Lemon, Lemonade

Every day for the past eleven days, I've awoken to see this in progress, and have contributed as little as I could to it. But it remained. And, bit by bit, grew.

There's even more than this, spread over most of the kitchen. It got there because the sink drain got clogged, I would plunge the water out of the drain, the floor would flood, I'd mop it up, and finally I borrowed a plumber's snake a week ago Saturday, got as far as disconnecting the drain right under the sink, figured out I didn't know how to use the snake, put the drain back together -- only it wasn't. I have no idea what's wrong, but I do know that the landlord said he'd send his plumber on Thursday of last week early in the morning. I got up after a rough night of going to Le Jam to see the Carolina Chocolate Drops, since the tramway construction has made it almost impossible to walk to the club (and the map on their website is, um, more impressionistic than utilitarian), and I wound up after the show sliding down a mudbank to get back to the tram, thereby frightening the hell out of two young women who obviously have seen too many movies featuring people named Jason. Anyway, I messed up a clean pair of jeans and my right kneecap in the process, which was almost ameliorated by the CCDs' excellent performance

I didn't eat dinner that night because there weren't even any trustworthy kebab stands open by the time I got back, but I'd been coping, as noted in my last post, by eating out. When the plumber didn't come on Thursday, I got mad. The landlord told me he'd been there, and I hadn't, which was at least one lie, but he then signed off on his duty. Fortunately, a friend contacted me with the name and number of her plumber, I gamely screwed up the courage to call him (I'm no good at all in foreign languages on the phone, but this guy was very patient), and he's due in about 90 minutes.

But, although I really can't afford it, I've been eating out, so I thought, hey, a chance to re-visit some old favorites and maybe make a new one.

First stop, unsurprisingly, was Thym & Romarin, from my previous post, on Friday night. They'd had an amazing-looking pork loin with a mushroom cream sauce going, and I was going to get some. Except I wasn't: "Sorry, no more tonight," the waiter said. Dang. Instead I started with a roast Camembert with a small salad, which was okay, and then had seiches, a local cuttlefish which was said to be served with pistou, which is like pesto, only without nuts and cheese. Now, granted, my nose was only half-cooperating this night, but I sure didn't see any pistou in the vicinity. The rice was just plain rice. And the seiches weren't cooked all that well: parts were hard. I suspect this was an off night (and I know, dammit, that basil's not in season: what was I thinking?), but I still won't recommend the utterly atmosphere-less downstairs room, which wasn't helped by a sound-system playing salsa a bit too loud. I still like this place, make no mistake, but I'll be more careful what I order next time and sit upstairs.

Saturday, I took a chance, and went back to Gourmet Gulch, my name for a square properly known as Place de la Chapelle Neuve, which has four or five restaurants (maybe more, depending on what time of day you go) surrounding it, a lovely place on a hot evening. Which Saturday wasn't. Still, I'd had an amazing meal here last summer at a place with the uninspiring name Bistro Gourmand and wondered how they'd do in chilly weather. Not so well, at least from a business standpoint: maybe I was there too early, but the place wasn't exactly jammed, and it was Saturday night. Still, the food looked good and, well, how can you go wrong ordering a starter of lentil soup with little "meatballs" of foie gras in it? I followed that up with a parmentier de canard, which is sort of a pie of rich, super-tasty duck with "frosting" of mashed potatoes, sprinkled with breadcrumbs and browned. Mistake: I ordered a cheese plate for dessert, I was having so much fun. Not only did they not include this in the menu price (okay, I should have said something), but it was served too cold, and there was much too much -- but it was good. Wine was a generic grès de Montpellier out of a box, big, plummy, richly satisfying, that went with everything. Phenomenal!

The seiches were on my mind on Sunday. The first place I'd ever had them, Le Bistrot d'Alco, was still the best I've discovered -- and one of the cheapest good restaurants in town. The question was if it'd be open on Sunday. It was. Since it wasn't as expensive as the previous night's place, I splurged and ordered a starter of mousse of fois gras, a few tablespoons of which came with four thin, somewhat dry, slices of pain d'épices, often erroneously translated as gingerbread, but really a kind of soda bread with spices like mace, ginger, and I think cinnamon. I'd always wondered about pairing foie gras with sweet stuff, and I'm not sure I understand it, but this worked quite nicely. Afterwards, I passed on the seiches, which they make with persillade, parsley and garlic finely minced together and tossed into olive oil, and just had a steak, which was okay, in a sauce I didn't quite get, served with a baked potato and some green beans tossed with olive oil and garlic. Had the wine of the month, which they serve by opening a bottle and then estimating how much you'd drunk. They estimated less than I thought, but it was a lovely Faugères, more peppery than the fruitier wines I'd been drinking, and, as their specials always are, a bargain.

