Spain 101, Part One: Entry

Here's the way I figured it: In September, I'd be promoting my Michael Bloomfield book (you do have your copy, right?). Come late October, and going into November, I'd be hard at work promoting my first new book in 33 years, The History of Rock & Roll Part 1. There would be a gap, and in that gap airfares would fall. I was getting mighty sick of America, between the horrific election, the lack of civility in everyday society, and all the rest of the stuff I don't have to tell you about. Google Flights informed me that I could afford a round-trip ticket to Barcelona, which seemed, as always, to be a great place to shake off the jetlag. But I've spent a lot of time there, and I have, since my visit to Girona this spring, developed an inexplicable fascination for that part of Spanish history where Spaniards (whoever they may have been in any given area of the Iberian Peninsula), Jews, and "Arabs" (more properly Maghrebis, since they, like most of the Jews, were from Northern Africa) lived together, not always peaceably, but... Of course, it ended in 1492, when Spain kicked out all of its scientists, physicians, mathematicians, philosophers and businessmen (ie, Arabs and Jews) and descended into 350 years of being a peasant society under the heel of the Inquisition.

Thus, I decided to read up on this history and go visit some of it. Lest the trip be too medieval, I also planned to stop in Madrid, a city that went up mostly in the late 19th and 20th centuries, to see the Prado and visit someone I knew there. After that, it would be a short train ride to Toledo, which has a fascinating history of the three-culture society, then back through Madrid to Valencia, up the coast to Tarragona, and back to Barcelona for a good rest before getting back on the plane. I had about two weeks to squeeze this in, and let me tell you in front, that wasn't enough in some of these places. Also, I've missed a couple of important sites, most notably Grenada, where the Arabs held on right up to the Expulsion. I mapped it all out carefully, chose some good looking hotels, and bought a Renfe Spain Pass, which entitled me to five trips on the Ave, the Spanish national railroad's high-speed network.

Pro tip: Do not buy a Spain Pass. Allegedly, Renfe lets you print out your tickets. In practice, negotiating their website is about as difficult as it can be, as we'll see. Renfe has now displaced '90s-era Deutsche Telekom as the worst-managed public utility in Europe in my mind.

Another pro tip: Wherever you may be travelling, if you use the Rough Guide series, there'll be a Kindle edition of it on Amazon. I bought the Spanish edition, and loaded it onto my iPad, and it was an unexpected joy: hot links everywhere to museum websites, local tourist info offices, and the like, as well as excellent maps which you tap twice and they blow up bigger than they are in the paper book itself. Highest recommendations.

Okay, I'm packed. Let's get outta here.

* * *

There's not much of Tourist Barcelona I haven't seen, but I do have a strong affection for the city, and love to start off my trips there. There were two museums I'd neglected, and they gave me an excuse to leave the hotel to do something besides eat. One was the MACBA, the Barcelona contemprorary art museum. Greil Marcus had just been there and seen a show dedicated to punk, which would be interesting because punk hit Spain very shortly after Franco was deposed, and my guess was that they'd have a very different take on it. I walked down there to discover that the show had closed on Sunday, and today was Thursday. Dang. But it was a lovely building, and what else was I going to do? Turns out the answer was not stay for very long: the ground floor was filled with an insufferable one-woman show by an artist whose work is criticism of the art world. I knew this kind of stuff existed, because a woman I know in Germany does it, but wall after wall of documents and videos of this woman complaining about minutiae can only be of deep interest to people deeply involved in it, which isn't me. Upstairs, the permanent collection also seemed to focus on conceptual and text-heavy work, never my thing. The one room I found fascinating, though, was a large one concerned with the Downtown New York scene of the 1970s, with a video by Vito Acconci, another by Gordon Matta-Clark, and, on a full wall, a documentation (perversely attributed to the woman who'd filmed it) of a Trisha Brown dance performance. I'd read a great deal about her, but of course never seen her in her prime. The word that fits is "furious." Not angry, just a phenomenal amount of energy channelled directly into the movement. It made the entire visit to the museum worthwhile. 

I spent some time getting sort of lost in the surrounding neighborhood, relishing the street art and other weirdness before heading back to the tapas bar next to my hotel for a late lunch. 

Yes, this is an actual restaurant in Barcelona. 

No idea who this artist is, but they're all over town

Actual Barcelona bar. My kind of clinic, although who knows if it's my kind of bar

And so, armed with a ticket I'd printed out at home, I bravely walked, with my luggage, to Barcelona Sants station and boarded an Ave to Madrid. 

