Things I Like

Ow. I took an 8-kilometer hike today (that's about five miles) to Celleneuve, an ancient village that's been engulfed by Montpellier, and I'll have some on that tomorrow, but along the way I snapped some photos of stuff I like.

Like street art (so much more fun than the Berlin variety, for the most part):

and lizards:

(Thanks for standing still, dude. Have a nice winter!)

And gigantic pine trees, even though their falling pine cones can dent your cranium real good:

It was a great day for a walk, and I know there aren't many more left this year.

Tomorrow, my somewhat anticlimactic goal.

Midmonth Miettes

The Sud de France people set up on the Comédie this weekend, and as you might expect, it was a celebration of fall. The two products most in evidence were ones I don't have much use for: chestnuts and honey. Guys roasting chestnuts over open fires drew large crowds, weirdly enough, although maybe I'm just blasé from having seen this so much in New York. It smells good, but I just don't like the taste of chestnuts. As for honey, I can't really think of anything I want to make that I could use it in.

Another big draw was a truck whose side opened up to show a small kitchen, where several chefs prepared meat dishes while an MC to the side made comments. I didn't have the patience to stand there and watch, and I'm not eating that much meat as it is, thanks to finances. There were a few wineries represented, although nothing too interesting, and a couple of olive producers. The biggest hit with me was the best Roquefort I've yet tasted, from a firm called Carles. Creamy, tangy, with just a hint of the barnyard in it, I regretted not having the cash to buy a wedge from M. Carles, who was handing out little slivers on pieces of bread. I also picked up guides to tourism and gastronomy in the Aude, which is Cathar castle country.

There was also a guy selling squash of various kinds, and I finally got to get a slice of this long, green-skinned squash with a bright orange interior, about five inches in diameter that I've been seeing around the markets. On the recommendation of some cooking experts, I coated it with olive oil, wrapped it in foil, and stuck it in the oven for an hour. It barely softened, but at least I know what it tastes like now, so I'll try to score another disc and try again. The variety was listed as Langue de Nice, and may be known in America as banana squash, but I'm not sure. The guy who was selling it was too surly to engage in conversation: I made a small grammatical error and he switched to bad English, refusing to change back, and sneered at me. I've only had that experience with Germans in the past; maybe he was a spy.

* * *

I frequently awaken in the middle of the night, thanks to Les Lunkheads downstairs coming in and firing up their stereo and throwing bottles at each other, although this has tapered off as the cool weather has come in because they've been keeping their windows closed. But one thing that helps me get back to sleep is a drone that happens in the early morning hours, a drone with a hissing beneath it. It's the sound of the streets being buffed, the streets and, of course, the vast expanse of the Comédie. Small vehicles with buffing brushes cover the square and the many pedestrianized streets, which are made out of polished limestone. As I fall asleep, I never fail to wonder that I live in a town where they polish the streets.

* * *

Since I've wanted to add some art coverage to this blog, I trooped up to the St. Anne church the other day, alerted by one of the free magazines we get in our mailboxes, an "independent information magazine" with the bizarre name Chicxulub, which, it turns out, is the name of the crater in Mexico where the meteorite which allegedly caused the extinction of the dinosaurs hit. They were among the sponsors of the first "Salon du dessin contemporain" there, and although I took a notebook along, I didn't see a thing to engage my interest. I also wondered what it was I'd gone to see. "Dessin," my dictionary confirms, means "drawing," and yet there wasn't a lot of drawing there. There were a bunch of canvases which looked like the kind produced for interior decorators, some of the usual shocking-to-be-shocking stuff, and one piece which impressed me: someone had arranged a bunch of matchheads in the wall in the shape of a phoenix, then lit them. The smoke stained the wall, and after it was all out, four more matchheads, red, were placed where the bird's eye would be. But for the most part, my guess is that this was an occasion for the local galleries to haul out the stuff they haven't been able to sell in order to entice prospective customers to shop under one roof. Oh, and for Habitat, which I understand Ikea is trying to unload, to hand out their new catalogue.