Monday, though, was a real problem, especially when I seriously considered the damage I'd already done to my bank account, which was considerable. (Of course, I'm not even thinking of paying my rent until my plumbing works again, but I've still got to have enough left over for that). Okay, Monday would be pizza. There's a joint called Valentino's, down on the rue des Balances, that I really like, and they do a grilled eggplant and sundried tomato pizza that was going to be dinner last night. Well, it would have been if Valentino's had been open, anyway: lots of places close on Mondays. The fallback was the famous Pizza Ste. Anne, which occupies most of the short rue Ste. Anne, and that's where I went. An undistinguished "green salad" (lettuce, thin rings of red onion, thin half-slices of tomato, olive oil, and a lemon to squeeze onto it, but at least it was a salad: these other restaurants aren't big on vegetables) was followed by my usual, a Pizza Atomica, made with mushrooms and Spanish chorizo sausage, not as atomica as you might think, but proably plenty challenging for your average French person.

But please, let me eat at home tonight. I can't afford another restaurant.

Note, however, that this attitude is subject to change with appropriate income. I've still got a half-dozen places I want to try or re-try.

Off to find some dough to pay the plumber!

* * *

Thym & Romarin: see last post. 

Bistro Gourmand, 7 place de la Chapelle Neuve, 34000 Montpellier, phone 04 67 66 08 09, open daily including Sunday from 10am til midnight.


Bistrot d'Alco, 4, rue Bonnier d'Alco, 34000 Montpellier, phone 04 67 63 12 09, open for lunch Monday-Friday noon-2pm, dinner daily 7:30-10pm. 


Pizza Ste.Anne, 3, rue Ste. Anne, 34000 Montpellier, phone 04 99 63 54 42, open daily noon-2pm, 7:15-11:15 pm, no dinner Monday. 

Miettes d'Automne

Okay, I'm back. Unless things get screwed up again, that is. I either got turned on or turned myself on yesterday with Orange (it's hard to tell) and, except for a disconnection or two, have been on ever since. So I'll be back more often here, and in fact have a couple of posts backed up, but I also have some work to do, so they'll have to wait a bit.

At any rate, until yesterday, this has been my office:

That chair on the left, partially obscured by a freezer full of various Quorn and Linda McCartney products, clotted cream ice cream, and frozen Yorkshire puddings (among other things), was where I passed the time at the English Corner Shop, which, as I've said, is owned by two Americans, former engineers who got stranded in France when a French version of a tech incubator over in Provence went belly-up. They did some research as to where they could open a version of a store they were already patronizing in Antibes, sensibly chose Montpellier, spent a year battling the bureaucracy, and finally opened at the beginning of October. I showed up to beg bandwidth a couple of weeks later, and was graciously allowed to occupy that chair from 1 til 4 or 5 each day. A couple of days later, Chuck's doctor ordered him into the hospital for a week for some tests, since a blood sample came back with some odd results. Judi asked me if I could hang out and keep an eye on customers, since she didn't like being alone in the shop.

I did, and it was fun. There was quite a parade of characters: regulars who, some of them, came in with clockwork regularity; bemused French people who looked at the stock like it was some sort of ethnological exhibit in a natural history museum -- but usually bought something; British people who'd seen an ad or who'd just been walking by, to whom the sight of jars of Marmite or Bounty bars, or Walker's crisps brought on a nostalgic rush; a South African guy who offered to buy the place; and, memorably, a clutch of teenagers who stood by the drinks cooler, examining the stock, then each selecting a can of root beer, paying, and rushing out the door. "I think they think they just bought beer," Judi said, after a moment's thought. If so, I wished I'd been there when they popped the tab on the top of the can and saw what they'd gotten into.

And besides using the wi-fi, I also met people. This is something I've needed to do for a while, and now I see people I know in the street and nod hello to them. I also know far more than I ever wanted to about British foods and their subtleties, such as they are, and I've come face to face with frightening things like canned macaroni and cheese and a British variation on Mallomars made by Cadbury which have the added touch of a jelly-like filling inside the marshmallow, and may contain not a single natural ingredient. Scary stuff.

Anyway, thanks to the Fowlers, and if you're in town, here's what the place looks like, at the foot of rue Four des Flammes, just past La Tomate, the inexplicably popular restaurant, and across from the Palace Bar, a nice place that does a good lunch at reasonable prices.

I'll be hanging out there more, after I catch up on some of the stuff that's piled up here at home. But I'll leave my computer home.

* * *

Just to the right of that picture is the corner of rue Roucher, which features a number of restaurants. Since the plumbing problem in my kitchen hasn't improved, and, in fact, got worse when I tried to use Chuck's plumber's snake over the weekend without finding instructions before I left the wi-fi on Saturday, I have to eat out until presumably tomorrow, when the landlord's plumber will come to fix that and the toilet, which has been busted since January. (Yes, January. And yes, I told him back then; he did a magnificent job of pretending I hadn't.) I can ill afford this, particularly since the day after my birthday at the beginning of the month I took myself out to dinner at a place I'd been curious about and, as I walked there, had the familiar feeling of my sinus polyps inflating, which meant that by the time I got there, I couldn't smell or taste much. The restaurant also didn't seem so good, although I'll give it another chance some day, simply because the young folks who own it seem very committed. Still, it set me back €40, which was upsetting for a meal I couldn't taste.