* * *

Jetlag is a nasty companion, so I dozed and missed some of the scenery between Barcelona and Madrid. I use the word advisedly: most of it isn't "scenery" at all, but, rather, sere brownness occasionally interrupted by what could only be called mesas, like in the American West, weird rounded hills with flat tops, made from sedimentary rock. Really bleak, really odd. But the train was on time, a cabbie whisked me to my hotel (an actual palace at one time, but Spain's so full of minor royalty a "palace" isn't quite as grand as it sounds), I checked in, and then went into the neighboring square for a late lunch. After that, I wandered around the vicinity for a while and tried to get a vibe. Back at the hotel, I contacted Miguel, my acquaintance there, and we made a dinner date. He's been living in Madrid for some time, so he knows the city, and later that evening (it's true: Madrileños eat late) we walked through some crowded plazas and down some streets and came to a seafood joint he likes. I never found out the name and have no idea where it was, but most of what we had was prepared the same way: broiled, doused with olive oil, sprinkled with paprika. This allowed the baby scallops, razor clams, and sardines to show off how fresh and perfectly cooked they were. Fine with me!

Sunday was devoted to the Prado. Now, what could I possibly say about the Prado, right? Well, here's one thing: in 2013, José Luis Várez Fisa and his family were kind enough to drop a nice collection of Spanish art from the 13th to the second decade of the 16th centuries on the museum, who stuck it in a fine set of galleries in the basement, which, if you enter the museum the way I did, can be the first thing you see. Since this is my favorite period of art history until you get to the 20th century, it made the visit totally worthwhile before I'd even gone anywhere. There was a bit more upstairs, but man, the ceiling they'd lifted from a church in León, painted with heraldic designs, Bible stories, myths, and a veritable 14th century kitchen sink of images made my day. 

Upstairs, the museum most people go to see begins, and I dutifully walked it, dodging tour groups, as one does, and hoping to see something that would catch my interest beyond what I already knew would do so. Thanks to Robert Hughes' magnificent book on Goya, I had a newfound appreciation for Velásquez, and thanks to the way the Prado is organized, I noted that Velásquez, Zurbarán, and a guy named Cano with whom I hadn't been familiar, all flourished at the same time. I'm very much into Zurbarán, and although I lucked into a clutch of his work many years ago in Castellón, the Prado has, predictably, loads of great ones. In fact, I got so numb wandering through gallery after gallery that I missed his still life with a cardoon, which was a kind of fuck you to the dominant still-life style of the day with its white streak of cardoon stalk sweeping across the picture as if to say "Oh, yeah? Watch this!" But basically, as time goes on and the 17th century goes into the 18th and 19th, my eyes glaze over. 

What saved the rest of the day was, of course, Bosch (whom the Spanish call "El Bosco," summoning up memories for those of a certain age of after-school chocolate milk), with the definitive collection of his work, and Goya. The Bosch room isn't big because it turns out his work isn't that big. It did have one work I'd totally forgotten about, a round tabletop depicting the seven deadly sins (and you can bet he did a great job of that), as well as the under-known masterpiece "The Haywain." And, of course, the tryptich of "The Garden of Earthly Delights," that enigmatic explosion of weirdness. There was an awful piece of bloviation about it in the New York Review of Books this year that added nothing to the world's knowledge of the painting except to note that in the very right-hand corner of the central panel, there's a little guy apparently giving a blowjob to another little guy, the only explicit sex act I could find in the painting, although there's some ambiguous male-female action and other weirder maybe-sexual stuff going on. I saw a great show in Rotterdam years ago, where just about everything but the Prado stuff was included, and it made a great case for some of the imagery in the "Garden" coming from pilgrim's badges, the tin souvenirs pilgrims to Santiago and other places bought to show where they'd been and pinned to their cloaks. But the great news is that the Prado has this thing close enough to stand and gaze at, and I did, for a long while. 

Goya, with Hughes' writing still in my mind (it was the last book I read before leaving), was great. It was interesting to note how small the two Maja paintings were (and Hughes is right: her head's on wrong! Not that I was noticing when I first saw a reproduction as a kid), and thrilling to stand in front of his revolutionary paintings, and the "black" paintings that he did on the walls of his house in his last years, which Hughes doesn't reproduce all of, for obvious reasons. (I also, like many people, really loved the painting Hughes calls "Head of a Dog" and wonder why the Prado decided to call it "Drowning Dog." It may be Goya, but not everything in his life at this point was dark and gloomy.)

A day in the Prado can -- and did -- exhaust one, so I limped home knowing both that I'd be back (hell, big museums don't faze me: I used to work in the Metropolitan!) and that I'd had a very full day. Miguel suggested a secret restaurant in another corner of town called Asturianos, where Madrid's top chefs enjoy authentic cuisine from Asturias prepared by an old woman and her two sons and is, as far as I can tell, nearly perfect. I didn't much like the ultra-dry sherry we were served initially -- it seemed to have a chemical taste I couldn't shake -- but the sardines, beef cheeks and sausage-and-bean stew that came later hit the spot decisively. 