The other bit of art news is some photos by local news photographers being displayed on the Esplanade. Like the pretty-but-depressing Earth-from-above photos by Yann Arthus-Bertrand which had been out there until recently, I thought there would be a larger show inside the Pavillion Populaire, but apparently not. I was going to write about the Arthus-Bertrand show, but it moved on before I got the chance. Suffice it to say that the captions got wearisome, each image of abstract beauty explained, but no matter how uplifting the image seemed to be, there was always a downer at the end about how the resource pictured is disappearing, harming the environment, or wasn't able to be saved. There are other ways to present this material that don't make the viewer want to slash his wrists afterwards.

* * *

But there's another new artwork up on the Esplanade, if only briefly.

That's right, folks! Montpellier now has its own Berlin Wall. Of course, those of us who have seen the real thing will realize, thanks to the street-buffing guy walking in front of this one, that this one's much shorter than the original. Also, the rounded top isn't made of a different material, and isn't even round all the way: it'd be easy to hop this wall. It's also thinner than the original:

But there's a good reason for that: apparently on November 9, the 20th anniversary of the opening of the German-German checkpoints between East and West Berlin, the city's going to hand out sledgehammers for people to knock this one down. I may wander out to see this, although I certainly heard enough chip-chipping from Mauerspechern 20 years ago (the souvenir market must be fed!) and I know this one's not made from asbestos-riddled concrete and reinforced by iron rods.

This little installation is the gift of the Maison du Heidelberg, which is the German cultural presence here. I'm not sure why there's not a Goethe-Institut, but maybe Montpellier doesn't rate high enough with the German culture bureaucracy for one. As someone who lived three blocks from the death strip on Bernauer Strasse for eleven years and then another year by Mauerpark, where the Wall crept up north, I find this sorta pathetic, but it'll probably be fun to knock down anyway.

Fall Comes To The Market

The seasons certainly are changing. I missed last Saturday's market because I already had enough stuff in the house and with visitors in town I'd be eating out and not cooking. I still have two yellow tomatoes and a bag of green beans from last week, in fact, but there was other stuff I was out of, so here's part of the haul.

Up in the corner is the first of this year's broccoli, gotten from the hippie farmer, who was already packing up at noon, but obligingly unpacked his scale and cashbox to weigh and get paid for this single head of broccoli. The transaction attracted more customers, though, so I don't feel bad about hindering his departure.

Underneath are two red pears. Pears and apples, particularly the latter, are showing up in quantity, and I've always had a soft spot for pears, so I'm trying a bunch of different varieties. These red ones are, I think, going to wind up in a salad with some toasted nuts and some of that slab of Roquefort to their right.

Onions and potatoes are also more in evidence, and these onions in particular looked great. Plus, I was out. Above them, some of the tubular tomatoes that'll top a pizza later this week, and a green-and-red tomato thrown in as lagniappe by the tomatologist's assistant. Just below the parsley, you can see that the last eggplants are kind of funky, but these are actually in better shape than you'd think. And finally, more pears, these juicy as can be, although the skin is very rough, thick and tasteless. These wouldn't work in a salad, and are better out of hand. Two of these no longer exist, in fact, having disappeared very shortly after this photo was taken.

Not in the picture is a head of lettuce, and some Parmesan, which I got at the same cheese shop up the hill in the Halles as I got the Roquefort, and a loaf of bread from the second-best baker in France, whom I saw today pulling baguettes out of his coal-fired oven, since he'd opened his baking room to the street. My shopping is pretty much done for the week, so what remains is to enjoy what you see here.

Knocking Around The Zoo

The Extreme Walks continue. A week ago Sunday, I got it into my head to figure out where the Montpellier Zoo is. I'd heard it was free, and it appeared to be in a huge park to the north. I figured to myself that it was easy enough to walk north, so I took off. Remarkably, I went the right way, but I was actually, I see by the map, too far to the east to actually hit the Zoo, and I would have eventually come to Castelneau-le-Lez again. Fortunately, a road sign alerted me to that, and I went down a remarkable street called the Rue de Nazareth, which took me around the back of the huge military school which nests in the north end of the Beaux Arts district. This street is lined with ancient villas, some of which are attached to the military school, others of which are private. Their grandeur and solitude have been compromised by the encroachment of boxy apartment complexes, but it's still cool to see the big wall with the gate and barely glimpse the two-story stone house within, cushioned from the street by a stand of stately trees.

