered around a little, noticing that there were alleys filled with people drinking and eating plates of tapas being handed through a window on the street. Big plastic tubs lay around for the garbage, and each of these places had specialties: octopus tentacles, crabs, and a couple of things I couldn't identify. I wasn't hungry, and I was skeptical about my ability to make anyone understand, but it was fascinating. After a while, I went back to the hotel, and eventually they arrived, did a great show and we did an interview.

I'd given myself an extra day in Castellón because I wanted to see what was there independent of my work schedule, and because I also hate weekend train-travel. There were two things I really wanted to do: visit the local art museum, and head to the Grao, the port, for a paella. Neither turned out to be as easy as I would have liked.

First, my approach to the museum was complicated by a huge number of horses and ponies, some drawing carts, some just with a rider. A guy in a flat, broad-brimmed traditional hat and a caballero suit on a pure white horse rode with his wife or sister on a matching horse, her skirt draped out in front of her, and, more incredibly, draped behind her in such a way that it covered the entire rear of the horse right up to where its tail started. I was wondering what this would have looked like when she got off. There was an almost endless stream of these animals , and I have no idea where they were headed, but it was definitely entertaining.

There are two art museums, one contemporary, one everything else, and I'd passed the contemporary during my wanderings on Saturday. It was no problem to get there, and it appeared from the map that the Museu de Bellas Arts, the one I wanted, was nearby. It actually was a couple of blocks away, and I was concerned because, unlike the contemporary, it closes at 2 on Sunday. Again, a nice security guard pointed the way.

The main reason I wanted to go to this place is that I'd read it had some Zurbaráns, and I'd never seen any of his work up close. But before the floor where they were, there were two floors of ceramics. If there's a subject that interests me less than ceramics, I can't really think of what it is. Still, I was there, there was a lot of time before lunch started, so I took a turn. Good lord.

Okay, still wondering where Picasso was coming from? True, he wasn't a local, but these are 19th century Valencian plates, and the entire floor was just one of these beauties after another. There was an implication that these designs are still being made (captions in the museum -- and signs everywhere, for that matter -- are in two languages: Castillian Spanish and Catalan, hugely inconvenient for non-speakers, especially because they're nearly identical), and I don't have to have an authentic antique -- I'll settle for a few of these made last year. I'm going to try to figure out where to find them, bet on it.

Upstairs, it was a typical provincial museum, some really nice medieval stuff, including a St. Michael by the Master of the Porticula vanquishing a demon who apparently had really bad breath, a cycle on the life of St. Bru, who shows up nowhere on Wikipedia or Google, but has numerous representations here (he was apparently the founder of a community of hermits who was a tourist attraction for Popes passing through), and ten, count 'em, ten Zurbaráns, the only famous ones of which were on loan somewhere. Grrr. I did, however, get my dose of magnificently-composed black tones a la Zurbarán from a Portrait of the Artist's Wife by one Josep Rubio, showing his black-clad wife standing by the fireplace. Very hard to imagine people were dressing in button-to-the-chin dresses in 1934, let alone painting such mid-19th-century-looking paintings, but maybe that's why Rubio, too, isn't in Wikipedia and doesn't show up on Google. Like I said, it's a provincial museum. That doesn't, however, mean it's devoid of its pleasures, even in the painting collection. (I looked for postcards and must report that the Museu de Bellas Arts is the first art museum I've ever been in that doesn't sell postcards. At all. What are they thinking?)

The map made it look like I could just head down the street the museum was in and wind up at the Grao, so that's what I did. And did. And did. The surroundings quickly got incredibly boring: huge boxes of buildings housing wholesale tile dealers, wholesale beverage sellers, frozen fish dealers and the odd karate studio or showgirl bar. At one point, there was a concrete monument by the side of the road, marking where the Greenwich Meridian passed. It was more 1:38 in the afternoon than it had ever been before. It turned out to be about six miles from the museum to the Grao, and I was exhausted when I got there. Luckily, a restaurant that came very highly recommended, La Tasca del Puerto, was right there, but a glance at the menu put the fear into me: expensive. Also, all the rice dishes were for a minimum of two people.