One more day, two more museums, which, if I hadn't gotten lost, wouldn't have been enough to fill a day. Okay, to be honest, the Reina Sofia has a great collection of early 20th century stuff, and if you want Cubism, well, the Spanish sort of co-invented that. My disappointment was 100% not being in the mood, so I'll have to go back when I know what I'm getting into. Down at the other end of the big street connecting the Reina Sofia and the Prado is the Thyssen-Bornemizsa Museum.  I was lucky: Monday Master Card underwrites free admission for all, with the caveat that the museum closes at 4. The collection here is the result of a Hungarian billionaire with a taste for art marrying a former Miss Spain who likewise had a passion for collecting. What's wrong with the museum, I figured out when I snapped that the color coding of the captions indicated whose collection was whose, is that it was a case of unlimited funds and limited appreciation of what they were buying. There are hundreds of paintings in this museum, a couple dozen of which, at the most, are worth your while. With that much cash to sling around, you kind of have to get lucky occasionally. 

Hey, Baroness T-B: I think the kid's in on the joke

The acquisition was handled like a grocery-shopping trip: "Hey, we need Canalettos! Get some Canalettos!" And they did. There's a good reason why you've likely never heard of most of the painters here, as you'll see. Only just as they were about to close did I find a piece of the Baroness's collection when she began dipping her toe into contemporary art, with some decent pieces including two huge Richard Estes photo-realistic canvases -- hopelessly un-hip in the current market, but I thought they were pretty arresting. But, not wanting to get arrested any further, I allowed myself to be shooed out. 

Dinner that night was an amazing "tapas" restaurant. I put the quotes in there because the portions were so huge. The oxtail stew alone was worth the trip. I'm not naming the place, though, because a guy who looked like Gary Busey walked up to us (Miguel had invited his chef friend Pepe along, and I was describing Cajun food) and noted as how he never heard American accents. Turned out he was from Dallas and owned the building and there were four floors and a rooftop terrace devoted to a private club above the restarant. The view from the roof was amazing (and would have been more amazing had I known more about what I was looking at) but I found the denizens, including our host, just a bit creepy. We finally got loose of him and said good night. Tomorrow, I'd leave for Toledo, and looking at a map, I noticed that the taxi driver who'd take me to the hotel had "gone through the park," as we say in New York. But the short walk to the station on a morning that promised a fine day was a great adios to Madrid. 

Retail in the 'Hood I

Retail in the 'Hood II

Permanent residents of the Madrid train station gathering to say good-bye

Europe, Spring 2016, Part Five: Spain Again and Out

I'll admit to a certain relief as I steered the Peugeot out of Montpellier and on to the motorway (which was, along most of its length, the old Roman Via Domitia) towards Perpignan to return it. Maybe if I'd had someone with me to whom I could have shown bits of my past, perhaps driven up to Pic St. Loup and up the tiny road that leads to the ruined castle hanging off its companion escarpment l'Hortus that I thought I'd hallucinated until I actually was able to stop and photograph it. Or maybe I needed the down-time as a day of drawing a deep breath before heading into the last couple of days of this trip.

Spring in this part of the world announces itself with wind. Cold winds sweep out of the mountains and lower the temperature until they're countered by warmer winds from the south, the Mediterranean, and Africa itself. I used to sweep up a fine yellow dust that blew into my apartment, and someone who knew told me that this was sand from the Sahara in Algeria, picked up and transported to coastal France. The winds were in full effect on the highway, and I had to pay attention to stay in my lane, and make sure that the gigantic semi-trucks stayed in theirs. Fortunately there weren't many campers on the road: signs in French, English, Spanish, and German appeared every dozen or so miles warning against violent cross-winds.

But at least I didn't have any problem finding the Center of the World again, even if I did make a misstep finding the parking garage and, then, the rental return. It was okay: I had plenty of time before my train to Girona at 3:17. I was concerned about the scratches -- very concerned -- but just as concerned that Europcar had closed for lunch and there were various customers milling around. My body was sending me signals, so I went to the main waiting room, found some packaged sandwiches, and found a French BLT, speck, lettuce, marinated tomatoes on a seeded baguette. I knew I'd burn off enough glucose toting the case of wine that this wouldn't be an issue. Then I headed back to the Europcar area to wait. Apparently someone had tipped off the cops that someone arriving on the train from Marseille, a teenage boy, might be trouble, and a number of suspects had their luggage searched. Another pair, who looked to be in the demographic, were apparently undercover cops, checking in with the uniforms from time to time.

