Day Tripping Part 5: Carcassonne - the medieval-est city I have visited

Today was a continuation of the day trips I have been trying to take while in Southern France. I was most excited about traveling to Carcassonne (which is about an hour a half west of Montpellier by train). Carcassonne, I had been told by multiple sources, was supposed to be deep in history, tons of medieval folklore, a giant city surrounded by a castle and super pretty. Of course, the nature of our travels would disagree. It was already raining by the time we got to the train station. Regardless of the weather, we carried on. After wandering around the city for about an hour trying to find the poorly signed tourist office, we finally got a map of the city and were directed to the other side of the bridge where 'Old Town Carcassonne' was. The city is really beautiful, even under the rain. We visited several churches on our way to the old town. When crossing the bridge, you can see the beautiful castle structure looming overhead, high up on a hill. After walking about 20 minutes in the drizzle and passing the trailer park of Carcassonne (though this was a real camping trailer park, not an American style homestead, if you catch my drift), we arrived at the castle. They offered an English tour at 2:30PM but due to weather concerns, they threatened the cancellation. We decided to tour ourselves, no audioguides or anything. Since this is such a tourist destination, much of the castles' signage was also in English. Isn't it nice that English is everywhere?

Anyway, we figured out that much of the castle had already been destroyed throughout time and wars so much of what you see today is a recreation. The city within the castle walls had the most touristy shops and restaurants that you could ask for. Basically, you walk over the bridge and moat into the castle walls and there you have the city. Once you walk a bit further in, you come to the actual part of the castle that you can walk in after paying a fee, of course. I love the fact that rarely do they check my ID for anything so I can often get in at reduced prices. Many tourist places offer discounts to people under 25 so I just lie and normally get in. Student prices exist as well and since I have that International Student Card that I bought from Grand Valley State University a day before I left, I use that all the time too. using that card isn't even really mischevious since the University knew I didn't attend that school but sold me the card anyway. That was nice anyway! So the tour of the castle was cool. You mostly get to walk around the tourrets and on top of the city walls. We also tried not to fall due to slippery conditions. And yes, even though I am a klutz, I made it through the day without falling. Walking on top of the city walls was really neat anyway because you could see how it was constructed for battles and arrows with all the slits and holes in the walls/floors. After the castle tour, we visited a huge church within the city and then had lunch.

Searching for a lunch place was an adventure in and of itself. Since we were in such a touristy area, the menu prices were ridiculously overpriced. We nearly left the whole area to get back to the current town of Carcassonne for lunch. On the last little street that we went down, we found a little tapas cafe. This was most definitely more of a locals place which suited us just fine and so did the price. I had a sort of pumpkin soup which was quite tasty indeed with fresh parmasean on top. The cheese ravioli was wonderful as well, though I felt the portion was rather small. The cheese on top was baked on which made it even tastier. Of course, we had local Carcassonne table wine which we ended up buying a bottle of on our way out of town.

One of the churches we saw:


After old town Carcassonne, we wandered around the current city which was a little boring on a whole. Besides some churches, it was getting too nasty out to really enjoy any sights. Even their Christmas market was mostly closed down. We found this great tea shop for an afternoon snack (crepes of course) and some really interesting tea. I find myself really becoming a tea connoisseur so I love tasting new loose leaf tea combinations in every place I can. This place did not disappoint even if the crepe was only so-so. I really enjoyed going to Carcassonne even if the weather didn't cooperate.

Here I am on the draw bridge going into old town Carcassonne:

Christmas in Marseille

For Christmas, in order to kind of get out of my house and away from the throngs of visitors and family that I did not know, we decided to escape to Marseille (where Laurent lives). My landlords' son and daughter had been hanging around for a couple days and I was getting really uncomfortable. So, after a simple train trip of an hour and 40 minutes, we arrived in Marseille. Now, I had been told that Marseille was a bit more "urban" than the other cities in the area. I thought it was great. Now grant it, I have been to Marseille a handful of times, but never really seen much of the city besides a couple places that Laurent drove me to or the mall. This trip was special since we walked all over downtown and the surrounding areas. Laurent and his whole family were in Paris over our Christmas time trip, so we got a whole apartment to ourselves. The weather was really gorgeous for the majority of the trip which made sightseeing much more entertaining. We saw the Palais de Longchamps which you can see below. It was amazingly huge and only a couple block away from Laurent's place! I never knew!!
We then walked all the way downtown. Now, I say all the way because you are basically just walking down a big hill to get downtown. We saw this really strange long block called "Saint's Row". There were all these stalls selling saints and other manger accoutrement (including little animals)! It was a little strange and plentiful. After "Saint's Row", we walked down to the sea. There was this awesome bell show. Bells and video below. This man was basically playing a piano where all the strings were attached to these bells and Christmas carols came out. I was blown away and you can see the crowd was pretty huge in that area.




After a cafe and some souvenir shopping, we ended up kind of wandering around the area waiting for dinner time. We ran into Laurent's church which was beautifully lit as you can see here. Dinner was great, as usual. We had muscles, seafood soup, seafood spaghetti and muscle stew. Wonderful! The seafood there, you have to assume, is super fresh since they are literally, fishing right off the dock.

Christmas eve was spent wandering around downtown again and finally finding the museum called "La Vielle Charite" that had a special Van Gogh/Monticelli exposition. After about an hour of trying to find this hidden gem, we succeeded. I wish I knew that art students got in for free! I got in for half price but since Will said he was an art student, free! If only I knew! Well, it was cool anyway since you got to see the influence that Monticelli had on Van Gogh. They had a lot of paintings side by side in comparison so you could really see how influential Monticelli became for Van Gogh even though they knew each other a very short time. We did try to go to midnight mass at Laurent's church and even though the sign said the doors were open at 11:30pm, when we got there at 11:37pm, it was packed! Standing room only. Well, I mean, I wanted to go but didn't want to stand for the hour long mass or even longer. So after 10 minutes of standing around hoping to get a seat, we gave up and went back home. I was really disappointed because the church was beautifully decorated. Here is a picture of the church right before sunset.


Christmas day, like in America, was spent indoors and watching "A Christmas Story" and other Christmas-y movies. Everything was closed, as in the US, so we really couldn't go anywhere anyway. I made an awesome dinner though (as seen below). I'm really quite proud of myself. I made lemon-garlic salmon (with super fresh salmon from the market), real mashed potatoes, brocolli, cauliflower and some sort of weird hybird vegetable that came with it and dessert was awesome! It was like a chocolately, nutty goodness puree in a flaky crust, topped with coconut sorbet. We were stuffed! Food picture below.



Some of the seafood shops on the street:


The weather on the day after Christmas was kinda cruddy so we just walked down to the mall, looked at all the crap and then meandered the area until it was time to go. I leave you with this funny picture of me with my scarf. Yes, it was chilly most of the time we were there and this is proof.

An American in France part 1

Will came to visit me for the holidays and we have had a great time so far. I have been playing tour guide and food aficianado of Montpellier and France in general. It's a difficult task but I am up for it. We have already been to the zoo. Here is Will next to the goats that got ridiculously close to the fence. If he could have gotten out, I think he would have! He was evil and a bit scary.

On Friday, Will came with me to school and watched me teach my little kids. He snuck this picture of me (below) teaching which I thought was super cute since one of my kids was raising his hand to answer. We had a little show and tell with Will at the end of class. They were super excited since he was so much taller than them and had a big Californian accent. They loved it and asked a lot of funny questions including: How tall are you? How much do you weigh? What fruit do you eat in California? What kind of vegetation is in California? What are the common flowers there? Do you know any famous people?

Will proceeded to tell the kids that he knew Britney Spears and drove a Ferrari. They loved it and I think half of them believed him.


After the zoo and school, we walked all around Montpellier with Cathy as a great tour guide as well. This is in the Peyrou park which gives you a great view of the city from above.
Here we are in front of the LED Christmas tree in downtown Montpellier enjoying the brisk air and huge throngs of people.
This billboard was for a movie called Agathe Clery. On top it says: "She is white. She is racist. She is going to be black." I thought this was a little politically incorrect and the preview didn't make it look any less politically incorrect. Now I am a bit interested to see it just because it didn't seem to really have a plot, just her turning black. Oh the French!