But last night, I had to go out, and there was a place on rue Roucher I'd walked past a number of times and was also curious about. It seemed that the fat chef who used to do the lunches at the Vert Anglais, and may have perfected their fantastic hamburger, had opened this place, so I figured it was worth a shot.  Was it ever!

The chef wasn't in evidence, and the whole team seemed to be one very serious young guy cooking and the other waiting and busing the tables. There was a small upstairs and also, apparently, seating downstairs, but the place is tiny. There's a fridge just inside the door, the kitchen is semi-open (a real rarity around here), and there's room for maybe ten people upstairs where I was. I started with a tartelette du boudin noir, a small crock with some cut-up blood sausage and apples topped with a pastry crust, served with a salad. I'd never tasted boudin noir before, and it's very pleasant, with just a touch of nutmeg setting off the darker flavors, and the apples being, of course, a natural accompaniment. This was served with a small salad with a tasty mustard vinaigrette. There were several main dishes I wanted to try, and I kept telling myself that I've got to stop ordering steaks of various sorts, because it's boring, but the pièce de boeuf here was advertised as served in a port reduction with confit of garlic, and I found that intriguing. The beef itself was pretty good-sized, tender as could be, and the sauce was a perfect complement, as was what the chef did with the garlic: cubed it up and fried it with cubes of potatoes. Wow. There was also a tiny amount of zucchini and red sweet peppers on the side, and I could have done with more of that, but this was a very satisfying meal, and I sopped up all of the sauce with the excellent bread. No dessert, but that's okay, and the pichet wine, a half-liter, was a nice basic Cotes du Languedoc, perhaps even from Palliatrice (I think that's spelled right), the closest winery to downtown here, not noted for masterpieces, but quite drinkable. The bill for all of this was a whopping €23, or just over half what my last restaurant meal cost. I'll definitely be back.

Thym & Romarin, 14, rue Roucher, 34000 Montpellier. Phone 04 99 61 72 29. Open Mon-Sat 7-10pm, Tues-Fri lunch noon-2pm. 


* * * 


Incidentally, a couple of people asked what I did with those turnips from a few weeks back: I looked for recipes and had just about decided to toss them with olive oil and salt when I found a very nice-looking recipe in The Silver Spoon, that wonderful Italian cookbook. It had me saute some onions in olive oil, add equal proportions of turnips and potatoes, pour some vegetable stock over it, and then dust it with some oregano and cook in a 400-degree oven, with some mozzarella over it, for a half-hour. Boy, was that good. In fact, I am now in possession of two more turnips so I can do it again. 


* * * 


So one thing's for certain: winter is coming. I caught the Tomatologist at the market last week with what he said were his last tomatoes until mid-June (actually, it's the Tomatologist's son, but he's as friendly as his dad), but he lied: he was back with more this week. But that's definitely it. There are a lot more roots for sale, dark leaves like chard and spinach, cabbages, odd twisted carrots, some in exotic colors, and winter squashes and pumpkins (in fact, the Silver Spoon also has a recipe for turnips, leeks, and pumpkin which looks good...).

Another reason you can tell what time it is is that Montpellier has balls:

Soon, there will also be a huge synthetic tree at one end of the Comédie, too, as garish as they make 'em. And after that comes the fall wine fair and then the Christmas market on the Esplanade. This year, for the first time, I'll be able to afford a tasting glass and taste the wines on offer, too. And, not for the first time, I'm sure I'll find the goods at the Christmas market to be as tacky as they come.

But that's then and this is now, and I'm glad to be back on line.

Next up: more Year of America in Montpellier.

Meanwhile...

Just an interim post to explain why I'm here so infrequently these days. My phone and Internet service was cut off in mid-October, and since this was the umpteenth time this had happened, I phoned Orange's friendly English-language help line to find out why. 

There is, as I've explained before, a situation called dégroupage totale, where your telecom provider separates you from Orange (the former state monopoly known as France Telecom) and takes total responsibility for the line. I would go to Free and navigate their impossible website (designed by chimpanzees), put up with the frequent need to log back on as I chased my tail in circles, and finally hit upon a page where my account was listed as dégroupage total. Why, then, couldn't I get rid of Orange? So this time I posed as a new customer and found a button to push to determine if I were eligible for dégroupage total, since it varies with the part of town you're in. The answer: no. 

So I really did owe Orange all that money all along! Okay, I'd paid Free, so that was working, so all I had to do was get Orange to turn me back on and I'd be back in business. So I called Orange, they turned me back on, but with a different customer number. "Tell Free you have a new number," they said, "and you should be back on."

So I did and Free told me they no longer wanted my business because my customer number had changed, and I was to send back my router box and so on immediately via registered mail. 

After discussions with people who had also been through this, it emerged that the least bad solution was just to shift my business to Orange. I called them back, had a conversation with one of their support team last Friday, and on Tuesday, my "Livebox" appeared. 