I then hit a larger street going off at a 90-degree angle and knew this was the road north. It climbed gently uphill, and at one point, I hit a long, narrow park called St. Odille Park, which was a nice relief from the sun, and filled with French Girl Scouts doing their thing. From there it was a brief walk to the University Paul Valérie (the arts and letters division of the main University), which I knew was near the Zoo. The road made a V, and there was a map, so I took the right-hand road, and, after passing more villas and apartment complexes, it got steeper and led to a large sports stadium which was crawling with security, for some reason. Just past that was the entrance to the Zoo, where, except for a building in which there's a mockup of an Amazonian rain-forest (which has its own webcam) and costs €6, the whole place is, indeed, free.

There were a couple of drawabacks, though. First, it was Sunday. On Sundays, every parent in the world who's got bored kids in the house has an idea: let's go to the zoo! Especially if it's free! And, since it's a "zoological park," there's loads of room for the kids to run around. This is good for parents, not so good for solo visitors. Second, I got there at feeding time. Lots of animals don't like to be gawked at while eating (this human included), so the keepers tend to leave the food in a private place and the animals go there to feed. I was told that the lemur exhibit was particularly cool, and I got to see a bunch of lemur butts as they ran into their enclosure to eat.

I wandered around some, and finally saw some large antelopes called addaxes back in an exhibit. Those, and the parrots rioting in a cage by the entrance, were the only animals I saw. But I was also critically aware of one thing: I was far from home, and needed to get back, and the only way I was sure of how to do that was to walk back. I hate walking back the way I came, though, but I was pretty sure that I hadn't come the easy way. By the time I was back at Paul Valéry, I saw signs to the center of town, so I just followed them. This led me a totally different way than I'd come, past a huge hospital complex, a small sports stadium, and a bar that specializes in beers of the world, where I'm going to head sometime soon for a beer which (unlike French beers) tastes like a beer. Then there were a bunch of unfamiliar buildings that were at least 100 years old, but I'd never seen before, a hill, and, next thing I knew, I was coming up one side of the Jardin des Plantes and found myself over on the northwest corner of the centre ville!

So what did I wind up doing the next Sunday? A couple of friends from Berlin (with whom I'd done a food blog when I lived there) were visiting, and they'd bought picnic supplies and wanted to eat outdoors, since the weather was great. I thought they meant in one of the parks near the house, but they wanted to go to...the Zoo! So this time we took the tram and the shuttle which runs to the Zoo from the St. Eloi tram stop, far less taxing on the feet, and instead wore ourselves out finding the picnic area at the "Asian swamp" display.

The Zoo, you see, is a park. You walk and walk down trails (10km worth), and then there'll be a fence. That will be an exhibit where, if you're lucky, you can see animals. Almost without exception, the animals at the Zoo are suited to life in a climate like the one here, and don't require a lot of water (so there are no hippos and no elephants). There's an emphasis on endangered species (which, of course, is a classic way for zoos to get funding), and nothing really showy. One exception to the dry-climate rule are the rhinos, who need a wallow:

But beyond that, you've got things like onagers (the ancestor of the modern donkey), various deer and antelopes, buffalo, a bear pit with gorgeous Siberian grey bears, and this guy, whose name I forgot to write down, but is the world's largest flying bird. (Oh, and speaking of water, we did find the Asian swamp picnic area, but the swamp itself was temporarily out of business, for some reason).

Since he's a couple of meters tall, I would love to see him take off. My guess he needs those long legs to achieve escape velocity.

The other thing about the Zoo being a park is that the trails wind around, and, being on top of a hill, every now and again, you'll get a great view. On our way from the bears to the lions, through a break in the trees, this beautiful village appeared, with Pic St. Loup looming behind it. The picture doesn't get the whole thing, but it just made me appreciate, once again, where I'm living.

Yup, for €1.60 you can take a bus to that view. Next task is to figure out what that village is. It, too, may be walkable from a bus stop. But that's for another day. The weather is cooling off, though, and while the sun shines, that makes it ideal for walking.

