Amtrak: The Nightmare

The Adirondacks as seen from the Adirondack. One of the top ten train-rides in America, the crew told us, and one of the top ten of my life, running neck-and-neck with another 11-hour visual spectacular, Oslo-Bergen, which I did one August, so I got to see Norwegians in bikinis on skis having snowball fights with each other by thermal springs glowing with psychedelically-colored algae at the foot of a glacier.

No bikinis in early March, of course, not in upstate New York, and it was a bit early for the really spectacular view of Lake Champlain, which was indistinguishable from all the other white stuff except it didn't have shrubs and trees growing out of it. Still, the idea was to get to Montreal in as picturesque a manner as possible. I've done this seveal times, and I know the ups and downs. For instance, the "club car," which is what remains of a fine dining tradition. A friend of mine, many years ago, remembers taking the train from near San Francisco to Philadelphia, where the other half of his family lived in the 1950s, particularly the stop in the Rockies to load on live trout and strawberries for the dining car. This year, the conductor announced that chips and hot sandwiches were available there. "I'm not sayin' it's good," he said, "I'm just sayin' it's hot." Us seasoned Adirondack hands know that at Albany, the stop to change crew and switch engines is long enough to stomp up the escalator, grab some somewhat reasonably-priced chips and soft-drinks and some unreasonably-priced sandwiches (unreasonable mostly because they're lousy -- but at least they exist), pay for them, quickly check your e-mail on the iPhone if that floats your boat (no wi-fi on Amtrak, although I understand it's been on the Canadian trains for a while now), and get back to the train before it pulls out.

Mostly, though, on the way up, once you've gone through the gauntlet of submachine-gun toting security guys (contractors, from what I could see) at Penn Station, what you want to do is stare out the window. So much history, so much scenery. At one  point we were stopped at Lake Champlain and I realized that that odd-looking building over there was Ft. Ticonderoga, which I'd just read about in Manituana, that astonishing look at the race up to the American Revolution seen through the eyes of loyalist tribes of the Iroquois nation. It gets dark after the customs stop at Rouses Point, New York, and by the time you get to Montreal, it looks like a real city, with skyscrapers' windows dotting the night sky in grids.

I've done this a number of times at different times of year -- fall is kind of mind-blowing -- and loved it. It's peaceful, beautiful, and you wind up in Montreal or New York, depending on which way you're going. What's not to love? I've recommended it to dozens of my friends, and I recommend it to you.

Except.

It's Amtrak. And sometimes it goes horribly wrong.

You do have to accept some things when you step onto an Amtrak train. You have to accept that it's kind of funky. You have to accept the inedible food at mind-boggling prices. You have to accept that you will never, ever be on time, and that 30 minutes late is "on time," the same as it is in Montpellier. You have to accept that a certain number of your fellow passengers will be gibbering idiots or sullen drunks, and hope they're not sitting in earshot or next to you. But the train's almost never full, so you just claim your turf, look out the window, and wish you'd remembered to stop at that deli on your way out of town.

The morning I woke up in Montreal on the day I had to leave, it had snowed six inches overnight, that on top of what had already been there. It was still snowing hard. To get to the train station was easy: I left Rodney and Victoria's house, turned the corner, and walked a few hundred feet to the Metro station. By the time I got there, out of breath from tugging my uselessly-wheeled luggage, both hands were an unpleasant blue color (I have gloves, but I can't find them, since I've never needed them in Montpellier). But I got to the Central Station via the Metro in plenty of time to not only buy a bagel for breakfast, but also some kind of sandwich for lunch.

It was pounding down snow as we left Montreal across the bridge, and it got worse as we travelled into rural Quebec. The engines failed once before we got to the border, but were restored by the time we hit Rouses Point, which is good: the heat in the cars depends on electricity. The Customs and Immigration guys did a good quick job, possibly because only one Arab guy was on the train and only one black guy had an attitude, a large Jamaican chap who thought each question was an attack on him personally. The trip didn't turn hellish until we were in the U.S.