Now, all this time I've been online thanks to the good graces of Chuck and Judi down at the English Corner Shop, holding down a table at one end of the store and meeting a bunch of fascinating people, helping Judi understand what their stock is all about (as an American, she has never had any experience with these products, but as someone who's visited England often, I at least know what they are), and telling every sentient being who walks in that I'm looking for an apartment. 

It's not, however, a situation conducive to sustained concentration, such as even a modest post like this requires, let alone some of the work I need to do. So I have to do that offline at home, then pack up my gear and head into the store, which opens at 1pm. 

This should all work itself out by the end of the week, so that I can go into the store because I want to, not because I have to. 

Meanwhile, there are other crises. Most notably, my kitchen sink no longer drains. It takes about two hours to empty a full sink of water, such as one uses for dishwashing, and I've made use of some noxious chemicals, and then a plunger. This has only resulted in the floor flooding. Thus, two floods a day (wash and rinse), with the rinse taking place in water that's who knows how contaminated with sewage. I say this because the other night, when we had a good, pounding rainstorm, I pulled the plug on the rinse water at 9:30, and there was still a half-sink left when I went to bed at 1am. And boy, you should have seen the floor the next morning.

Thus, I wasn't too upset to bump into my landlord on Wednesday of this week. I told him that I had his rent money, but he still owed me not only the receipts for the back rent I'd paid, but also he had to deal with the plumbing. "I have a plumber," he said, "who I'll call right away. He'll either be at your place around 11 on Friday -- tomorrow is a holiday [it was: Armistice Day, or We Beat Germany Day, depending on your viewpoint] -- or else, since he's going on vacation next week, sometime after a week from Monday." 

Do I even have to tell you he never showed up on Friday? 

I'm not going to spend my life mopping and plunging. I'm going to hire my own plumber and the slumlord (I looked up the French, which is apparently marchand de sommeil, or sleep-merchant, which I love) will pay for it, and that's that. 

And Orange will turn me on by the end of the week or I'll pitch a fit at them. 

After which I'll find a fantastic apartment, move in, and effectively start a new life down here. Or at least that's the current fantasy. I hope it's not too much to ask. Perhaps I should send the Remover of Obstacles another e-mail. 

And now it's off to the store. Which is closed on Sundays and Mondays, unfortunately. Of course, Orange could turn me on on Monday. But do you honestly think they will? 

Where the Glass-Blowers Were

And so it came to pass that, in the middle of escalating tension, Friday, October 29 arrived, and I realized that this was the day that Hérault Tourisme and I had a date. The date involved getting up way early, then offering up a prayer that the trams weren't on strike, then jumping into my clothes, jamming down some breakfast and coffee, and taking the tram out to the Château d'Ô stop, where a young woman from Hérault Tourisme, Sabrina Lucchese, would pick me up and drive me to Claret, a small village in the east of the department, for a day of varied touristic stuff with other English-language journalists and bloggers. It all started like clockwork: my phone buzzed as I stepped off the tram, and it was Sabrina, asking if I were there yet and then saying never mind, she saw me. Her car pulled up in front of the bus stop and we were off. 

Claret is in the area that's now calling itself Grand Pic St. Loup, but it's got nothing to do with the wine claret. That word, pronounced klarrit, is an outdated British word for French red wine, usually from Burgundy, and is descended from a Latin word. Claret, pronounced klah-RAY, is a smallish town in the garrigue, the brushy ecosystem that exists in flat places up high in these parts. There's no claret or anything else winey grown in Claret, but for centuries it was the center of the regional glass industry. The glassmakers are mostly gone by now, but there is the brand new museum, the Halle du Verre, which has just undergone a million-Euro renovation, and we were going to start with a guided tour in French. 

Industries tend to grow up around places where the raw material is plentiful, and I never did catch the explanation of the special sand that made Claret-area glass so special; our guide was very easy to follow even though she spoke too fast for me to take notes. During the years of early glassmaking, a premium was placed on transparency, a transparency that at first could only be attained by using rare and costly rock crystal. The press-kit I got says that "Beginning in 1290, the oak forests on the Causse de l'Orthus attracted glassmakers and their families," so maybe the oaks got used for fuel. (A "causse" is a geological term for a limestone plateau, and if you remember back to posts this summer, the Orthus is the mountain facing Pic St. Loup which I spelled Horthus back then). 

At any rate, the glassmakers were ennobled by the King, and formed a guild of premium glass-makers whose wares were sold all over Europe from the market at Sommières. They were probably un-nobled by the Revolution eventually, but they left behind some nice specimens of their glassblowing art, which are displayed upstairs in the temporary exhibition hall in a show called Le souffle du verrier en Languedoc: Verre d'usage et de prestige sous l'Ancien Régime, or The breath of the glassmaker in Languedoc: Everyday glass and prestige glass in pre-Revolutionary France. It shows an attention to detail that's mirrored in the permanent exhibit downstairs: two of the notable specialties were the porron, a flat-bottomed spherical bottle with a narrowing tube running off the base of its neck, a wine receptacle made for drinking while working, and a topette, a skinny squarish bottle used to hold medicines, produced in the tens of thousands for the medical school down in Montpellier. The show's up until November 14, and, along with some of the other stuff I'll get to in a minute, or which you can discover on one of the tourist maps, it's worth the trip, especially on these crisp fall days. 