Europe's Best Burger

EDITED JULY 18, 2012: This has become one of the most popular of all the posts on this blog, so it behooves me to update it. Since I wrote this, the Vert Anglais has changed owners amidst some scurrilous rumors. I'm sorry the old owners have gone, and their chef departed long ago. Thus, I haven't been back, and I'd be surprised if any of the information about the Vert Anglais Burger below still holds. It might -- and there's no doubt that the publicity this place got upped the quality of burgers elsewhere in town. But until I try them again -- unlikely, but possible -- this judgement of Europe's Best Burger has now been suspended until further notice. Sorry!

* * *

Okay, let's admit it: nobody comes to Europe to eat hamburgers. There's simply too much European food around. But most of us Americans who live here miss them from time to time. And boy, can finding a decent one be a chore.

I first felt the craving a few months after moving to Berlin. I lost it almost immediately: a friend stopped by a place offering hamburgers and ordered one. The cook reached into the freezer, extracted a frozen patty, loaded it into a fryolater basket and dunked it in the hot grease.

Some years later, some friends opened a Tex-Mex restaurant, for which I consulted on the Tex end of the menu. I gave them my secret recipe for hamburgers, which involves a little something to be mixed into the meat. The chef, a Chilean (and, hence, a know-it-all), decided not to add the stuff to the meat, and, instead, sauteed it along side and put it on top. This doesn't work. (But he also decided my chicken-fried steak recipe was too simple, so he added enchilada sauce to the cream gravy, thereby ending the flood of transplanted Americans who were patronizing the place). They soon pulled the Tex part of the menu except for the burgers, which were the same frozen patties.

In fact, frozen patties were in use all over town until The Bird opened. Owned by transplanted New Yorkers, it made everything -- hamburgers, fries, sauces -- from scratch. Only the buns were problematic: for some reason, European hamburger buns dissolve before you're through eating the burger. The Bird compensated for this by using toasted English muffins, which were almost, but not quite, as bad.

But that's not a Bird burger atop this post. It's the Vert Anglais Burger, €12 worth of triumph over improbability. By this, I mean that it's served at a place owned by British people, who, collectively, have never figured out what a hamburger is, and cooked by a French chef, one of a people who, while quite good at le steack haché, have never thought the hamburger was worth figuring out.

And I am awarding it the prize of Europe's best burger because, although the Bird's chef has many wonderful variations, he's an American. The Vert Anglais Burger is an interpretation of an American cheeseburger by a chef who's aware of both American and French traditions and has fused them perfectly. For instance, that little dish with the orange sauce in it? That's nothing more or less than a sort of hommage to la sauce sécrete du MacDo. It bears some resemblance to rouille, the cayenne-infused mayonnaise served with fish soup in classic southern French cuisine, and some is also included on top of the burger, which needs no ketchup. Also atop the burger is a bit of lettuce and some extremely fresh tomato. And note that bun: the chef has discovered how to toast it to a point where it is structurally sound. This also has the salutary effect of toasting the sesame seeds to a nutty goodness.

The fries, I think, are frozen, as are most fries in Montpellier restaurants, but they are so well cooked that I have to say "I think." And the salad yesterday wasn't the best I've had with this dish, because it was based around soybean sprouts, but it was certainly good enough.

What is happening at the Vert Anglais is interesting: when I was virtually living there, between last November and this March, I was always there for lunchtime, which was mostly served upstairs because the outdoor patio was too cold to eat at. There was a decent number of diners, although the menu wasn't terribly interesting. In recent months, however, there's been a decided upgrade of the lunchtime menu, while holding the price steady. The wine-list has expanded slightly, and now includes one of the local masterpieces, a 2007 Ollier-Taillefer red AOC Côtes du Languedoc. I rarely eat a large lunch, so I haven't tried the seiches à la plancha (cuttlefish briefly cooked on a hot sheet of metal) or one of the daily specials, but I have reports from at least one professional chef that superb work is taking place in the kitchen of the Vert Anglais.

I'm happy to see this upgrade happen, and was pleasantly surprised to get a new business card which no longer said Bar Vert Anglais, but Brasserie Vert Anglais. It'll be nice if they can figure a way to offer a dinner selection, although with the perils of the restaurant business being what they are, being conservative about this is always the best course. Meanwhile, though, in the evening until 9, there are "tapas," which is to say various fried items and a charcuterie plate, and one main-dish: the Vert Anglais Burger.