Eventually the agent reappeared, several families pushed ahead of me and got their cars, and I returned mine. She didn't seem unduly concerned about the scratches and I still haven't heard anything. My American Express card showed only the $100 I'd charged on it, so who knows. And the train to Girona, when I finally got on it, was impossibly crowded and noisy, but it was only 45 minutes, so I arrived in Girona, got a cab despite the fact that my hotel was only a few blocks away (luggage again) and checked in to a once-elegant hotel (cigarette burns on the desk? really?) crowded with British and Scottish golfers. I went out as soon as I'd stashed my luggage to look at the town, but the weather had other ideas and I returned, somewhat damper for the experience, about a half-hour later.

For dinner, I hit the city's oldest restaurant, Casa Marieta, and had some odd pâtés to start, then a dish of squid with green peas, which was interesting. But I'd read a description of the place as "tired," and that's just how it seemed. Surely there was someone doing something more interesting with Catalan food here. Fortunately, there was.

The next morning I set off to see the obvious sights and to figure out what the story was with Girona. I'd read that it had the best-preserved Jewish quarter in Spain and deduced from that, mistakenly, that the Jews hadn't been expelled from Girona with the rest of the Spanish Jews in 1492. A visit to the Jewish Museum set me straight, as well as inadvertantly providing me with a perfect first stop in figuring the place out. The Jewish quarter, El Call, had apparently existed in one form or another since before 1000 CE, and besides becoming a center of trade, it was a center of Jewish intellectual life, epitomized by Mossé ben Nahman (1194-1270), who must have been a busy guy, since he penned famous commentaries on the Talmud, systematized the Kabballah, wrote poetry, practiced medicine, and found a little time to preach at the synagogue, which at the time was located atop Girona's hill next door to the cathedral. He left town in his old age and died in Acre, which the museum puts in Israel, but I seem to remember as a Jordanian city. By the time of Mossé's death, though, Gironans had become suspicious of the Jews, and demanded a wall be built around the Call. Riots and laws persecuting the Jews began in 1381, and a lot of them converted, at least outwardly, but they continued to socialize with the unconverted and also made mistakes when practicing their new religion's rituals. The Inquisition finally came to town to see what was up, mostly because Barcelona, where they'd been working, kept having bouts of plague, and Jews started emptying out the Call. The usual punishment for being a Jew was burning in a bonfire, but so many had left by the time the Inquisition's bureaucracy had found them guilty that straw dolls were used in almost every case. And by 1492, of course, the Jews had all left. The Inquisition proved so popular with the people of Girona that in 1820, during the Riego Uprising (unexplained in the wall caption), the House of the Inquisition was burned to the ground, destroying all its records. With the Jews gone, they'd gone after herbalists, homosexuals, witches, Lutherans, and anyone else they didn't like.

If you wanted to sum up the history of the Jews of Girona, a rather ugly sculpture in the museum's courtyard does a great job:

On one side, the Zodiac, an astrolabe, various navigational instruments, and Mossé with a book...

...and on the other side, Columbus sailing from a Jew-free Spain using those instruments.

It was time to climb the hill, where the rest of the story would unfold, and explore the cathedral and its surroundings. The Museu d'Art is located in one of the buildings where the cathedral's bureaucracy was once housed, including its prison, and it has an impressive amount of mostly older stuff (ie, right up my alley), including a minor work by the Master of Cabestany, a long painted beam of unknown provenance, showing a procession of monks,

Rather badly captured here, but click to enlarge

the ubiquitous lion-eating-a guy carving, 

There's one in Montpellier, too. No idea.

and lots more. Impressive. Eventually, you leave into the plaza in front of the cathedral, where, letting my eyes adjust to the bright sunlight, I saw an act of rather shocking violence: I was noting the seagulls that were up there among the pigeons, because they were about two feet from one end to the other. As I was trying to decode whether or not the cathedral was actually open (it still serves as a cathedral, after all, with several Masses a day) I noticed that one of the seagulls had taken a small black pigeon in its beak and had broken its neck, and was bashing it against the pavement to hasten its death as it flapped its wings, ever more feebly. I'd always known that seagulls were eaters of every sort of junk available, but had no idea they'd hunt live prey. 

Although, in its odd way, it set me up for the cathedral, which is big, filled with Baroque chapels as over-the-top as any Spanish Baroque art can be (and that's plenty, althoug I do like that period's organ music), lots of depictions of martyrdom (Spanish Catholicism is gory) and its treasury has, as its central display, a very old tapestry depicting the Creation. I liked that a lot: it was a cheapo way of teaching the bible to the illiterate masses and it's crowded with bible stories and other goodies, like the pair of Jews at the bottom who serve as an informal logo for the Jewish Museum. 