So I walked down to the yacht harbor, where there were about a dozen places all described as cafeteria freiduria, all of which also had rice menus. All, alas, wanted a minimum of two people. It's obvious from looking around the Grao that it's a tourist destination in the summer, so I wasn't too surprised when one of the waitresses at Restaurante El Galeón spoke English to me. She said I could get the day's special, paella Valenciana, for one, so I sat down at a table. I started out with sepia a la plancha, griddled cuttlefish served with olive oil flavored with garlic and parsley. There was also bread, again lightly toasted, with tomate and ajoacet. This was the local equivalent of chips and hot sauce: the tomate was even like Mexican red salsa, only with garlic substituted for green chiles, while the ajoacet was a very garlicky mayonnaise.

A great start. Unfortunately, and as I suspect happens at a lot of these places, the paella was a disappointment, made with canned vegetables and a few hunks of what could have been rabbit and/or chicken. Nice, saffron-y taste, and the rice was cooked al dente with skill, but I can easily envisage better.

That's just as it came: not a lot of goodies in there at all.

I was not going to walk back into town after all of that, though, so after a stroll along the waterfront, I got a bus. Some genius has pegged the busfare in Castellón at €.93. Bet the drivers were just overjoyed when that came down.

In the end, I realized that Castellón has just enough in it for a weekend: get in Friday night and get a meal, spend Saturday doing stuff (there's also a nature preserve the city owns out in the nearby Mediterranean that I didn't look into because it was, um, January), stroll the streets lined with orange trees, hit the museum, the market, the big square with the old tower, just relax, eat and drink well, and that's it. And off-season is both underpopulated and cheap: see my hotel rates. I want to explore this area some more, but my priority is still exploring this corner of France first, and learning more about it. Still, one huge benefit of being located here is the quick access to both Spain and Italy, and anyone with paying assignments in either place are welcome to contact me.

And another thing this trip taught me: it is not, no matter what they tell you, possible to overdose on garlic.

* * *

Hotel Doña Lola, C/. Lucena 3, 12006 Castellón. Tel: +34 964 21 40 11. Singles €43 offseason, includes free breakfast, wi-fi, large flat-screen television. 


Restaurante Eleazár, C/. Ximenez 14, 12002 Castellón. Tel: +34 964 23 48 61. Part of a restaurant group in the city, Mesón Navarro, which has four restaurants around the city with varied opening hours and slightly different menus.

Nothing

It's awful. I've got time these days to post on this blog, but...nothing to post. I was beginning to think I'd either gone nuts or become far more boring, when Gerry asked if he could link to something I'd written and asked where it was. I combed the archives here and must have found every one that even came close. Except the one he was looking for, which he found before I did.

But in the process, I noticed that so far, January's been a terrible month for blog-posts here. Montpellier's not exactly humming with excitement at the moment, and about the most exciting thing going on is the soldes, the annual January/February sales.  It seems to be that way all over France. Across the big river, Sara in le petit village was complaining about it.

And I began to think that most of what I've been doing has been pretty boring. For instance, last week at this time, I drew a two-hour shift minding the tiny Friends of the Anglophone Library collection, assessing dues from people just joining up, checking out books and taking them in. As yet, there aren't many people signed up, so just after the 2 o'clock opening, it went dead. Just as the last of the "rush hour" customers was leaving, a woman I recognized from the early save-the-library meetings walked in and was greeted by the woman leaving, and out of their conversation the phrase "split bones" leapt into my ear.

The woman who was leaving left, and the woman who was arriving came in, and it was just the two of us, so I asked her what that stuff about "split bones" was about. "Oh, I was run over by a car a few months ago. He stopped long enough to make sure I was still alive and then just drove off," she said, a bit more perkily than you might imagine. "Probably didn't have insurance; a lot of them here don't, you know." But she was out of the hospital, convalesced, and ravenous for new reading material. She candidly confessed her addiction to reading, which she's suffered from for the entire 20 years she's been living here. We talked on and on, and the outlines of her life here emerged. Most of it was medical: she'd come down with her 20-year-old daughter, they'd gone horse-riding in the Cévennes Mountains, the daughter had come down ill, and, after a harrowing journey through the French medical bureaucracy, she was diagnosed as the ninth identified case of Lyme Disease in France. As for the mother, the woman I was talking to, she'd been living for years with cancer, and talked about it like an old friend. She also mentioned a long-ago passion for riding a Triumph 250 motorcycle, a hobby she'd picked up from one of her older brothers. By the time someone came to relieve me, I was in awe of the strength this woman had had to summon for her entire life down here. Living in France is hard enough, what with one thing or another, even when you're in perfect health. And she was just as casual and upbeat about it all as you can be.