 

Our next stop was the art glassmakers, Bernadette and Gérard Attard. He blows glass, she does spun glass, and they were conveniently located next door to the museum. First he did us a tiny pitcher, followed by a dolphin which, somehow, he managed to drop, with no ill effects. There was a rumor going around that some of our number had been made depressed by the sight of so many empty glasses, so we headed out of town into the garrigue to remedy that. 

  

The tourist initiative that helped rebuild the Halle du Verre and the ancient Couloubrines glassworks in the nearby village of Ferrières-les-Verreries also helped kit out the Mas de Baumes near that  village, a farmhouse atop a hill in the garrigue which now contains a hotel and restaurant overseen by famous local chef Eric Tapié. Having received many pornographic e-mails from the local Slow Food convivium of lunches he'd created for them, I was anxious to taste his food. 

The place turned out to be comfortable, but not ostentatious, and our table had a nice view out into the surrounding hills. 

As soon as everyone got there (we were waiting for Helen Cho, a young woman from Oakland who moved to the area a year ago and writes a food blog called Languedoc Zombies), the show began. We started out with a white, a Sauvignon called Salle de Son from St. Hippolite that was perhaps the best white I've ever had. It was all about minerals and vegetables, dry as the garrigue outside, and married perfectly with the two seared scallops resting beside a smear of squash with a pool of balsamic vinegar in it and a little chutney of finely chopped grapefruit skin. The garnish was parsley, but deep-fried. We were also madly scooping up rosemary-infused olive oil and fleur du sel, both from renowned local producers. 

This done, a red was brought out, a 2008 Bergerie l'Hortus Classique, which was as typical a top-end Pic St. Loup as you could ask for, kind of a Platonic ideal if you were trying to explain it to someone else. Here, my year of not tasting got to me, and I could identify that it was, indeed, a Pic St. Loup from before my taste buds deserted me, but I'll have to get back with you on the details. Or you could try to find one yourself. 

After the starter, I was primed for the duck breast which came next only to be wildly disappointed: mine had cartilage all through it, making it tough to saw with the knife we had, which was not quite a butter knife. A couple of others reported this, too, and my mashed potatoes, which didn't seem to be anything but mashed potatoes, were actually cold. There was a wine reduction scattered here and there, and a nice little relish made from pine nuts, figs and corn on the side, but if I were in the kitchen I would have either not served that particular breast or trimmed it better. 

I don't usually eat dessert, but then I don't usually eat at places like the Mas de Baumes, either, so I dug right into the chestnut tiramisu with champagne, sauced with coffee. There was a fish-shaped golden thing of caramelized sugar reminiscent of glass, and a black thing that looked like a piece of charcoal garnishing the dish which was chocolate, but, I suspect, a kind of cookie made with chestnut flour, since it had a very sandy texture. Really well-put together and balanced, the garnishes speaking to the glassmaking of the region -- and not too sweet, either. 

We were served little pots of vanilla panacotta with a dollop of rosemary honey with our coffee, and that was it. Just enough. 

Given that there are plenty of other places like this in the area, I don't know if I'd go back, although I have no idea how much this menu would have cost. That main course was a major blunder of kitchen craft sandwiched between two sublime moments. The hotel aspect, on the other hand, is very tempting under the right circumstances. Hell, on a good week, I could even afford it.

Our next stop was back in Claret at a distillery, which had some of us going until we saw that it was an oil distillery: juniper wood is heated until it gives off its essential oil as a gas, which then is sent into a cold-water bath and decanted into a vessel where the oil and water separate. I'd never heard of the stuff, but it's used not only in cosmetics, but also as a treatment for psoriasis and as an all-purpose veterinary medicine. It takes them a hundred kilograms of wood to make seven liters of oil, and they make 15 tons of oil a year, which explains all the wood lying around, as well as the very nice smell, which is hardly noticeable, which you can't say about most distilleries. It's also the only juniper distillery, not only in France, but, once the one in Spain closes down at the end of the year, in Europe. 

I'm sure Hérault Tourisme would have been ashamed to lure all these journalists (well, there were eight of us) up into the Pic St. Loup terroir without showing us a winery, so off we went to the nearby village of Vacquieres, where Chateau Lascaux is located. I was really looking forward to a tasting there, because this is a wine with a strong local reputation, but the owner, Jean-Benoît Cavalier, had had his car break down on his way in and was stranded out in the garrigue somewhere. A young woman with the key to the storage tanks, though, took us in to see the sleeping wine in barrels and then the huge 10,000-liter tanks were the new wine was hanging out. We got to taste some of that, but other than alcohol and yeast, the predominant sensations, the mysteries lying underneath were elusive. The rosé seemed like it already had something going on, but the red was just like liquid fire. Nice color, though. 