If you're visiting Montpellier from the States, the Vert Anglais is a great place for a French lunch or before-dinner drinks. But for those whose stomachs get homesick, it's great to have a superb hamburger so close at hand.

Brasserie Vert Anglais, 3 place Castellanne, 34000 Montpellier; phone 04 67 66 03 03. Open for lunch noon-2:30pm Mon-Sat (special English brunch on Saturday), tapas and burgers 6pm-9pm Mon-Sat.

Two Walks

Walking to the 13th Century: Hard times at the moment. No work, and incredibly difficult to get paid for the work I've done. No fewer than three checks have gotten lost in the mail over the past couple of months.

What I usually do at times like these is take a long walk. Staying home staring at the screen, waiting for e-mails that never come is counterproductive, and exploring my immediate surroundings is good exercise and helps me understand where things are. Maybe next time I'm lucky enough to be able to afford renting a car I won't get lost for a couple of hours trying to get out of town!

Thus, noticing that the temperature was stuck on a number that's supposedly the optimum for human life and noticing further that the sun was shining, and even further noticing that it was Monday and the U.S. wouldn't be awake for business for at least four more hours, I grabbed my hat and walked out onto an almost deserted Esplanade. I got to the end and looked out over the view and noticed a steeple. Okay, I thought, I'll walk to the church and thereby sharpen my navigational abilities.

As if. What I did was plunge into the Beaux-Arts district, so named for the art school it surrounds. A nice enough 'hood, but not that interesting. No sign of a church, though. I walked towards the freeway and noticed I was on the Avenue St. Lazare. Okay, then, I decided, I must be looking for St. Lazare church, so I walked up the street, following signs for the cemetery. It was a nicely-shaded street, with nothing much going for it beyond that, with apartment complexes here and there. Suddenly, I came upon a modern, ugly, dirty-earth-toned building and was astonished to see the words Jardin de Sens on it. This kind of ratty concrete building holds Montpellier's most famous, Michelin-starred hotel-and-restaurant complex? Yup, it does. To be fair, from looking at the website, I'd guess that the place is designed as an enclosure, and that the inside, be it of the restaurant or the hotel, looks inward rather than out onto the Avenue St. Lazare. I have to say, the Pourcel brothers' menu looks fussy to me, and this place isn't at the top of the list of places I'd like to go if I had money. And, with Insensé, their restaurant in the Fabre Museum, and a wine-and-tapas place on the hill, I have other, less expensive ways to figure out what they're doing.

Anyway, it wasn't open for lunch and I wasn't hungry and I couldn't afford it, so I carried on down the avenue. Where was that church? There were signs for the graveyard, and eventually I came upon the graveyard extension, the graves all crowded together like at Père Lachaise in Paris, but all newish. A bit further down the street was the main event, and right on the corner, in a sconce in the wall, there was a bust of a woman. "Hélène d'Italie, Cetinje 8 Janvier 1873 - Montpellier 28 Novembre 1952." A queen? But where in Italy is Cetinje? I walked a bit further, and there was a gate in the wall, so I walked in. A huge graveyard, just as crowded as the extension but many times larger stretched before me, and an arrow pointed to my right, saying "Tomb of Helen." I walked down the path and a huge black marble wall to my right had an inscription about the city of Montpellier and a tomb of members of the French Resistance and the Helen of Italy Foundation, and, in fact, there was a large boxy tomb in front of the wall. At the end of the path was a very large granite tomb with the simple word ELENA on it. I'm still not clear on what part she played in the Resistance or why she died and was buried in Montpellier and her Wikipedia entry, in which she's named Elena of Montenegro (although she was married to the last Italian king, making her Queen of Italy until the monarchy was abolished), isn't much help.

I'd forgotten all about the church by now (although if I'd seen it -- or any church, for that matter -- I might have remembered it), and was noticing signs to Castelnau-le-Lez, one of Montpellier's close-in suburbs. I figured that if I were that close, I might as well check the place out, so I turned right at the end of the street, and noticed that I was still on the Avenue St. Lazare and I was still outside the cemetery walls. This is a big 'un. And, in a break in the fence, I looked down and saw another cool thing. Blocked off from the rest of the cemetery is another cemetery for Jews. This isn't so much anti-semitism as it is the fact that the main graveyard is likely consecrated Catholic land on which only Catholics in good standing could be buried. I stared at the Jewish names, and wished I could figure a way to get in, but there didn't seem to be one from where I was standing, so I kept walking. Now I find myself wondering if there's another ghetto for nonbelievers and bad guys attached to the St. Lazare, like the "freethinkers" graveyard I found in Berlin one day.