The kind of meta-moral of this is, I realized later that day, that "boring" is as much a product of laziness as anything else. I'm still finding my way into this place, which everyone says takes a long time indeed, and, as is my wont, I forget that people are a part of it. It's clear that I need to meet more people, and to do this, I have to improve my French. And, somehow, I have to make a living at the same time in a business that's, if not dying, gravely ill. Cancer isn't quite a fitting metaphor for what's happened to publishing (maybe starvation is), but if there are people who can be as forthright and optimistic talking about it as this woman is, then it behooves me to be just as optimistic. Do I have a choice?

And although I suspect February will be just as dull, there are things happening that will contribute to the blog here. There's a development on the bagel front, for instance, and I'm headed out to what I'm told is the best-stocked Chinese market in town on Thursday. These will show up as miettes before very long.

Friday, though, I'm off for a festival in at this theater in Castellón, a city half-way down the coast between Barcelona and Valencia, and will have a report soon, which, yes, will include a trip to the market,  and, I hope, many nice photographs.

Miettes '11, Round One

Spotted today during a ramble around, proof that Christmas is over. This has got to be the worst part of the year to be here -- frequently cloudy, rainy, foggy, then wind comes in from the mountains and it's clear but really cold. The first time I visited Montpellier, it was so cold that I was actually yearning for Berlin! Well, in that it was far warmer there. But here we are, ready to start those alleged 300 days of sun, ready for the markets to have something in them besides root vegetables and the odd greenhouse tomato. I come back from the market and think I should take one of those photos I've been posting of what I snagged, but then I think of the colors: mostly brown. Good spinach, though; that's a reliable winter staple, and it's a lovely deep green, and when I can afford them, huge Comice pears, juicy and, if I let them ripen just so, quite tasty, although not as good as the smaller green ones with the red blush. Dunno what they're called, but they're over, too. And the apples of this region...I'm not impressed.

* * *

So I've been buying lunch instead of making it, and, walking towards Gourmet Gulch the other day, I came upon this and muttered beneath my breath "Oh, no. Here we go again."

Crap. I already went through this in Berlin. Out of nowhere, a fad for bagels. And the "bagels" start appearing in the stores and I just shake my head and mutter that all that is torioidal is not bagel. This place, on the rue d'Aiguillerie, specializes in bagel sandwiches, expensive (€5.50-€5.80) concoctions with New Yorkish names like Rockefeller, Coney Island, Broadway and Staten Island (Staten Island?). The combinations of ingredients look random, and a plain old smoked-salmon-and-cream-cheese isn't one of them. This, of course, is because there's no such thing as cream cheese in France.

Still, in the baskets there on the right-hand side of the big window, there's "bagels natures," at €1.50 apiece, to take home. So I did, foolishly. Folks, for it to be a bagel, it not only has to be toroid, it not only can have an egg-wash glaze, but you have to boil them! Yup, sorry; that's where the texture comes from. The dense chewiness, the thing that makes a bagel a bagel, it comes from a quick bath in boiling water. Trust me on this: I've made them at home. Now, I know there's a huge debate about what else in the water makes the great taste, and that the comparitive purity of New York water supposedly makes its bagels unparallelled in the world, but the bottom line is, you do have to boil them. And this joint doesn't.

So far, the only slightly acceptable bagels I've found around here are in the surprisingly large kosher section of my local supermarket, where you can get four bagels (sesame or poppy-seed) for €3, sealed in pairs in some sort of protective pack. They're not all that good, but they're better than these.