That was it. I got back in Sabrina's car, we talked about how happy we were that the impending rain had held off, I gazed at the mist surrounding the Pic as it loomed up in the distance, and I had only two wishes: that I could do something like this every week, and that I wasn't going to have to rush to the English Corner Shop (where I've been using their wi-fi for two weeks while waiting to get turned on at home), and write a very aggressive letter to my landlord, telling him what to do with the pieces of paper he'd forced on me the day before and ordered me to sign. It wasn't the way I wanted the day to end, but it's the way it ended. 

In fact, I hope I do get to do stuff like this more often. The whole area is promoting itself aggressively, and seems to accept bloggers as journalists. I've been itching to write more about all of this stuff, and yet without a car, it's hard to do the self-guided thing. The different tourist agencies, however, don't cooperate with each other, which isn't a good thing when it comes to reaching out internationally, especially to Americans, who I'm sure would love to drop some dollars on this whole corner of France, judging from the ones who passed through here this summer. So now I'm on Hérault's mailing list, and maybe Gard, Alpes-Pyrénées and Aude will come along in due time. Lacking a magazine to write about this stuff for (and, of course, having never known a magazine that'd take junket-generated stories), I'll write it down here, along with my own odd peregrinations. Stay tuned.

Confessions of a Turnip Virgin

It's been a while since I posted any market stuff, and there's really not much special about today's trip, except that I bought way too much broccoli, which really isn't a problem, since one of the many ways you can tell me aparat from George H.W. Bush is my love of broccoli. I'll just make up some snail butter (butter, minced shallot and garlic, parsley, black pepper) and steam one bunch, and the other will probably get cooked with olive oil, garlic, anchovies and dried red pepper to become spaghetti sauce. I got some celery, too, for an experiment making red beans and rice for tonight, since I may have found some sausage that'll work in that. 

In the picture, there are some late Roma tomatoes which'll become part of a pizza, a huge head of romaine lettuce for the caesar salad dressing I'll make tonight, some tiny pears from the guy with the best pears at the market, and two ugly black turnips. These are the famous navets du Pardailhan, evidently renowned all over France (I mean, a turnip with its own website? They take food seriously around here!). For what, I don't know; I don't even think I like turnips. But I sighted them briefly last year and someone started raving about them so I'm going to try roasting them. Anyone out there with ideas for them, please chime in; this guy's only at the market for a couple of weeks, then he vanishes until next year, but I bet these things will keep for a good while. I assume you peel them after washing them, but this is my first try with them, so any info is welcomed. 

Walking To Jacou, Waiting For Dropping Shoes

Sorry I haven't been here in a while. Once again, I lost telephone/internet service, but at long last I know why this is: I have to pay two phone bills. Have to: no choice. Even though I've opted to have service from another phone company, Free, apparently the neighborhood where I live hasn't been set up for what the French call dégroupage total, so I have to provide France Telecom Orange with €9 and change each month. And although I've been diligent about paying Free each month I thought that the bill from Orange was a mistake. My mistake: they turned off the carrier to my house on Wednesday morning. Getting back on is always a problem, so now I'm waiting. 

* * *

This is why I woke up on Sunday in the knowledge that I had a pretty empty day ahead of me. Sitting around the house would just mean utterly wasting my time unless I wanted to take on some huge project, and since I'm going to have to move anyway (and I'll get to that in a minute), huge projects don't much appeal. 

It was time to revive the Epic Walk. 

It was the right day for it: the sun was shining, a few clouds hung in the sky, the weather was chilly but not cold, and I had an urge to get out of town for a while. I even had a goal: Castelneau-le-Lez, the suburb just northeast of town. Last time I'd gone, I'd gotten there by accident, just wandering. But this time I had a question I wanted answered: the town of Clapiers is northwest of there, and I'd gone to a tomato festival there last year which was a lot of fun. This year I missed it, because the friend who drove last year wasn't around and there didn't seem to be any public transportation to Clapiers on Sunday. There was also alleged to be a Roman house there, and there is a local form of candy the bakeries sell whose name translates as "rabbit shit." Rabbit shit and Romans: what better excuse? The map seemed to indicate that Clapiers was reachable from Castelneau, so off I went. 

I'd gotten to Castelneau last time in a sort of roundabout fashion, and I suspected that the big road that led away from the Corum here in town, which starts as the Avenue de Nimes and bcomes the Avenue François Delmas and parallels the railroad tracks most of the way might be a more direct route, and I was right. What I hadn't planned for was how hard it would be to walk the first five minutes: the Montpellier Marathon was happening, and it was all over the place. The Esplanade was a maze, and a couple of times I dodged people with strained faces propelling themselves along the track. When I finally got to the Avenue de Nimes, it, too, was being used for the Marathon, and a long line of very pissed-off drivers was backed up while the cops let the marathoners by. One car of young men had one of them hanging out the window with a rifle, which I hope was a fake. Other drivers were eying him warily. 