Part of a tour of my house

I thought I would give you a little tour of my place since my friends took a bunch of pictures at my place today as well.

Here is my kitchen:
(Dela and Cathy pictured)
(Junko, Dawn and Leymi pictured)

Here is my dining room/piano area:

(Dela pictured)
(Junko pictured)

Here's my living room:

(Leymi pictured)

And here is the cat that lives with us. She has no name. I am not kidding. I asked my landlords what her name was and they said that they never got around to naming her. I call her "kitty".

Holiday party at my place

Today, in celebration of the upcoming holidays, I had a few people over to my new place for a potluck feast. Below is a picture of the food. Junko and Aleksey brought a home-made quiche (ham and cheesyness). Leymi brought a spinach tart thing. Dawn brought/made mulled wine and Scottish shortbread (kinda like cookies). Cathy brought chicken stuffing (made from scratch) and we made eggnog together (from scratch). I made Hanukkah sugar cookies as pictured below as well.


(You can also see in this picture our super cool, homemade eggnog that was quickly devoured!)(Top are my Hanukkah cookies, bottom is the Scottish shortbread that kinda broke into little pieces in transit).

After lunch, we watched the animated "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and I thought I would be really nice and download the Spanish subtitles for Leymi. About 10 minutes into the show, I realized that they were the subtitles for the Jim Carrey "Grinch" movie. Whoops! Then we watched "A Charlie Brown Christmas" with the correct Spanish subtitles. That cartoon made me realize that the kids are SO mean to Charlie Brown. They actually call him stupid and an idiot. What a bunch of jerks!

Here are some fun group shots.
Starting clockwise from the 7:00 position: Dela, Aleksey, Junko, Me, Dawn, Cathy and Leymi (with the short brown hair)

Here we are again: Dela, Leymi, Me, Cathy, Aleksey (in the back), Junko and Dawn falling down in the purple shirt.


Dawn and me in a very tight embrace!
Dela and me in a funny pose.
Here I am in my living room, probably on my way to setting up my computer for movie madness.

I leave you with the ever popular British word lesson of the day: manky = dirty
In a sentence: Now my shirt's all manky because I have been making mulled wine for 2 hours.

Happy Birthday to me = peanut butter, Wicked and tea

On Wednesday, December 10, a few of the assistants and I celebrated my 27th birthday. I spent the majority of the day not really doing anything, which was fine. I got a really well-priced haircut and Dawn, Cathy and I got ice cream in the afternoon and then walked around the Christmas markets that I mentioned before for a few hours until dinner where we met up with Junko and Aleksey. Here are some really great photos of the Christmas markets at night.


(This is from behind the entrance. "Bonnes Fêtes" means "Happy Holidays".)

This is one of the fountains downtown with the promenade into the other half of the markets. They said that they were trying to light the promenade as they do in Paris along the Champs Elyysées. Having been in Paris at Christmas before, I must admit that they did a pretty good imitation.

We went to dinner at this Greek restaurant called "La Petite Aphrodite" which means "The little Aphrodite". It got really great reviews and was supposed to be a really cozy family-type restaurant. When we got there, we realized that we were the only people there and they actually had to turn the heat up since we were pretty cold. I think our server was also the cook and the dishwasher. We only heard noise in the back when he went back there so we might have had a jack-of-all-trades there that night. Here I am:
This was our small group (Cathy was taking the picture so she is not in it). Dawn, Junko and Aleksey are on the other side of me (obviously).
Our dinner was fine. I don't think it is worth returning to but the tzaziki sauce was great and clearly handmade. The baklava dessert was tasty as well.

