I fell behind a day somewhere in there, and since I expect to have lots more to do once I reach Avignon tomorrow I figured I’d write a short bulletin covering today in order to be all caught up when I wake up tomorrow.
Friday was my last full day in Avignon. In the morning we had a meandering conversation after breakfast that somehow branched off from yesterday’s visit to the caves with the bear logo. I ended up telling the same story that I told at Franco’s wedding about the poorly-executed 1993 hiking trip to Mount Marcy in which we arrived way after dark and botched the operation of hanging our food packs from a tree to keep it away from bears. A bear had a successful game of pinata during the night and claimed some peanut butter and a bag of hard candy, but thankfully left us the rest of our food. On the way down a park ranger stopped us to confirm we were the folks who’d had a problem with a bear, and then gave us a lecture on the best tool you have to protect your food against bears. That was the set-up for the famous ranger line “It starts with R …” It turns out the ranger was thinking of “rope”, but we had fun coming up with all kinds of other options on the rest of the hike out (“rifle”, “repellant”, “ranger”, etc.)
I had fairly little trouble recounting this story in French, except for the fact that “rope” in French is cord, which starts with C and not R. How do you translate that part of the story elegantly ? The words fusil, bombe and forestier don’t all start with the same letter. Looking at it now I see two out of the three start with F, and so I could use ficeler (to tie up) to tell the rope part of the story and swap out fumée (smoke) for bombe (repellant). But on the fly all I could do was translate everything one-for-one and acknowledge that the alliteration plays better in English.
Other than that, we spent some time on pronunciation of vowel sounds, which is one of my weakest points. No matter how many times one tells me, I forget that the indefinite article un (“a” or the number “one”) is pronounced like the in- of incroyable and not like the -eu of peu probable. I also mangle the distinction between the -en-, -an-, and -on- sounds: menton and montant sound the same to me, both in my ear and in my mouth, and I can never remember how to say meringue or bilingue. Éliane gave me clear demonstrations of vowels made with the mouth in a smile, vowels made with an open, round mouth, and vowels made with an vertically-elongated mouth with the chin dropped.
We cut the morning lesson short to take a day trip to Carcassonne. I was already there Monday night, but it turned out I had gotten entirely the wrong impression of the city. First of all, there’s two halves of the city, on opposite sides of the Aude river. The ancient walled city and fortified castle of Carcassonne, the one featured in the eponymous board game, lies on the southeast bank of the river. The more modern city, called La Bastide, is on the northwest bank (they joined to become one municipality less than 200 years ago). And not only did I visit the modern rather than the ancient city earlier in the week, I somehow missed the more notable parts of La Bastide.
I corrected that on this visit, guided by Éliane and accompanied by Benjamin. We strolled through more interesting parts of La Bastide and they explained to me the history of the two settlements, the cathedral, and the deployment of the massive development grant that the new city received in 2015 to revitalize tourism in the more modern city. Then we drove over the river and up the hill to the medieval Cité of Carcassonne, walked around it a bit and ate lunch in a low-key restaurant. It was a more friendly, social conversation rather than the explicitly pedagogical sessions I’ve had all week with Éliane over breakfast. We joked a lot about their difficulties with certain English pronunciations and found in passing certain fairly common English words that they did not know. Benjamin and I compared return-to-office experiences post-Covid and talked a bit about the value of learning how to craft effective prompts for the ChatGPTs of the world.
After lunch I said goodbye to Éliane and Benjamin for the day and continued to explore the old city on my own. Well, first I went online and found a hotel that advertised having free wifi and rentable coworking space. You see, there was a meeting of the Board of the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, and since it was the first meeting since I was elected to the Board I didn’t want to miss it. The very nice people at the Hôtel de la Cité told me that if all I wanted was to use the WiFi and have a quiet place to sit for my meeting, there was no charge. They escorted me to a good-sized professional meeting room, and I took my Zoom call on my phone for an hour. I’ll have to remember to write a good review for the hotel on the internets.
My meeting successfully concluded (though low on phone battery) I continued my tour of medieval Carcassonnne. It’s the largest walled medieval city in Europe and the towers and ramparts are quite remarkable. Of course, I learned that much of it was in ruins by 1800 as first the shifting of the Spanish border to the south (away from Carcassonne) around 1600 and then the French Revolution from 1789 onwards had diminished the city’s standing, both in political and physical terms. A lot of the old city had been taken apart and carried over the river to serve as construction material for the new city. Napoleon set in motion a multi-decade restoration project directed largely by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who chose a particular period in the city’s thousand-plus year history and decided that was the reference point that should be put back in place.
So much of what I walked today was not original, making the old city as much a stage set as a real historic site. But it doesn’t feel at all tacky, and the style is quite consistent throughout which helps it avoid any Disney sense. I took a self-guided audio tour of the Château and the Ramparts, then wandered the streets of the enclosed city on my own for a while before getting dinner in a pleasant outdoor café. I hadn’t really planned on staying all day when we’d left in the morning, so I didn’t have a book or puzzles with me, and I regrettably passed up a chance to buy one of the handful of Carcassonne inspired real French novels from the Château gift shop. There wasn’t a real bookstore anywhere in the medieval city, and my phone was running low on batteries, so over dinner I had to content myself with reading a free guide to the region I picked up at the Tourism Office. I drank a glass of kir cassis and a beer, and ate a plate of spiced pork brochettes and some french fries.
I took a taxi home after dinner and got back around 8:45pm. I’ve been writing ever since, but it’s definitely time for bed now. I can pack in the morning.