This stretch of the walk wasn't very interesting: there are a bunch of new design and furniture shops close in, a gym, and a high-end restaurant with a "Mediterranean" and an "Asian" menu that might be worth looking into some day, because the largely outdoor seating seems ideal for summer. But the sidewalk was littered with empty water bottles and packages of something labelled "X-Treme Energy Gel," the composition of which I shudder to contemplate, and I knew that at some point the Marathon had passed here, too. Eventually, I came to the walls of the cemetery and knew I was getting close to a snarl of roads, one of which would lead up the hill to Castelneau. This junction, with a traffic circle in the middle, is called Charles de Gaulle. 

Soon I was walking up the hill on the Avenue Anatole Briand, and sure enough, there was the 12th Century church I'd stumbled upon last time I was here. It was Sunday, but there was no sign of activity, although the interior's been modernized and last time it looked like it was still a working church. 

There was almost nobody on the streets of Castelneau, though, and as I passed through town, following the sign to Clapiers which indicated I had more climbing to do, I noted that Castelneau's major industry seemed to be real-estate, which to me indicates a town cannibalizing itself. No doubt, in the surrounding hills there are wonderful expensive houses, remade farmhouses, and other properties new and old. That so many of them are for sale at crazy prices makes me wonder what Castelneau will be like in ten years. 

As I left Castelneau on what was still the same street but now the Avenue Jean Jaurès, I had to stay alert. There wasn't any more sidewalk, no pedestrian path at all, in fact, and although traffic was light, it was still there. At one point, I had to stop, cross the road, and take a picture. There was an actual cliff there, and I wondered if there were any car corpses down below. But what I was looking at was Pic St. Loup in the distance, and, closer in, the Lez River, wider than it is in Montpellier, rushing along. 

I thought about real estate briefly myself. I had all of €17 with me, after all. But all those offices were closed. It was Sunday.

That wasn't the only vista I saw, but it was the only one I shot. I was nervous walking on the shoulder, and soon I was in an even more dangerous position, as the onramp to the D61 highway appeared. The shoulder vanished, but it was clear I had to walk under the highway to continue along to Clapiers. The road climbed some more, and there was a sign with Castelneau-le-Lez crossed off. I'd reached the peak of something, and the breeze was stiffer. As I trudged, a car came along and the guy honked and waved. If it was someone I knew, well, consider this a virtual honk-and-wave from me. 

Walking downhill, I saw a sign to Clapiers, or at least a park belonging to Clapiers, so I headed left thinking it might be the park where the tomato festival had been. It wasn't. There was a big water park, now closed for the season, a restaurant, and a sign noting the sister cities of Clapiers, one of which was in Burkina Fasso, one in Italy, and one in Serbia. How close was I, though, to anything I'd recognize, let alone a way back to Montpellier, which was a consideration at this point? As I'd turned off the main road, I saw an entrance to a hike-bike trail in the woods. Also, I knew Jacou was down the road, and that was the end-point for tramline number two, which could dump me off back at the Corum. I'd been considering a walk to Sommières and had mentioned it to Gerry, who said my best bet would be to start in Jacou, so maybe it'd be worth checking out. Plus, the tram would be empty and I could sit all the way back home, which, since I hadn't done one of these walks in a while, sounded wonderful. The rabbit shit and Romans will just have to wait for another day.

So I walked over to the trail and it was beautiful: the woods were deep and studded with impressive limestone rocks, huge pines, and patches of briar. I should have taken a picture, but instead, as I walked closer to town, I got this end-of-season vineyard instead. There are a few up there; no idea what the product is like, or even what label it bears. 

Finally, a McDonald's appeared, and I knew Jacou was near. I trudged through far more of Jacou than I wanted to see. The entire thing looks to have erupted since 1970, although I'm sure there's an old town somewhere in all of that mess, or the remainders of one. I followed signs (and the occasional bus) to Parking-Tramway, saw the ugly fountain built by Jacou's sister-town in Portugal (it had tiles on it, and horrid blocky modern-art statues of a man and woman), the International Ecumenical Campus, and what seemed like mile after mile of suburbia, French-style. Just when I was convinced I was lost, the sight of the yellow-and-red tram caught my eye. With five minutes til departure, I spent €1.50 of my fortune on a ticket, sat down (ahhhh), and about a half-hour later, I was at the Corum, where the only sign of the Marathon was a litter of plastic bottles and cups. They were deflating the bouncy castle for the runners' kids as I walked back to my apartment. 

* * *

Which apartment won't be mine much longer. The landlord was by the other day with the news that the building will be sold as of November 30. At that point, the new owner will probably evict all of the tenants so that the place can be renovated, although there has been a painting crew doing the hallways over the past week. We can't actually be chucked until March 15, but I want to find another place before then. 