Rodney had said something about six inches being nothing: it was looking like 18 inches before this was over. Being in a train, and having done plenty of train travel in Germany during bad winters, I was just thinking that it was probably nicer than flying when the first major outage hit. It was a total whiteout; no way to tell where we were. The train stopped, the lights went out. It began to cool off. Then the lights went on, the train lurched a few hundred feet, and the lights went off again. There were two conductors who were serving the train, a tall Irish-looking guy who looked like his older brother might have been NYPD, and a short, brash young woman who had a clear, piercing voice. They gave us status updates whenever they had something to report. This start-and-stop stuff went on for about three hours. It was, from what I could make out from the reports, due to the engines just refusing to accept this weather. "It's been like this all winter," the young woman told me. "The engines are just worn out; it hasn't been like this since '07."

Then, a miracle: the electricity caught and stayed. We could, if the tracks were still good, keep going and only be an hour late. Ah, but the tracks weren't good. But no worry: at the cost of some more time, a vehicle was being sent up to correct the problem. It arrived.

It derailed. It tipped over.

Another crew was sent out to rescue the repair vehicle. Which would then still have to fix the tracks so we could proceed. We were shunted onto a sideline. A freight passed, going the other direction. The sun began to go down and the sky became a colored grey instead of grey. It's hard to say what color or colors were infecting the grey and cheering it up some, but it sure looked nice, briefly. It was sometime after four. We were somewhere south of Rouses Point and north of Plattsburg. We were there for four hours.

There's not a whole lot to say about waiting. We waited. I read just about everything I'd brought with me for the whole trip. I gave up on a New York Times puzzle from the Friday paper and finished the last Sunday one I had with me, wishing I'd been somewhere I could have gotten the new Sunday Times magazine, which has been redesigned. The Jamaican guy complained; he was going to Washington D.C. I was wondering when we'd get in. An attempt to book the same hotel I'd had earlier in the trip for Monday night had failed, and I'd had to pay more than I'd wanted for a room, but it was in the magnificent New Yorker Hotel, whose Deco architectural details I'd been able to see out the window of my last hotel, and I was eager to see what it was like on the inside.

We paced. We went into the club car, where free "snack packs" filled with questionable stuff (one pack of white, salty triangles had a notation that said for ingredients, we should call an 800 number or write, which was ominous, although they seemed to be rice crackers, but...is that legal?) were handed out. There were Starbucks Frappuccinos to keep me awake. Finally, the crew passed through to tell us we were ready to roll, that Plattsburgh would be next in about twenty minutes, and the train started up.

But we were late. There were still stops to be made, although no one got on or off. Rebellious smokers found a car to smoke in, or just outside of in the vestibule. I was stiff. And we still weren't at Albany. At Albany, there'd be a crew change and a ten-minute layover. Experienced Adirondack travellers said it was almost exactly two hours from Albany to Penn Station.

We hit Albany at half-past midnight.

I dozed, I read, I paced to the club car, I proudly resisted the temptation of another $1.75 four-ounce bag of taco chips with so much seasoning on them they seemed to have grown artificial chili-flavored fur. I also didn't get another Frappuccino. I wanted to sleep.

At 2:34 am, we pulled in, and I finally stepped off the train. It should be noted that the Albany crew offered no apologies, there was no voucher offered for being six and a half hours late, and there was no other sort of gesture in the direction of what the rest of the world considers service. I once was delayed badly on Deutsche Bahn, and wound up with a €50 travel voucher. Several other times, I was given coupons of one sort or another for one kind or another of systemic problems. The only institutional feeling I got off of Amtrak was "Get off the train quickly so the cleaning crews can get on."