I walked alongside what became a highway for a little while, and then came, inevitably, to a traffic circle, one of whose arrows pointed up a small hill to "Castelnau-le-Lez, Église XIII siècle." Really? A 13th Century church? Okay, that was worth a hike. And it was:

Up a twisty little street is the church of St. John the Baptist. From its incredibly thick walls and tiny windows, as well as some very hard-to-read inscriptions above some stones set in the walls inside it, I think (but I'm not quite sure) that this was a fortified Cathar church, although I wasn't aware the Cathars were very strong this far east, although now that I've read the intro to the Wikipedia article on Catharism, I note that the crusade against them was initiated by the murder of one Pierre de Castelnau, who was from the dioscese of Montpellier. Anyway, it's a neat little church, very obviously still in use, and worth walking all the way around to catch the odd little square on the other side from this photo.

The rest of downtown has its share of old buildings, but not this old, and so I rejoined the traffic circle, and soon was on a familiar street which took me back into downtown Montpellier. The whole walk took two and a half hours, and it wasn't until I was almost back where I started that I saw that damn steeple again. A look at the map, which shows churches, hasn't clarified a thing. But it doesn't matter: St. John the Baptist was way cooler.

* * *

Walking to the 21st Century: Tuesday didn't seem like it was going to be any more fun than Monday had been, and I'd gotten an e-mail from Marie saying she'd just been to the big mall at the Odysseum and thought it was like the ones we had in America. They've extended the tramline, too, so that you can now take the tram straight to Ikea down there, and I began to wonder if the Odysseum, the huge, sprawling part municipal, part commercial blot on an obscure corner of the city, was also walkable.

It is, but it's far less fun. Whereas the walk to Castelnau was dotted with old villas decaying behind high gates (but still lived in) and the Lez river flowing at what looks like about a mile an hour, if that, and the graveyards and all, the Odysseum lies due east, and the route there takes you through, well, not much. There are apartment complexes, of course, some so new they haven't taken the plastic off the windows, and there's construction, and dust and vacant lots. Eventually, you come to an industrial park with offices in it, and then to -- of course -- a traffic circle. A lot of roads lead to the Odysseum, unsurprisingly, and there are a lot of cars to look out for. (Even so, I'd rather be on foot than on a bike).

It wasn't much of a walk -- just over an hour -- but the real foot-punishment started when I got there. Indeed: inbetween the previous structures that I'd seen when I went to Ikea at the beginning of the year and Ikea itself, a gigantic shopping mall had grown up. This wasn't at all like an American mall, though: for one thing, it's outdoors. It's loaded with outdoor eating places and access to the majority of the stores is via outdoor escalators. It's going to be hell trying to shop there when it starts to rain, and I found myself wondering if the designers had even thought about that.

The stores are mostly run-of-the-mill chain stores, many of which are in the mall around the corner from me. Europe's first Apple store, the opening of which was breathlessly related in the local press back in June was nowhere to be seen although there's a Darty store where, if you have to, you can buy a Mac system. There was a cooking-accessories store where they didn't have a pizza stone, a Levi's store, and an ice cream store that had lines in front of it.

But the attraction of this new complex is the Géant. That means giant, and is the name of a chain of what the French call "hypermarkets." It's a supermarket where you can buy a Samsung flat-screen TV for €599 or (as I did) a block of lard for €1.50 (biscuits on Sunday! Yay!). The place is huge, and instead of wearing out my feet hiking along the road, as I had on Monday, I wore myself out cruising the 15oo square meters of this joint. Once you get used to the presentation, you realize that it depends on sheer volume to intimidate you into buying. When you come upon an aisle that has a sales item represented by a display that's 24 units across and four down, it's like being yelled at. Of course, if the product is something you already wanted, it's like confronting an endless supply of it. In fact, once I got used to the size, I was impressed by how much wasn't there. There's a much better supply of pasta in the Inno around the corner from me, for instance, and it's 1/8 the size.