Outside again, I descended the hill and headed for the grandly-named Archaeological Museum of Catalonia, housed in the former church of San Pere de Gallegants, which has a nice cloister and good paintings in the museum part showing how ancient people lived here (burning the dead, putting them in ceramic vessels, and burying them surrounded by mini-Stonehenges of rocks) and were influenced by the Greeks and, later, the Romans. Christianity seems to have arrived early, around the 4th century, possibly with Roman colonial settlers, and there are apparently small basilicas out in the countryside dating from then, centered around the cult of St. Felix the Martyr, who remains the city's patron saint. 

Next I went to the "Arab baths," so-called not because they were made by resident Arabs (a people who seem missing from the city history, interestingly enough) but because they were in the style the Arabs employed: first a cold dip, then outdoors, then a hot  room for the steam. The building dates from 1194, but there really isn't enough of it to warrant a visit, and it was made less pleasant by a couple of those cult-kids making new-agey music on what looks like an overturned wok with dimples in it. Those suckers are loud!

It was time for lunch, and as I made my way down the street, I passed the City Museum, which would be the perfect knitting-together of the various threads I'd gathered so far, but I wasn't going to miss another meal and get goofy, so I went to a place in the Call and had the one signature Catalan dish I'd missed in my visits to Barcelona: botifarra amb mongetes, which looks like this: 

Right: sausage and beans

It wasn't all that distinguished, but it was just enough to fill the gap, and I was off for my last museum of the day. 

The City Museum starts out with one of the weirder rooms I've ever been in. It was once a Capuchin monastery, and when the monks died, they were arranged in a seated position and placed in the dessicarium. 

Dry up, bro!

When the corpses were mummified by the air circulating around them, they were dressed in their old robes and displayed in another part of the monastery. Memento mori, dudes!

The city museum is big on history and light on artifacts, which was okay by me, and the period between the Romans and the Inquisition is wisely left to other institutions in the city, but come the 19th century and the city's realization that its economic growth was stunted by its still being encircled by the age-old city wall, the citizens decided to tear most of it down so the city could grow. It became a printing center and had a few other industries, but it also suffered badly when it was bombed (by the Spanish government) during the Civil War in 1938. There is an amazing small display of children's drawings of the bombardment, all done in typical primitive kid style with bright crayons, and it reminded me that, starting with that, Spain became ruled by a fascist dictatorship under Generalissimo Francisco Franco, with full support from the Church, and that it remained so until 1975. With the current stirrings of reactionary right-wing politics fuelled by extreme conservative religion in the United States, remembering Spain's history during these times is a disturbing and, I'd say, necessary thing to do. 

After that, I was museumed out, and started strolling back towards the hotel. Along the way, I passed a restaurant that looked interesting enough, wrote down its name (incorrectly, but thank heavens for Google Maps, where I just zoomed in further and further until its name appeared) and, when I eventually got back, I checked out their website. There, I thought, would be a meal worthy of Girona's spirit. 

Because there is a spirit there, as there is in Barcelona, but it's more concentrated because the town is smaller. The place thrums with activity: Lance Armstrong, Gerry told me, took a house here because the hills were great training places for him and his team, and although I'm used to being a minority group as a pedestrian in Austin, not until Girona was I outnumbered by bikers. Had it not been for a book festival in the evening that drew crowds to its entertainment part, between the golfers and the bikers, I might not have seen any civilians at all. I liked this place, and once I arrived at my interesting-looking restaurant (where I'd reserved: you have to, I'd say), Llevataps, the deal was sealed. I started with a warm salad that contained calçots, a uniquely Catalan cousin of the green onion and leek that's usually roasted, touched with a bit of romesco sauce, went on to an absolutely amazing dish of grilled artichokes and razor clams, which concentrated the artichoke flavors while charring the leaves -- a tour-de-force -- and finished up with tender octopus whose method of preparation I didn't note, because by then I was too full and had to regretfully leave half of it behind. With this, I had a bottle of Io Masia Serra, a brilliant combo of Cabernet Sauvignon, black Grenache, and Merlot, one of those creative red blends I've favored recently, and which paired with the artichokes and clams spectacularly. Without question, the best meal of the trip, and not nearly the most expensive. The staff was friendly and the whole experience underscored my belief that Catalonia is well ahead of France in experimenting and creating within the tradition, extending it instead of merely preserving it. I gotta get back to this place. 