It's not a surprise that Amtrak isn't supposed to exist, that the Powers that Be in Washington have been trying as hard as they can to kill it for decades, that its rolling stock sucks, that the trillion-plus miles Americans drove last year were good for them, and that President Obama's attempt to introduce a high-speed rail network such as other civilized countries have is doomed because there's no Federal money for it and the states in which it would run (with the exception, apparently, of California) have rejected it because their Republican legislators don't want no damn Negro telling them how to travel and besides, they, too, are broke. As someone who's been riding the European train lines for nearly two decades, all I have to say is you don't know what you're missing. Of course, you'd also have to upgrade the service, but gee, that would mean hiring semi-skilled people and training them to do things like walk a snack cart with nearly-edible offerings on it up the aisle, use a boil-in-bag setup for hot meals, and have a coffee cart with decent coffee on it.

As for the end of the trip, I bolted out of Penn Station, with the New Yorker two blocks away, stepping over people sleeping on the floor, having fistfights just inside the door, and leaking bodily fluids of various sorts, ran to the gorgeously-lit lobby of the hotel, and discovering that they couldn't find my reservation. Thirty additional minutes later, it was discovered that Expedia Canada had hyphenated my middle name with my last name, resulting in my not being with the Ws, but I got my key, went upstairs, threw my clothes into a heap on the floor, and, between 3:30 and 8:00, slept in the New Yorker Hotel like I'd wanted to do since I was a kid. I really must go back some day to enjoy it: it's old-school New York (the heavy bathroom, the firehose shower), with all mod cons (wi-fi, excellent bed). But at 8, I was up and getting ready to go to Philadelphia.

A Remedy For Montreal Weather

I suppose there are worse times to visit Montreal than just at this moment, but I'd be hard-pressed to name them. The transition to spring involves lots of cold rain, which, on the ground, turns to ambiguous ice: is it frozen, or just slush? Your feet start taking on a mind of their own and your center of gravity lurches. Okay, it's ice: find the safety of a snowbank.

We slogged to a historical monument-cum-museum, the Maison St.-Gabriel, a mansion that a fur-trader sold to a nun who was one of the first women in the Quebec colony. She turned it into a school/chapel/house for the  young women the French crown recruited to marry the men who'd settled the colony, known as the filles du roy, daughters of the king. My friends Terry and Patricia have just bought a house in the Point St. Charles area, the first landfall of the Europeans in the Montreal area, and this is, as it were, in their back yard.

There are tours on the hour, the only way to see the place. We had 37 minutes to wait, so we slogged back to the apartment, then slogged back. When we returned (after a really informative tour) the power was out. There was only one thing to do: Chinese food.

Terry had arranged for some local media types to join us at Cuisine Szechuan, 2350 Rue Guy. I'd been there last year, but my sense of taste was gone, as it had been for a year, and I only got the sense that the food was spectacular. This time, since I started recovering this summer and am almost back, I got more than that. My new camera even has a setting for shooting food, and I hope I didn't act too obnoxiously as plate after plate arrived at our table and I stood up and tried to shoot it before it all disappeared. Look at this, for instance, which I think is called "Beef and Vegetables in Chili Sauce."

Not as obscenely hot as it looks, but rich, deep flavors. Another total winner, cumin lamb:

Aromatic, subtle (maybe a little too subtle, considering the other dishes), perfect.

One problem with this place is they bring stuff in almost random order, so that the appetizer of sliced green chiles with preserved vegetables showed up in the middle of everything else and almost got ignored.

Then there was a simple dish of bok choi in garlic sauce:

And the Szechuan classic, dry-fried green beans, which I've never had better than here:

And (slightly out of focus), twice-cooked pork, another Szechuan classic. The pork was, authentically, pork belly, which squicked out some of the folks at the table. By the time it came, I was quite full from all of this (there were several other dishes whose photographs just didn't turn out, including soft tofu and eggplant casserole which was astounding, and pressed tofu and celery, a masterpiece of texture and taste), but it seemed pretty good if you picked pieces of pork which weren't 100% fat.