This place has never been right, although I really can't fault the location, but the landlord lied when he told me it was fifty square meters. I have no way of estimating this -- it's not the meters, I can't do it with feet, either -- but a friend who is better figures I have between 35 and 40, which is why I've sitll got a bunch of boxes unpacked from my mid-November move from Berlin in 2008. My office has never been set up correctly, my books are in chaos, and so is my CD library, partially because the living room is partially blocked by a huge pillar. Plus, I hate the kitchen: although I really enjoy having a spacious pantry, which is great to store my miscellaneous dry ingredients, two electric units placed so close together that it's almost impossible to have two pots going simultaneously isn't a great stovetop, and I'm amazed I've done as well as I have with it. As for the rest of it, there's virtually no water pressure, the faucets are clogged with lime from the hard water, the drains are slow, and the toilet broke over a year ago, necessitating my reaching into the cold tank water to flush it. All of this could be yours for nearly $900 a month, plus, of course phone and electric. 

I know the town better than ever now, so I can read into the classifieds better than ever. The current fantasy is to start the new year in a new place. There are many obstacles to this, not the least of which is money, but I'm determined to do this right this time. It's going to require some luck, but that's already started: over the past week, Les Lunkheads, each and every one of them, has moved. The painting crew is in there now, and there are sounds of a drill, no doubt installing a new door. 

So now I'm ready for the 60m2 place in St. Anne with the gas stove and "pierres apparents," as the ads say, for €400 a month. Just let me know when I can come look at it; I can spend December moving in. 

Now if the phone would come back on so I could start in on those classifieds… 

UPDATE: I wrote this around noon. At 2:30 the phone still wasn't on, so I called Orange's wonderful English help line. A robot voice came on saying "Orange garble computer garble please call back within 48 hours." Great. 

UPDATE #2: Still not up. I'm so glad I paid the bill. 

Days of Lard and Lenin

My local supermarket has tons of stuff, but it lacks one thing that I use, albeit in moderation: lard. I don't know how the locals make pie crusts for their tartes, but I know I have to have it to make biscuits and flour tortillas, two things which often wind up on my Sunday breakfast table. But there's a solution: way down at the end of Tramline Number One there is the Odysseum, a mammoth mall which includes a Decathlon sporting goods store and an Ikea, as well as the supermarket/department store which always lives up to its name, Le Géant. If anyplace in France is going to have something you can't find elsewhere (but which is made in France, natch), it's them. So with nothing else holding me at home, I decided to ride down to the Odysseum and visit the giant.

That wasn't my only motivation, though.

The President of the Languedoc-Roussillon region, in which I live, is a controversial fellow named George Frêche, who is such a nutbag that the Socialists actually threw him out of their party, so he formed a sort of I-Love-George party, a lefty Lieberman move, if you will, and still managed to get re-elected. His Wikipedia article isn't up to date, though, because it doesn't mention his latest folly. Oh, building the Odysseum, with its annoying faux-ancient-Greek theme loosely based around Odysseus' travels, is one thing. But at one end of it (the one the furthest from Ikea) there's a huge round concrete plaza, around which Frêche has decided to install, at great cost, statues of Great Men. The first five have just been erected. There's Franklin D. Roosevelt and Charles deGaulle, of course:

And Winston Churchill, whom I couldn't get a good picture of, and Jean Jaurès, of course:

You can't do Great Frenchmen without including Jaurès, at least not down in this part of the country, and there's already one in the center of town that looks exactly like my brother-in-law Frank, in the Place Jean Jaurès, which is covered with tables where students drink and eat pretty much all the time. Jaurès was one of France's great socialists, and a pacifist who tried to head off World War I, but was assassinated first, and you can read all about him on Wikipedia, too.

But there's another statue there which has raised a lot of hackles since these first five were unveiled. It's of Vladimir Ul'ianov, called Lenin. Like each of the others, it cost €200,000 of French taxpayers' money, and, as someone who's slowly making his way through A People's Tragedy, by Orlando Figes, an 800+-page history of the Russian Revolutions and Civil War, I'm afraid I have to say M. Frêche has put his foot in it big-time. Figes paints a portrait of a nasty little asexual being, addicted to violence and adulation, who, like his successor Stalin (whom Frêche is, reportedly, not averse to adding in the future after the astoundingly mediocre sculptor delivers Gandhi, Golda Meir, Nasser, Nelson Mandela and -- another nice guy -- Mao Zedong), seems to have enjoyed killing people just for the hell of it.

I also love the way the statue is positioned:

After snapping this pic, I became curious about what this Altissimo place he's pointing at is, and it turned out to be (appropriately enough for France) one of those fake-rock places where you can practice climbing. There's plenty of fake French rock on the sound system at the Odysseum, too.

I have no idea what this plaza is supposed to be used for, and there's no clue there, either. That Frêche has already spent a million Euros on this embarrassingly bad municipal art and has another million's worth on order is bad enough. It's not that easy to find, and there was almost nobody there when I was except for a couple of French people who just had to see for themselves that there was actually a statue of Lenin at a shopping mall in Montpellier. How embarrassing.

Anyway, I got my lard, so breakfast tacos on Sunday, with home-made salsa picante.

A pound. A year's supply.