Obligatory cliched pic of houses along the Onyar River

Non-obligatory picture of feline residents of the river's edge

* * *

I had no train to meet to get me to Barcelona the next day, but I wanted to get going, even though I knew the hotel wouldn't have my room ready. But I seemed to have trouble getting out of hotels on this trip: construction workers hit a power line in Narbonne, trapping everyone inside (the front door had an electric eye to open it) for an hour or so, and Sunday morning in Girona, there was the city's annual 10,000k run. The brilliant folks who organized it managed to cut off the three big streets surrounding the hotel so no cabs could pick anyone up. This lasted for 90 minutes, with one of the desk ladies getting testier and testier with the cab company, who didn't seem to have any idea if there were a solution or how long the race would last. I hung out in the lobby, watching runners dash in to use the john and then dash out again, and finally the thing ended and a cab took me to the railroad station, where I was offered a fast train and a slow train. The fast train got me into Barcelona ten minutes earlier, so I chose the slow one, which took a different route and went through some lovely countryside. Had I but known, I could have gotten off at the Paseig de Gracia station in Barcelona, two blocks from my hotel. I also realized that, if one left at about 9, one could do a day-trip to Girona from Barcelona. Llevataps is open for lunch, too. 

Monday I checked out, but I also met a friend from Austin who arrived that day to start a trip with his girlfriend that would also take in Florence, where they would do some work on a film they're making. She wouldn't be in until later, so I took him to try to get a cheap phone, then to the hotel/housing agency that handled the apartment they'd rented to get the key, then to the apartment, and then back up to the housing agency's next door neighbor, a stellar northern Spanish tapas joint called Pulperia Bar Celta. A perfect last meal in Barcelona!

* * *

I'd also booked this end of the flight badly, and had to overnight at an overpriced, dingy hotel at Heathrow, a fate I wouldn't wish on anyone. After that, though, I had a long time to think about the trip (and, much as I'd disliked the Austin-Heathrow nonstop on the way out, this flight wasn't nearly as crowded, so I had some room). And I did. Beauty had clearly been encountered and enjoyed -- luxuriated in, even -- both natural and man-made. Love was, of course, unchanged, except for a nagging realization that a lot of women I'd been encountering in the States thought it unseemly that I could still be interested at my advanced age. Of course, my friend who was just starting his Barcelona trip was with a woman ten years younger than me -- and he's nearly ten years older than I am. I landed in Austin to discover a text from him: "What a big lovely city, Paris with a better attitude." Can't say that about the city I'd just landed in, and I'm going to have to cope with that somehow. I'm about to embark on a period where if all goes well I should see some changes in my material and professional life, and I intend to take as much advantage of that as possible. I would dearly love to get out of Austin: it's a bad fit, and had I known, I needn't have come here when I realized I couldn't stay in France any more. This isn't the place to bitch about that now. Just do your work, keep the love and beauty thing in your mind, and keep on. 

* * *

Two days after I got back, I ran out of coffee and headed up to Anderson's to re-fill. The next morning I poured some beans out of the bag into the grinder and took the egg man's rubber band to close it up. It snapped. 

Christmas Tree Warning

I really don't have an opinion of whether Christianity was good or bad for the Romans, but I do know that if you don't take your Christmas tree down, you might wind up like the folks in this house.

Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas, folks!

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

This is a railroad tunnel. It runs through a hill somewhere west of Béziers. It was dug in 1854. Big deal.

But it is. It's not just any hill. It's a hill which helped shape the history of this entire region, which had an immense economic impact on this whole part of France. And all because some monks decided to drain a swamp in the 1250s. As they were doing it, they were looked over by the ghosts of villagers who had lived on the hill since Neolithic times, and who had already been gone for over 1200 years. It's a pretty wonderful story, albeit a kind of complicated one, so stick with me here as I try to explain it all.

Let's start with the hill, because that's been there longest. E has lately been obsessed with the Via Domitia, as we saw in my last post here, and recently, when a visitor from Switzerland was here, they searched for a piece of it which leads to the hill. We went looking for it again yesterday, because he'd missed it, and after getting off the A9 at the Béziers West exit, we took the road to St. Chinian, but exited it at a rather sleazy turnoff leading to Nissal-lez-Enserune. The road was lined with truckstops and the occasional prostitute, which is something you don't see during the day around here. There were a lot of trucks, too. At any rate, after Nissan, we took a tiny road and found this imposing structure.

Proof that some French farmers make money, but don't acquire taste along with it. But turning off to the right of the lane leading to this place was a road. E pulled out his extremely detailed map and grinned. "Yes! This is it! I missed it before!" Like the tunnel, the road looked like a road.

But the map left no doubt: this was a section of the Via Domitia. So we parked the car and began to walk. And it started looking more Roman after a while.

Then it got funkier...

And finally ended in a bunch of blackberry brambles. We wouldn't have been able to follow it much further anyway: those trees you see in the distance shade the Canal du Midi. And that's another part of the story.

The Canal du Midi was an amazing engineering project undertaken by a minor noble named Pierre-Paul Riquet beginning in 1667, to connect Toulouse with Agde and Sète, via Castelnaudary and Carcassonne. It took them 14 years, and it almost ended in tears at our hill. But they finished it, it brought a wave of economic prosperity to the southern part of France, and, eventually, it was replaced by more modern forms of transporting goods, like the railroad, and, later, trucks. It was kept up, though, and these days well-heeled tourists can take leisurely cruises down it, stopping overnight at houses transformed into hotels with high-quality food. Even in the middle of winter, it looks pretty nice.