The meal concluded with a tureen of simple soup: chicken broth, fluffy pork meatballs, and some glass noodles, light, strong enough to stand up to the residual tastes from the rest of the banquet, but cooling and refreshing. After a meal like this, you're ready for whatever the Montreal night can throw at you. And for bed.

Half A Day In New York

Been a really weird day so far. I walked all the way across town to have an expensive but delicious deli breakfast -- corned beef hash with three eggs, onion bagel, toasted, schmear -- and found myself lost in what New York now is as I walked there and back through Murray Hill in the biting 20-degree temperature with the wind ripping through me. Who lives in these exquisite brownstones? Besides people in Woody Allen films and the very rich? A question that would come back later. 


Came back to the hotel and went through a bunch of rigamarole with the bank: they wanted me to report the theft to the NYPD, which I thought was a good idea, and the woman I talked to when I finally found the right number told me I could just make a report at the local station house around the corner and they'd send it up to Harlem. But no: the cop at the station (first time I've ever been in one, oddly enough) told me I had to go to Harlem and report it there. Had no idea how to get there, either. "You got a car?" As if. 

I wasn't about to go up there, so instead I decided to go to this gallery which had had a show I read about in the New Yorker which dealt with some stuff I'm researching to see if they had a catalog. They will have one, the girl at the desk told me, but it's in the early stages of production. 

Looked at a couple of other galleries on that block, but only went into one which was a tedious bunch of snapshot-quality pix of Chinese people in dorms and various druggy Danes doing drag and drugs, all by some Danish guy. Dull. Even some of the stuff I saw in Berlin was more interesting than that. 

I was depressed enough by the people I was seeing in the street, especially the 20-somethings who looked like they'd come to New York to do art or act or something but had gotten crushed by the economy. An awful lot of dog-walkers, all wearing the same knit Kurdish caps, although they were young Americans. And old guys -- my age -- standing on the corner as the wind drove down the avenues trying to hand off discount coupons to fast-food joints. 


But not far after I'd left the gallery block, I came upon something wonderful. I read the sign and then I climbed up some stairs and found myself on the High Line. This is an abandoned railroad line that's just been sitting there, in this industrialzed riverside stretch of mid- and downtown, forever. Someone who'd been to Paris and seen a very similar project there suggested turning it into a park. I've never been on the one in Paris, although I've walked past it enough, but this was great. It's got art installations, and the first one made me realize why the High Line is such a good idea. The guy's got a white metal plate on which geometrical shapes are cut through. This is on a stand. A few feet away and absolutely parallel to it is another stand with a cube on it. A square has been drilled into the cube. If you look through the square hole in the cube, you can align the cityscape perfectly with the white shapes. so that you're seeing details of the view without their context. Absolutely brilliant. I walked on, and then came upon a sound installation which played a different New York bell every minute of the hour. Some are famous, like the starting bell at the New York Stock Exchange, some obscure, like the Zen temple one I heard. There are tables and chairs around, and some places that look like they might sell food when it's not 20º out there. A great place to sit and have lunch and listen to bells. 

The first installation had reinforced something I already knew: New York is beautiful from a distance, or regarded as an artwork, but not so much close up. There were some amazing views of the river, the decaying old docks, and just random views up obscure streets. What's below is a part of Manhattan most people have no reason to visit, with wholesale button companies, the floral district, and, where the thing ends, the meatpacking district, which, thanks to some Mafia-owned underground gay bars, has blossomed into the Unaffordable Restaurant District. I fled as soon as I descended onto Gansevoort St., and found myself in the West Village, which has become gag-me chic and littered with outlets of companies I'm sure New Yorkers think are oh-so-sophisticated, but which I recognize as stores I walk past in the mall going from the supermarket to the wine store back in Montpellier. I wandered on, because I wanted to see what SoHo and TriBeCa look like today. I wish I hadn't. 