And I do wish Bagel & U success, because the crappy Berlin bagels were eventually followed by some not-bad bagels, and they, in turn attracted very good bagels indeed, supplied by a chain called Bagel Station. Elsewhere in Germany, an even better chain, Bagel Brothers, appeared in Leipzig, Lübeck, and other cities.

Of course, it's not like France doesn't already have a maddening profusion of bread. The bagel's texture puts it in a separate category, but I've sometimes been taking my noontime meal at this place (picture was shot today, Sunday, so it's not open), despite a couple of good bakeries practically in my back yard.

Even when it's open there's not all that much to see, but it has a large selection of different breads, unbeatable sandwiches (may I suggest the chorizo-and-cheese panini), excellent savory pastries, including mini-tarts with a variety of fillings, and, if you're very lucky, a Roquefort-and-walnut fougasse (a local flat pastry, either made flaky or dense and chewy, with stuff, often duck cracklings, mixed into it) that is just superb. My guess is their breads are just as good.

(Bagel & U seems to have a Facebook page, but I couldn't find an address. Easy enough to find in real life, though, if you want to. La Boulangerie de l'Aiguillerie, 36 rue de l'Aiguillerie, no phone I can find).

* * *

I had business at Ikea the other day, a new reading lamp so I could put the not-very-good one back in the bedroom where it was intended to live, so I headed down to the Odysseum on the tram. It's the end of the line, so as I waited to head back I saw a bunch of guys in black hanging out at the building where the drivers go for coffee after a run. They all got on our tram, and I was surprised to see that after we were on our way, they fanned out throughout the car, checking tickets, running them through little hand-held electronic devices. They came to me, and, of course, mine didn't work, no matter how many times the guy ran it through. Visibly chagrinned, he had to resort to the analog method: turning the card over and seeing the date and time clearly stamped on the ticket. Duh.

But it was interesting: I don't ride the tram much, preferring to walk to what I need to do, most of which is pretty local. I've never seen this done before, and I'd wondered if our old Berlin tradition of Schwarzfahren, riding without a ticket (yes, I know the word also means hitchhiking, for some reason), could exist here. Apparently it does; a few stops down the line, they grabbed some hapless youth and escorted him off the tram.

The trip also took me past a construction site where the Tram 3 line, which will open next year, veers off down towards the beach. We're about 15km from the Mediterranean, and this new line will deliver it to us for the price of a tram ticket. I actually have never been to the beach here, but now that it's winter, it might be the right time to figure out how to get there.

For the moment, though, I'm staying pretty much right here in The Slum, doing this and that. More news as it happens. Don't hold your breath.

2010: The Pictures

Because the pictures are the good stuff, and there wasn't all that much good stuff in 2010. If I have come out of this year with a single insight, it is that two of the most important elements in my life at the moment are love and beauty, and, while we can't command the former to appear, we can at least seek out the latter. I managed to do a fair share of that last year, mostly through the lens of my camera. I'm the first to say that I'm not a very good photographer, but I'll also admit that I've put myself into places this year where all I really had to do was push the button.

The following images are subject to my rassling with software. The photos from the first half of the year are entombed in iPhoto, and I can't figure out how to get them out. Around May, I finally figured out that this was impractical for the sake of the blog, which is the only thing I take pictures for at the moment, so I invented another filing system. The other software is Photoshop Elements, which I'm gingerly feeling my way into. I have a need to watch over the shoulder of someone who knows what they're doing with this thing, which is how I learned computers in the first place. But I've known some of the basics for a while, so I managed to adjust the color and sharpen this and that on copies of some of the pictures I've taken and even crop a couple of them.

This selection was easy to make, though: I've got my desktop picture on the computer set to cycle the photos I've taken this year, and so I've been looking at them (and, from time to time, deleting them) over and over. These are the ones I've liked the best, and it was surprising how many of them I haven't   posted before.

I'm really hoping to get out into the Languedoc's widely varied terrains more in the coming year, so next year's selection should be even harder to make. Meanwhile, here are these.

* * *

In Mid-May, I became very restless and got on the train and headed to Béziers. I've since met someone who lives there, and she claims it's astonishingly dull. That's believable, but somehow, my shutter finger went wild in its streets. I've still got to look more closely at some of the shots I took. For instance, I have no idea why this picture fascinates me so: I took it from three angles, and this one's the keeper.