The weirdest part of the whole experience, though, was when I went to check out with my lard, a bottle of wine that looked interesting (and was), and a bottle of water to soothe my parched throat. There was a huge number of checkouts, all empty. I went up to one and the guy told me I couldn't check out there: I had to go to the scanner. I walked into a corral with scanning machines in it, and a woman came over to help me. I'd used one of these before in the HEB in Austin, but this one worked differently. First, I chose my language, so I thought I'd see what it was like in English. It welomed me to Géant, and then switched back to French. The woman looked nervously on as I scanned my three items, then as I fed the money to pay for them into the machine. I then noticed that, unlike at the HEB, there were, of course, no bags. So I had to go through the whole thing again to pay 11 cents for a bag. "Don't lose this," the woman said, pointing to the bar code the scanner had printed out. "It's for the gate." And it's true: you can't leave the corral without it. This whole thing is such a pain in the ass I don't think I'd shop at this place if it were in my back yard, which it isn't.

It's only been open since Saturday, though, and they were still stocking some of the shelves. And it's nice to know you can go to Ikea on the tram. But I don't think my next walk will be to the Odysseum, although it's true that the aquarium is pretty nice. And yes, I took the tram back.

I'm still waiting to hear about work, and I'm still not getting paid, though. Where should I walk next, I wonder...

Autumnal Equinox Miettes

Been a while since I did a market still life, so I thought I'd show what's going on as the summer comes to a close:

Not much different from the rest of the summer, with one difference: the grapes in the upper left hand corner of the board, which are everywhere. They have seeds, which I've learned to ignore instead of spitting them out except the odd huge hard one, but they have remarkably little taste, due to a lack of acid. I was really hoping for something better. Ah, well: there are now tons of pears, although they seem to be coming from Italy, and I'm keeping an eye open for them and for heirloom apple types, which seem to be coming in from Provence, which is nearer.

The rest of the bounty here is fixin's for ratatouille, which has been running through my brain recently because of a breakaway idea I had for it (to be reported if it works). That's what the long tomatoes are for; the regular ones are from the tomatologist, and wound up in salads, except for the two small ones, which were in a pizza with one of the eggplants, an experiment which worked okay, but needs a bit of fine-tuning. Unfortunately, my pizza stone shattered during the cooking of this, and I need to hit some building-supply stores here in search of untreated terra-cotta tiles. Or maybe start a pizza-stone company to sell them to the many fancy-cooking places.

The blobby looking thing with the multi-colored exterior is a pepper saucisson sec, which seems to have too much fat for just slicing and eating, like I usually do with them for a light lunch. I'm going to cube up a bunch of it and throw it in the scrambled eggs with crisp potato cubes tomorrow for breakfast and see if it's got any redeeming qualities at all.

This photo is from Tuesday's visit. Today I got more stuff -- another melon, some green beans, some lettuce, the usual -- and added a pound of these things:

They're called cocos at the market, but what they are are fresh white beans. After buying a can of white beans the other day to make pasta a la fagioli I felt like an idiot, with these things fresh in the market. But on the other hand, I didn't know how to cook them. Turns out, the ever-reliable French Letters did, and I refer you to her post for further info. Not sure quite what I'll do with them yet, but there's always pasta a la fagioli! (Known to barbarians as pastafazool, if it sounds familiar...)

* * *

One thing that's at the market and on the streets these days is not (to the best of my knowledge) edible: kittens. Is this the time of year that cats have kittens? Because there are these old women pushing boxes on wheels and selling baby animals. The first one I saw was just off the Comédie, and I thought there were little Davy Crockett hats on sticks and it was a performing kittens show until I got closer and noticed that the "hats" were furry mice on springs for the kittens to bat. These old ladies are kid magnets, unsurprisingly, so you get to see lots of French parents being importuned by lots of French kids to buy a kitten to take home. At the Arceaux market last Saturday there was another one, and she also had a couple of puppies. These ladies are apparently in the business, because the boxes are decorated with pictures of baby animals and clowns, which latter would keep me from adopting one, no matter how cute it was. I also wonder: is this a scam of some sort? Their sudden appearance on the scene just makes me wonder. But then, I'm the kind of guy who'd look at a kitten and see a scam, aren't I?