It wasn't just the guy talking on the cell phone who turned the corner too fast in his SUV and hit the young woman crossing the street full-on. That was awful, but it could be rationalized by the way things are here: everyone in a hurry (a problem dating to the 18th century which I doubt will ever be fixed) and utterly self-absorbed (a problem that's been coming on strong for the past few decades). No, I'd been walking down once-familiar streets. Once they'd had the signs of furtive enterprise, with gallery names and names of projects on the doorbells, a lot of industrial stuff on the way out -- wholesale cardboard boxes, shirt factories -- and the occasional business on the ground floor selling fashions crafted in one of those lofts, a couple of Italian bars that wouldn't let you in, a record store or two, an organic restaurant, and, on the side streets, huge galleries showing important artists who usually had studios not more than a couple of blocks away. There were three bars: the Greene St. Bar, the Broome St. Bar, and the Prince St. Bar, just so that when you felt like a drink with your friends, you didn't have to walk too far: they're essentially a block apart. When things started changing and expensive (but independently-owned) shoe stores and the like started moving in, they endured. So did the Kitchen, the avant-garde performance space, where I'd seen so many people in the course of a festival a few months before I moved to Texas in 1979. And Dean and deLuca, the gourmet grocery. That was still cool and there really was a Dean and a deLuca, who were real guys selling fancy food to artists whose stuff was beginning to sell. 


Well, I already knew the Kitchen was down where I'd gone to the gallery because I passed it and a friend of mine is playing there on Friday and Saturday when I'll be in Montreal. It, like everything else, was priced out of the neighborhood. And...was it still a neighborhood? Was anyone living in these lofts? Well, of course they were, young and rich. Who were they? Who cares Downstairs, cheek and jowl, were brand stores. One after another, flying the flag for something you can find in the mall, with "limited edition" shit you can't get in the mall that still has the logo. More extensions of French chains. Precious little restaurants, some of which, actually, might be okay; I didn't stop to read a menu. (That corned-beef hash was still with me.) Finally, I was walking up one street and I saw a flag: OK Harris. All right! That was a great gallery. I hadn't heard much about them of late, but then, I haven't followed the New York art scene lately, either. I got closer and closer and was about to cross in the middle of the block when...I saw it was a cigar shop. With little rooms where you could smoke. No trace of the gallery. No trace of the Greene St. Bar. No trace of the Prince St. Bar. The Broome, thank god, endures. I almost went in to have a beer in celebration. I think that was where I saw the graffito in the men's room that said "Congratulations: you're in the one place in this neighborhood that does not appear in A Woman Under the Influence." Someone knew the end was nigh in 1979. It has arrived. Long ago, I suspect; I wasn't paying attention. 

Month-End Miettes: A Voyage Begins

February, another month with not much happening. Well, that's not strictly true: I've been preparing for a month-long visit to the U.S., as usual, for South by Southwest. It's the 25th anniversary this year, and I'm on a panel entitled "I'm Not Old, Your Music Does Suck," which ought to be, um, interesting.

I didn't blog at all when I made this trip last year, then summed everything up when I returned, although I was trying to keep the topic of this blog solidly on my life in France. But there are too many interesting things going on at SXSW, too many issues that affect what I do for a living, not to write about it. So I'll try to check in once in a while to update all of this. I'll also be going to New York, Montreal, Philadelphia, and Cecilia, Louisiana on this trip if all goes well, and the couple of days I'll be in Cajun country might well inspire me to unleash the old camera.

"If all goes well" is the operative phrase there. Yesterday, someone spoofed my debit card and emptied out my bank account. This is all the more annoying because a couple of weeks ago, the bank shut me down briefly for "suspicious activity" and I led a not-too-bright young man through my upcoming itinerary, with dates, so that the bank wouldn't do that again. They should have known I was still in France instead of on upper Broadway in New York yesterday, but...they didn't. So right now, I'm waiting for America to wake up so I can figure out what to do next and how I can lay hands on some dough that's been sent to the account so we can shut it down. Everything ought to be okay in about ten days, but living through that's going to be the challenge. Wish me luck.