I also managed to see a bunch of circles there:

A former wine shop, and...

cheese ads.

In early June, a photographer arrived to take my picture for the AARP magazine. It astonished me how much money magazines are willing to waste. This guy is really good, and he spent a few weeks touring Europe for a story they were putting together on the best places to retire. I contributed some words to the story (the writer never left New York), and showed the photographer around Montpellier and, on one memorable day, we took a drive, where, in Sommières, we wound up at a neighborhood feast. But we also hit Pic St. Loup, the nearest mountain visible from Montpellier,

drove through a village that had just finished running the bulls (this guy was too young and had to stay home),

and wound up in St.-Martin-de-Londres, a sleepy, ancient village.

In the end, AARP barely used any of his photos, including, fortunately for the magazine's readers, the several hundred of the ones he shot of me at the Saturday market.

July brought a bunch of visitors. First came the invasion of the gorgeous folksingers.

Although, to be frank, only two of the folksingers were gorgeous, the third isn't in this picture (he was arranging a trip to the countryside), and the guy in the middle sells cheese for a living when he's not giving it away to folksingers busking at the Saturday market.

A couple of weeks later, two friends from Berlin showed up, and we wound up in a 14-year-old Volkswagen driving one of the most insane roads I've ever encountered, to and from the Cirque de Navacelles. It's a tribute to how nice Andi (who drove) is that he's still speaking to me. But even beyond how remote Navacelles itself is, it showed me that there are small villages just everywhere around here. This one is near Navacelles, but I'm not sure exactly where or what it is.

My guess is that wine or fruit trees are involved.

August means St. Roch gets his trip around his old 'hood, but it's about time someone fixed up the oratory dedicated to him across town: he's missing a hand and his poor dog's missing his head. But this is the corner, allegedly, where he was arrested while sitting on a bench resting (see the link for details).

In October, I went on my only Epic Walk of the year, from my front door to the nasty little village of Jacou, where Tram #2 ends. I'm actually fairly sure that there's a nice center to Jacou, but by the time I got there I was exhausted and unwilling to find it. But before that, I walked a hazardous, traffic-filled road above Castelneau-le-Lez and shot the Lez River rolling along, some farm buildings, and, off in the distance, old Pic St. Loup.

So now it's a new year, and I'm hoping that for all of us it'll be a less trying, more enriching one. I'm still out there looking for love and beauty, and if you are, too, I wish you success.

Now to get to work on that.

Midwinter Miettes 'n' Meanderings

One afternoon recently, I was hanging out at the English Corner Shop talking with Uncertain. He's a British expat here in town, and has been in France for over 20 years, so I pick his brain as often as I can for survival tips and so on. At any rate, he'd been reading this blog, and said, out of the blue, "It's not a hill, you know. It's an extinct volcano. There are two vents. The house I live in is on top of one of them, and the building The Globe is in is on top of the other. Unsurprisingly, they're the two oldest buildings still standing in Montpellier. I have no idea how old they actually are, however."

Wow, I thought. What a metaphor!

A couple of days later, though, something occurred to me. One thing the hill Montpellier's built on is full of is limestone, and the nearest mountains you can see from here, plus other assorted hills in the area, are also limestone. Limestone isn't an igneous, or heat-formed, rock. It's made up of the remains tiny marine creatures, which makes it sedimentary. And if the earth did poke a volcanic vent through limestone, the limestone would change into something else and have other qualities. Or...was I maybe wrong?

I happen to know where I could ask some actual real geologists, though, so I did. The information I was looking for turned out to be in French, and none of them spoke it. Well, some of it was nominally in English, but it was a scientific paper from the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing entitled "SPOT Data and the Montpellier Igneous Rocks as Keys to a New Large-Scale Interpretation of the Bas Languedoc (Southern France)." I read all through this and learned from it that actually, there might be oil around here. I later learned that mines in the Cévennes Mountains just north of here once provided France with much of its coal, so the thought that there's oil nearby isn't as far-fetched as it sounds.