It cut right through the Via Domitia at this spot, though, which was good news; I didn't want to walk much further, because there was still the hill to see.

We walked back to the car using access roads to the vineyard, whose owner was out busily trimming the old growth, and noticed that the vineyard bank facing one direction had a totally different set of wild plants than the one facing 90º in the other direction. I picked an herb that smelled familiar, but couldn't place it, and saw a whole bunch of wild strawberry plants. Moles had done extensive work on the soil, and there were holes where I bet there were snakes hibernating; there are vipers in this part of the world.

Back in the car, we backtracked some and followed signs to the Oppidum of Ensérune. Yup, another Roman Motel VI -- except it turned out to be more than that. We parked and paid the lady €7 each to get in, and sure enough, there were ruins.

In the center of the second picture there, you'll see several ceramic things set into the ground, with round holes. These are silos, used for storing grain, and stoppered with a tight-fitting rock. They kept food available for the villagers all year long. The condition of most of the excavations here only reflects the latest wave of inhabitants, though. It was first settled in an organized fashion  by Iberian Celts around 650 BC, although there had been Neolithic settlers before them, and quickly became a center of trade. Greeks started showing up about 200 years later, and a century after that, part of the town was taken over by the Romans as an oppidum for the Via Domitia, and nice sturdy walls were erected to protect it. Then, around 400 AD, the town was abandoned in favor of living at a lower elevation. Certainly it must have been hard to get water up there, although perhaps I missed evidence of a well, and all the farming would have to be done down the hill.

The site's real value, though, is that it has a graveyard which was in constant use for the town's entire existence, probably the best-preserved ancient graveyard in Europe.

Because of the lack of room, cremation was the only form of funeral service, but the ashes were buried with pottery (some of which was smashed in the funeral rites), weapons, and other goods which helped archaeologists, who've been whacking away at this hilltop since at least the start of the 20th century, trace the settlement patterns. The one thing they don't know -- and never will -- is what it was called.

The really big disappointment was the museum, given the excellent documentation of the site itself. One hopes that some of the money the government has used to set up the extremely informative signs around the hilltop will eventually find its way into what is almost a caricature of the lost-in-time archaeological museum. There's no interpretation, and some of the labels are handwritten and faded. The video, though, is pretty good. There's a huge gift-shop and the boss patrols the grounds outside.

But the other thing you can see from this village is one of the weirdest medieval relics in all of France, the Étang de Montady. I tried to shoot it, but it was the shortest day of the year, and the sun was being fickle, so I defer to the mighty BastienM of Wikipedia on this:

If you look closely, you'll see, in the center, a round green area, traversed by what appears to be a road. This depression used to be a swamp, and one day the Bishop of Narbonne decided it should be drained. Some local monks (I have no idea where they came from, except E has determined they were Cistercians) then set about digging a trench. The trench went to the hill, and the monks, not knowing that limestone, which the hill is made from, is a damn poor conduit for water and tunnels dug through it are liable to collapse, dug a tunnel through the hill.

They didn't know it, but they'd discovered that there are different kinds of limestone with different qualities. And, when Piquet found his plans dead-ending at the hill, he despaired: he was already in hot water with the King, who was bankrolling the Canal du Midi, and now he was up against a limestone hill. But some of the local farmers found out about his problem and told him that centuries ago, the monks had done it, so he probably could, too. And so he took a chance, blew a hole in the hill, and the canal's still running through it today.

It's apparently a great place to fish for perch, as two gentlemen were doing as we walked through. Inside, and unphotographable by me, is a little room in the ceiling, which possibly leads to a manhole for emergency evacuation. Or not.

You can see how close the monks' tunnel is to the railroad tunnel in this shot I took which shows their canal and the white pylons in the first picture in this post.

And, since that town on the hill in the distance is Montady, I decided that the monastery which did the work had to be there, and so we set off to check it out.

I was wrong. The closer we got to the town, the more obvious it was that this was just another defense tower like we'd seen in Olargues.

But there was no stopping E, nor did I want to. He snaked up the tiny streets of the village towards the tower, and we were rewarded with yet another astonishing view.

But not as good as these guys got.

The birds launched themselves from the windows in the tower and just hung there. The wind held them motionless for a while, but they inevitably had to regain their purchase on the air, wheel around for a while, and then go back and do it again.