Update: This post was composed while I was impatiently awaiting 8am, New York time, when the help center opens. After posting, I Google mapped 4058 Broadway, where the ATM was. There's a Bank of America there. Also a check-cashing service and a drugstore, which are much more likely venues for the fake card to have been used. It's at Broadway and 117th St., not somewhere I plan to visit soon.

I drew two excellent helpers once I got on, one in Customer Service and the other in Detection (!), and they shut the card down temporarily. Now when my money arrives -- Monday, most likely -- we'll open it up, grab the money here, and shut it down again. So with luck, I'll be able to get out of here as planned. Now if I just had someone who wanted to take me out to dinner tomorrow night, all would be swell: I got robbed before I could get grocery money.

* * *

I haven't been to the market all week, but last time I went, one of the organic stands was selling something I pick up on the rare occasions I see it: "Japanese Mixture," a collection of salad greens that's fantastically spicy and bitter, a perfect wintertime salad. Past arugula and, I think, spinach, I can't identify any of these greens.

I know there's a doctoral student in botany who sometimes reads the blog, but I'm not looking for the Latin here. It's mostly dark green with some red. The yellow cast is the lightbulb's fault; I'm still learning how to use the camera to avoid stuff like that.

Anyway, by the time I get back, with luck there'll be some more choices in the market. It's already warming up. Life down here's about to get nice again. Well, I hope it does, at least.

Some Notes on Jewish Montpellier

Every time I've walked up the hill via the main street, the rue de la Loge, I've passed it: a hat store. An odd little place it is, too: a relic of another time on the street with the art-directed windows of high fashion and mass-market attempts at high fashion. It's brown, and the wooden letters spelling out CHAPEAUX seem to be falling off. In the window, arranged neatly, there are hats. They're not on mannequin heads, nor is there anything trendy about how they're displayed. They're offered, as it were, as information.

I have a flat wool cap from Ireland that I like, but it needs replacing. Last spring, when it was warm enough to work with the windows open, it got some odd attention: a huge wasp flew in the window, then went over to the cap and hung out for a while. Then it left. About 30 minutes later, it came back and hung out on the cap. Then it left again. The irritated me: I didn't want this humongous insect in my house, and it was really distracting me. Plus, who knew what it was doing to the cap? So I went into the kitchen, got a plastic bag, sealed the cap in the bag, and hung the bag from the hat-rack. The wasp returned, flew all over the house, spent about 45 minutes trying to figure out what was wrong and finally departed. It's nice to know that wasps aren't too bright. I decided that maybe the cap was too funky and I should stop in this odd shop and buy a new one when the weather got cold.

But I went in there before that, as it turned out. A woman I'd known in Austin came through with her family during the summer, and told me she had a couple of things she wanted to do. The first was to take a picture: she was utterly convinced that French supermarkets sold vibrators. I'd never seen such a thing, but I had to prove it to her, and she was disappointed. The other thing was to buy a beret for her husband. This isn't exactly beret country, but I figured if anyone would have them, the odd little hat shop on the rue de la Loge would be the place. The guy was nice enough, and she finally found something she liked, and I hung out in the store, absorbing its ambiance. I never did go back for a warm hat, but I swear, if the shop lasts the year, I will this year.

* * *

Last Sunday was nice and warm, and I remembered a suggestion Gerry had had for a place for one of my epic walks, the Domaine de Merle. I looked at the map, and it seemed to be a large house set in a green park not far from the St.-Lazaire Cemetery. Not a very long walk at all, I realized, so I set off on Sunday afternoon to find it.

I'd been up the road, the Avenue de Saint Lazaire, several times before, but always with a destination beyond it in mind after the first time I walked it and came back to puzzle out the Resistance Monument and its relation to Helen of Savoy, Queen of Italy and Montenegro, who hid out here during World War II.

She died in her lavish apartments in the hotel which is now the Holiday Inn, just around the corner from me, and is buried in St.-Lazaire.