* * *

Mentioning the great meeting of Montpellier's associations a couple of weeks ago, I seemed to have missed one I would have joined in a heartbeat: yesterday I learned about the Right To Sleep Association, which is concerned about the growing amount of noise in the streets late at night. I'm okay with a certain amount of it, and living just behind the Comédie, I get to hear some late-night drunkenness, but my downstairs neighbors, Les Lunkheads, have, as I've noted, overstepped the boundaries numerous times. The worst came a couple of weeks ago, when a woman went utterly insane about 5am and was pushed out the door and into the street, where she continued to scream incomprehensibly. The landlord got told about this, and took some kind of action.

But what's odd about Les Lunkheads is that they're not, as you'd guess, 20-somethings. "People into their mid-30s are acting like this," my Right To Sleep informant (who must remain anonymous for fear of late-night reprisals). "It would be one thing if it were teenagers feeling their hormones, or encountering alcohol for the first time, but it seems like it's becoming a regular form of behavior. My wife and I were sitting watching a film and we had to turn it off because we couldn't hear the soundtrack, thanks to the bar down the street -- and we had our windows closed in the middle of the summer!" Having experienced his own chapter of Lunkheads, he and some similarly affected types had meetings with the city, but as yet no plan has been hatched and no action taken. By the time the city figures out what to do, we'll all be sleeping with our windows closed and the problem will abate until next spring, just you wait and see.

* * *

I'm trying to remember: what French entity has my age on file? The telephone company? The bank? The reason I ask is that last week, along with my New Yorker, I found another magazine in my mailbox: Notre Devenir. On the cover, a hot woman with salt-and-pepper hair has placed her hands over the eyes of a guy her age, who's clearly enjoying it. "Our development?" What was this? I looked at the small type below the logo: "Magazine of information about services and pre-planning for funerals." I note that this is issue number one, dated August. Somehow, this is a magazine I can't imagine working for, and I wonder how often it comes out. (Interestingly, I've discovered that there are people who subscribe to bridal magazines for years and years, even after they get married, so I guess anything's possible. Well, except for the dead renewing their subscriptions to this one.) I didn't even break the plastic on this, though, so I can't tell you about how to get into Père Lachaise in Paris, which was one of the articles featured on the cover.

Okay, that was bad enough. This morning's mail, however, had a special offer for Siemens hearing-aids. Although, given the number of ear-bud wearers I see around me, that may not be an age-specific campaign at all...

* * *

This is second-best:

When I first visited here, in 2005, I chanced upon a bakery with a plaque outside which said that the baker there had been selected as the second-best baker in France. The Vieux Four St-Anne, though, isn't the kind of place you go into casually. It's small, and you'd better know what you want because there's always a line. I was intimidated, and on all my visits here, never went in. Then, when I moved here, I was around the corner from a fantastic bakery, so when I wanted a sandwich, it was no problem just to walk a couple hundred feet for a fresh baguette.

But this morning, I decided it was time to stick my head in the place, since it was on my way home from the market. I was in the mood for a sandwich, and I'd get a baguette to cut in half for one. There were several different sizes available, including a huge one that, after it went stale, could be used for a baseball bat. Interestingly, too, the baguette here was 85 cents instead of the €1.20 at my corner bakery. I ordered one, and the woman asked "Bien cuite?" ("Well done?") Great idea! She disappeared into the back, stuffed it into a paper bag, and took my money and handed it to me. I almost dropped it: it was still hot. Not warm: hot.

I let it rest while I took care of some business at home, and then made my sandwich. It was perfect: the crust was sturdy and flaked all over the place (I still have to sweep the floor: I mean, it was flaky!) and the crumb was the perfect consistency, chewy but not even close to tough. There were some large holes in the crumb, too, indicating that the leaven was natural. There was a slightly sour flavor, balanced with some sweetness. And I have the second half to eat with the mussels I picked up for dinner, too.

While I idly wonder who walked off with the plaque for best in '04 (the sign has long been taken down), I have to say, second best is good enough for me. And there's all those mini-pizzas and other pastries to check out...

Le Vieux Four St-Anne, 10, rue Eugène Lisbonne, 34000 Montpellier. Phone: 04 67 84 45 58.