Who knows where the monks who did this colossal feat in the Étang de Montady came from? Who knows what the name of the village which persisted for centuries on top of the limestone hill was? Who can imagine what the Languedoc would have been like if the Canal du Midi hadn't been built? And who knows what further amazing unknown bits of history lie out there for intrepid explorers, armed only with a German automobile, a very high-resolution map, and an intense curiosity to seek this stuff out? Stay tuned; we're already researching the next trip.

Roman Around

It's been a while, so I was happy to find an e-mail from E in my in-box the other day asking if I'd be interested in going to Ambrussum with him and J. J's had dental surgery, and hasn't been in much of a mood to go out, but her interest in Greco-Roman times around here finally got her out to look at the oppidum over in Murviel-lès-Montpellier the other day, and that coincided with E's interest in the Via Domitia, the Roman road which connected Nîmes with Cadiz starting around 120 BC. Wikipedia lists 11 oppida in France, but I'd always heard that Ambrussum was the good one. Boy, was it ever.

It didn't take long to get there. "Gee, this is hardly a trip," J said as she got out of the car. We'd headed down the A9 to Lunel, taken the exit, and followed the signs to the parking lot. (Hint: if you go, drive slowly once you're off the A9, because the signs come quickly and aren't obvious). The place was deserted, despite the fact, which E had discovered, that it was free until the end of the year. It was warmish, sunny, and a fine day to see what was going on here.

Oppida were rest stations for travellers, stationed about every 15 km along the Via Domitia. You could get a change of horses, a bath, blacksmith and wheelwright services, a meal, and a room. If you were a postal courier, you could pick up the mail for delivery down the line. Up the hill, there was a settlement with protective walls and shops where you could buy supplies. My guess is that Ambrussum was a pretty cushy place to be stationed. On the other hand, it was abandoned around 100 AD, possibly because of flooding from the river.

Of course, like all places that had to be dug out of the ground, it doesn't photograph all that well. Here, for instance, is the inn, and if you look hard, you can make out, over there on the left, the four guest rooms.

Just past this, a path heads uphill, and as you approach the gates of the settlement (or, rather, where they stood) it gets paved:

(Shoes included for scale. Yeah, right.)

Once up the hill, you're in the oppidum's community, and according to the archaeologists who are still working there, there are entryways to where shops and other services once stood. If the reconstructions are accurate, the houses up here were pretty nice, with the living quarters ringing a shaded courtyard.

The hilltop has ramparts facing away from the Via Domitia towards the Gallic settlements. The Gauls were at peace with the Romans during the time the oppidum at Ambrussum was occupied, but hey, they were French, so the Romans figured they had to keep an eye on them anyway.

And it's true that you're high enough up here: there's a real panorama visible from this part of the settlement, with a nice view of Pic St. Loup and other mountains, and one of the signs said that 180º from this view, you could sometimes see the snowcapped Mt. Ventoux over in Provence, but not yesterday. That's okay; the Languedoc mountainscape was real nice.

I think that's l'Hortus on the left close in, but I wonder what that sharp peak right-center is. Notice also that the A9 is right there, following the ancient route of the Via Domitia. Those Roman engineers knew the best way to get places, and there's no reason to change it now.

Down the hill lies the Vidourle River, with the famous Roman bridge providing access to the site from the Via Domitia. It started being knocked down by the locals in the 14th century, and the river has finished most of the job. If you wonder why, look at the size of that log hanging off the thing: that arrived just recently, and possibly with some force.

This Roman bridge is perhaps more famous than the other ones in the area because before the second arch fell apart in the 19th century, Courbet painted it.

Which puts Ambrussum on another Languedoc tourist route, the Courbet Trail.

As I said, this was free, but normal admission is only €4, and well worth it. There's a museum where you start your trip (and buy your ticket) and it's loaded with information both on the site in Roman times and its excavation and preservation, largely at the hand of the 19th century's platoon of gentleman archaeologists, many of them medical doctors who liked to go digging on weekends. In the museum, you learn that this site was occupied since Neolithic times, and even had some Greeks messing around it -- there's a shard of Attic pottery that was found on the grounds.

And J was, as she admitted, wrong: although it only took about 20 minutes to drive here from central Montpellier, the hike around the hill and the riverbank took a couple of hours. On a warm winter day with plenty of sunshine it was pretty easy going, but I'd say that if you're going in the summertime, you should bring some water along (and take it out: they're pretty militant about not littering this site, and I'm totally in agreement), because that hilltop's going to be nice and hot.

E's already talking about going to another oppidum down by Béziers, and that sounds good to me. And while this nice weather's not going to hold forever, there'll be enough of it to take advantage of it when it appears. Stay tuned.

(Oppidum d'Ambrussum, open daily except Monday, February-December, 2pm-5:30pm October-March, 2pm-5:30 Tues-Sat, 10am-12:30pm and 2:30-5:30 April-December, 9am-12pm and 3pm-7pm July and August.)