The title of my post is also what I received for my birthday. Since I had become such a tea snob in LA, I passed along that information to my friends here. My mom sent me my special loose leaf tea apparatus brew kettle and now I have great French loose leaf tea to make. I got some great Orient (with flavors of cherry) tea from Cathy and some fruity-type tea from Dawn that was called "Mysterious Mixture". The name of the tea is what actually made Dawn buy it, she said. Why not buy tea with no real name? I thought it was really funny. Junko and Aleksey gave me a funny card that apparently went thru hell to get to me. Dawn, generous great Dawn, also gave me Jiffy extra chunky peanut butter for my birthday. Peanut butter, in France, is both expensive and hard to find so receiving that for my birthday, while it may seem strange, was really cool because I have actually missed peanut butter since being here. You don't really miss stuff until you know you can't have it. Root beer and Mountain Dew do not exist here either. It's a cruel world!

And the best present received, as of yet, was from Dawn as well. She got 2 tickets for both my mom and I to see WICKED (the smash Broadway hit musical, for those of you who don't know) in February in LONDON when my mom comes to visit. Not only do I get to go to London, I get to go to London with my mom (she is flying into London when she comes to visit France...it was so cheap as far as trans-atlantic flights go), and NOW, I get to see my favorite musical in London's west-end which is the equivalent to Broadway. I CANNOT WAIT!

The evening ended with numerous phone calls and IM sessions with friends in the States. I am happy to say that, even though I was all the way over in France, I had a great birthday surrounded by new friends!

Christmas Markets & Teaching Hanukkah

Recently, downtown Montpellier has transformed into a winter wonderland of holiday festivities. Most notable, the Christmas markets which I have now grown to love and frequent. There are about 40 little blue huts set up all over the downtown "quad" for lack of a better word. Each hut (or mini-house in my opinion) contains different items of note for sale. Jewelry, wooden kids' toys, leather articles, tons of different liquers and wines, foie gras, chocolates, candies clothes, scarves and other exiciting knick knacks are all for sale. This is not to mention all the little vendors set up for little snackies including crêpes, cotton candy; warm spiced wine, coffee, cookies and hot cocoa. Can you tell how much I love it already? I went last weekend to their official opening night and enjoyed some really great live music on Friday night sung by an American band, of all things as well as a Grand Marnier crêpe. I thought the crêpe would be way better but instead, the alcohol was a bit overwhelming and not too flavorful. Alas, live and learn I suppose. I especially enjoy going to the market to just browse like crazy and comment on all the silly crafty items for sale. To be fair, there are some really great items for sale as well. I particularly like one of the hat shops with really funky furry hats in funny shapes. There is also an ice skating rink set up downtown now which is super cheap to use and even has skate rental. I think I am trying that out really soon.

In school, I have already started teaching toys (in the vein of Christmas). We have now learned: doll, car, train, ball, skateboard & bicycle/bike. Almost all of my kids mispronounce train. They always say tree. It makes me giggle. This week, in the hopes of teaching them something completely new, we are also learning Hanukkah and some vocab words associated with that. I must admit, teaching Hanukkah is really difficult. The kids have never heard of it nor have many ever heard of Jews. Imagine the difficulty in not only explaining a holiday but also a religion. I haven't really explained the religion though. I mean, come on. They are 2nd - 4th graders. Anyway, notable Hanukkah words are:

• Menorah
• Candle(s)
• Cookie(s)
• Present(s)
• Dreidel
• Gelt (the chocolate foil-wrapped coins)

I can't tell you how exciting it is for me to not only teach my culture but teach the little English girls in my classes completely new words. Finally, they get to learn at the same level as the other kids. I take a little pleasure in that. It's very challenging but it was very important to me to teach a little bit of my culture to the kids here. I actually doubt I am going to teach much about Christmas. I am going to run out of time anyway since I only have 3 more lessons in each school before vacation. I think all the kids are restless and it's getting harder and harder to keep the kids' attention. I also figured that the kids are going to learn about Christmas in English for the rest of their education. When will they ever learn about Hanukkah otherwise?

Finally, a picture for you. Here is one side of downtown with our cool LED-lit Christmas tree. The building behind the tree is the Opéra Comédie. The words in lights "Joyeuses Fetes" means "Happy Holidays".


Your British word lesson of the day: strop = tantrum. In a sentence: She's too old to have a strop like that.