Another geologist pointed me to a whole website about French volcanoes, and this was an accident, because I'd mentioned that the two mountains nearest me, Pic St. Loup and l'Hortus, were clearly limestone. No, the guy said, from what he could make out on this page, Pic St. Loup was an extinct volcano, although it wasn't where I said it was. Ridiculous! I see the goddam mountain off in the distance nearly every day! In all the years I've been coming here and the two years I've been living here, it's never been anywhere else! Ah, but when I looked at the page, I discovered the confusion. The harbor at Agde, about 30 miles down the coast from here, had been created when a volcano next to the sea had erupted and spilled hot lava into the ocean. And the name of the mountain was Mt. St. Loup.

On the way back from the cracker fair the other weekend, Peter swung around that way so I could investigate, and the mountain, much reduced, I would think, from when it erupted, is still there, and if you go down the right road, which we eventually found, you can see lots of dark black rocks -- clearly not limestone -- rising out of the Mediterranean.

Still, that left another question unanswered: nobody I know seems to know where Uncertain lives, but I certainly know where The Globe, Lawrence McGuire's used bookshop and cultural center, is, so I dropped by one afternoon and asked him if his building really was the oldest one in town, or even the second-oldest. "Naw," he said. "This place only dates from 1325. There was a woman who came through here not long ago doing some survey for the city, and that's what she told me. I mentioned it to the landlord and he said that he didn't allow them to put a sign on the building because then it would really restrict what he could and couldn't do to it." I asked him if he had any idea what the oldest still-standing building here was, and he wasn't sure, but he thought that probably it was over on the rue d'Argenterie, where that palace I mentioned some time ago had been for sale, the one where the guy beheaded his page for spilling wine on his doublet. (Sorry, folks, it's been bought.) I headed over there later, and there were trucks doing renovation, and a big iron gate blocking access. Some of the stuff in there, though, did look old. Investigation continues.

* * *

Investigation also continues into sources for ethnic foods, and after Mike's reading for his book Sweetness and Blood: How Surfing Spread from Hawaii and California to the Rest of the World, with Some Unexpected Results at Le Bookshop two weekends ago, sponsored by the Association to Save the Anglophone Library, Ed from Oz, one of the association members, started talking to Mike and me about Thai food, which led to his mentioning to me that there was a really great international market way the hell out in Castelneau-le-Lez, so we made a date to go explore this past Friday.

The place is called Mondial Market, and you can get to it on Tram #2, getting off at either Sablassou and walking away from Castelneau through the traffic circle, at which point it's on your right a bit along the Route de Nimes, or you can get off at Aubes Rouges and hit the traffic circle and go left until you get there. It's big, no doubt about that, and it offers sections devoted to Africa, England, the French West Indies, Argentina, Brazil, China, Spain, Greece, Mauritius, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Portugal, Réunion, Thailand, and Vietnam. As you might guess, some of these are better provided-for than others. The Indian selection, as you might guess, pales before Sai Food's, and the British and Italian selections are nothing much. Where it's big is with a few cuisines about which I know nothing whatever, and, according to the owner and a knowledgeable customer we talked to, I won't find out about in any restaurant in Montpellier, namely the West Indian, Mauritian, and Réunionaise cuisines. I'm having a lot of trouble finding books in English about this stuff, too, or even websites, although this seems to be a good article about Mauritian food.

The Mexican selection, weirdly enough, is pretty interesting, with a large selection of premade sauces in Tetrapak boxes and some made-in-Mexico salsa picante which I was unable to resist picking up. Likewise, the Portugese, Spanish, and African sections are pretty good, the latter well-supplemented in the freezers. The Chinese selection, though, was pathetic, to the point where I think I may have to go to Amsterdam or Berlin once stocks of some stuff in my Chinese larder start vanishing. (Maybe not: I keep hearing about a chain called Paris Store, the local one of which is totally on the other end of Tram #2, and Ed from Oz has indicated a willingness to go out there after the first of the year). The owner is amenable to requests, apparently, as long as he can find a way to get the stuff, and he and Ed talked long about obtaining Conimex, the Dutch brand of Indonesian ingredients. I haven't cooked Indonesian food in ages, so I hope he scores. Another oddity of the place is that every Friday morning, a Japanese woman drops by some sushi, which, at €12, is expensive enough for me to believe Ed's claim that it's the most authentic in town -- not that that would take much doing.