It's a huge cemetery, large enough that it has two satellite graveyards, and as I passed the first one I saw a large black monument shaped like half of a ship's wheel. Curious, I walked in and found myself at an extension of the Jewish cemetery. Now, I'd seen the first part of this last year when I was walking up to Castelneau, and had been puzzled by it. Its location outside the cemetery walls was provocative.

But the extension was only geographically isolated from the Christian plots, and, I realized, there was no anti-Jewish agenda here, only that the Jews wanted to be buried together. Maybe this wasn't the case when the other half of the graveyard had been started, but I couldn't figure out how to get into it, so there was no way to tell. Interestingly, most of the names in the new section showed Northern African origins: Shelbroum, Barchemoul, Sulem, Benboussan. So I walked over to the old part, the part I could see from the large road which could take me to the road leading to Castelneau, shot the above picture, and strained to see if I could make out a name. The only one I could see for sure was the one with the white plaque on it, which was all in Hebrew except for a small bit at the bottom which had the name Guinzberg. Now, that was familiar: Serge Gainsbourg had started out a Ginsburg.

I made a note to investigate further, backtracked to the road leading to the Domaine de Merle, took the wrong fork, walked for another hour at least up a hill filled with nice bourgeois houses until it dead ended at a fancy tennis club and a sign pointing to the zoo. I was lost.

* * *

Now, the way I always heard the story, a thousand years ago, this was a spice-trading port. The ships, largely run by North African Muslims who were the masters of Mediterranean shipping and had connections at the end of the Spice Route in Turkey, docked at what's now called Port Marianne, which today is a tram stop with some gleaming new apartment buildings one passes on the way to Ikea and the Odysseum. The trade was financed by Spanish and Moroccan Jews, and French Christians operated the routes north to important destinations like Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Paris where they sold the spices at a nice profit. The ships would dock, the spices would be unloaded, and from time to time, there'd be samples someone had handed off in hopes of stimulating a new trade in that item. The mysterious substance would have alleged for it various cures: it lessened the pain of menstrual cramps; it killed toothache; put some on a wound and it would heal quicker. Who knew if any of it worked? And why miss a lucrative new piece of inventory if it did?

So at one point, a deal was worked out: the Muslims had a system, the ancestor of today's scientific method, and the system was teachable. Thus, it would be possible to do experiments with these substances to verify the claims. All that was needed was a building in which to do this and the money to pay the scientists they'd bring over from Spain. The Jews had the money, and the Christians would donate one of their hospitals, which were as much hotels for pilgrims, since the town was on the route to Santiago de Compostella, as they were healing establishments. One of the earliest is landmarked on the side of the Monoprix on the Comédie.

Some of the items did, in fact, work as advertised, and soon, people were coming to the institution to learn about this. And, thus, somewhere along the way Montpellier University was founded as a medical school, with financial input from the French nobility, the Spanish Muslims, and the Jews, who were also working on publishing theological treatises.

Over the years, the harbor silted in and became unusable, the Spaniards threw first the Muslims, then the Jews, out of Spain, and yet a Jewish community, small, but prestigious, hung on in Montpellier. There's an ancient mikvah, a ritual bath, underneath one of the old buildings here, and you can sign up at the Tourist Bureau to take the tour of it twice a week. The building itself has signs about Montpellier's history of science and medicine and the part the Jews played in building it up. Eventually, of course, the Jews got expelled here, and then returned, and after a while the story gets very complicated. They never totally left, of course, not in a place devoted to learning.

* * *

You can read more about this in the Jewish Encyclopedia, and the Jewish Virtual Library, if you'd like, but the story that was utterly unknown to me when I did a Google search on "jews+montpellier" was the one that cropped up on a blog from 2007. It told the story of Alfred, the hatmaker, and proprietor of that place selling CHAPEAUX on the rue de la Loge. I commend it to your attention. And if the weather's nice tomorrow, I may well attempt the Domaine de Merle yet again.

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. 


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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.