Anyway, I'll be back to check the place out some more as the seasons bring more fresh produce in. Hell, the salsa alone might bring me back soon.

Mondial Market, 700 Route de Nimes (RN 115), 34170 Castelneau le Lez, Open Mon-Sat 9:30am-7:30pm. Phone 04 67 52 45 76. 


* * *

I was rather hoping to have a picture to post here, and remembered that I had one or two in the camera, but wasn't sure what they were. Yesterday, I tried turning the camera on and the on-off switch, which is also the shutter, popped off. I'm hoping to be able to get it fixed, but it'll be a while. Fortunately, this happened at a time of year when there isn't much to shoot, so if there's something really interesting, I guess I'll use the phone camera. You have been warned, then, about impending image degradation.

* * *

One thing I was going to take a picture of was the horrible blue-and-white Christmas tree out on the Comédie that impedes my trip to and from the supermarket, and is part of the Hivernales, the annual Christmas fair that's a companion to the Estivales in summertime. The similarities are mostly in the kiosks in which craftspeople try to sell stuff you would never buy if you were either sober or non-desperate, and the difference is mostly that it's cold out there instead of warm, and there's no sipping of rosé at night while leisurely consuming oysters. There is a small food court, though, and one stand has some decent-looking cheeses.

But all in all, the way the French do Christmas makes me a bit nostalgic for either Germany or Britain, which are the sources of the American Christmas celebrations. Until the mid-19th Century, Christmas wasn't a big part of the church calendar, but a whole combination of various secular forces which arose about then, including the wooden toy industry in Seiffen, Germany, and the packaged food industry later in the century, changed things around. German Weinachtsmärkte can be truly wonderful to walk around, even if you can't get to the one in Nürnberg which is kind of the grandaddy of 'em all, or the one in Dresden, where you have your choice of about 700 kinds of Stollen. I was always a sucker for the wooden stuff, and made a pilgrimage to Seiffen one year to do a story for the Wall St. Journal.

The French, however, don't have as many outward displays of Christmas. Instead, I'm told, it's about feasting, and I do know that my local supermarket has sprouted a sizeable foie gras department (that's right: department), since consuming diseased goose liver is one of the traditions. I have no idea if there are local Languedoc traditions, but given that this has historically been a Protestant enclave in Catholic France, and what Christmas celebration France does is Catholic, I kind of doubt it. My own research into foie gras has largely been stymied by its price, and given how expensive it is, I'd actually rather let someone who knows what they're doing deal with it. And maybe some day I'll get invited to one of these gastronomic orgies I've heard expats complaining about. "All they do is eat, drink, and talk." Sounds good to me, depending, of course, on what there is to eat and drink and talk about.

So joyeux Noël to all, and I hope to be back before the first of the year with a recap of the whole thing in pictures. None of which, barring a miracle, will be new, but many of which will have been previously unseen.

Others See Us, Part 2 (And Last)

The end of the year celebrating Montpellier's relationship, such as it is, with the U.S. draws to a close, but not without one more big deal art show. This one is labelled "The Deep South of America," and draws together three American photographers, Alex Harris, Clarence John Laughlin, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, over in the  Pavillon Populaire.

On first pass, I thought it was a mess. I still do to some extent, but I was happy I was so overwhelmed the first time through that I forgot to take notes. It's nowheres near as offensive as the first one. As you might expect, there are some huge problems here, starting with the fact that Meatyard, who figures as a major photographer in American art-photographic history, lived in Lexington, Kentucky, which is hardly the "deep South."

I have to confess a prejudice, however, before proceeding further. I hate "made" photographs. This is, of course, hypocritical: any photographer who has any options whatsoever with a photo plays with it, alters it, and changes it before printing it, which only makes sense. What I'm actually objecting to is as old as photography itself: the predilection of people who want to be artists and photographers to set up posed situations to Make Art out of a few models standing in awkward positions. I'm much more comfortable with people like Cartier-Bresson or Robert Frank than I am with, say, William Wegman and his dogs. So when two-thirds of this show turned out to be painfully self-conscious Art Photography, I was going to react.

Let's start, then, with the least-known of the three, and the only one shooting color, Alex Harris. His work here is from his "Pilgrimage to Katrina" series, all of which may be seen here. It's pretty straightforward: with the exception of the two Mississippi triptychs (and a single shot of a devastated amusement park) it's three photos of the same house or location, shot six months after the hurricane. I'm not at all sure what's gained by presenting things this way, but the effort does focus your attention on one location at a time and, thanks to the three different angles, the context in which the devastation stands. It's decent reportage, but I'm not sure it's good art -- nor am I sure it's not. In their own ways, although posing as documentation, these are every bit as "made" as the photos by the other two.

On opposing walls from Harris' work are some of the 17,000 photos taken in New Orleans by Clarence John Laughlin (1905-1985), "the eye which never sleeps," which range from evocative documentation to hyper-romantic balderdash. A book on him calls him a "prophet without honor," and it is claimed that he was the first American surrealist photographer, but I don't think his more outré work has worn well.

This one's called "The Mask Grows To Us," from 1947, and is one of an almost endless succession of pictures of women, usually veiled head-to-toe in some gauzy material, against some ravaged textured wall, or, even more clobber-over-the-head, in a graveyard.

This one, from 1940, is called "Where Shall We Go." There are some very nice photos of children in the poorer sections of New Orleans, burdened with titles like "A 'Lost' Boy," "The Disastrous Gate," "Figures From a Forgotten City" and "We Have Turned Away From Nature #1." I wonder if the work he did for Vogue is this pretentious. 

But it's Meatyard (1925-1974) who's the real puzzle here. A successful optician in Lexington, he bought his first camera to photograph his kids, and then, in the mid-’50s, found himself attracted to Zen, which resulted in a bunch of odd photographs of light on water and his famous "no focus" photos, which attempted to impose abstraction on recognizable objects by shooting them without focusing. An interesting idea, and the few of these in this show are worth looking at. From there, he moved into a series dubbed Romances, which are more posed pictures of his family, some of which are very nice indeed: 

Towards the end of this series, though, more and more of the subjects start wearing masks, which at first -- an obvious 3-year-old boy wearing an old man head -- are sweetly ironic, and then suddenly start looking more and more like Art. His culminating masterpiece, according to his fans, is a long series based around models -- Meatyard, his family, and his friends -- wearing a grotesque pinhead mask with a huge nose. This is the series he called "The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater," and boy, did it wear me out fast. 

Everyone in the pictures is masked, and each bears a caption matching Lucybelle Crater with her friend/son/daughter/cousin who is also named Lucybelle Crater. Cindy Sherman (whose name is misspelled in the wall caption here) has said that Meatyard "is the only photographer who had any role in my artistic roots," but when it comes to "made" photos, I prefer hers, since the pretense of authenticity is much stronger, resulting, I think, in a more powerful artistic statement. I certainly got very tired of Lucybelle early on, and if that's because there's something disturbing there, it's not unconnected to the fact that this huge collection was what Meatyard was working on when he died at the age of 46. I'm willing to admit his mastery while also admitting to not liking it much. 

At any rate, between this and the previous show, I'm tempted to tell the locals I'm Canadian, if these two exhibitions are what's informing Montpellierians about America. But if I were curating a show about the American deep South, I'd have headed straight to William Eggleston, who's surrealistic, Southern, disturbing, classically contemporary and big in Europe. I wonder, however, how the people who curate this odd building would respond to him. Not intellectually rigorous enough? Not trading in enough stereotypes? Not grotesque enough? 

Anyway, next year they get to pick on another country. To be honest, this show isn't that bad, and just because it's not to my taste doesn't mean it won't be to yours. And hey: we're getting showers these days, and the Pavillon Populaire is dry. 

Les Suds Profonds de l'Amerique, at the Pavillon Populaire, Esplanade Charles de Gaulle, open Tues. - Sun. 10am-6pm. Show runs until Jan. 30, 2011.