2023-07-02
I woke this morning at a reasonable hour, packed up my suitcase, left my bags with the hotelkeeper and headed out for another look at the town. The rest of the tour at https://www.a-ticket-to-ride.com/visiter-toulouse/ didn’t interest me much (and I’d already passed by most of the remaining stops, besides) so instead I made a plan to visit two of the markets and the Canal du Midi.
My first stop was the Marché de Saint-Aubin, so named because it occupies the entire length of the street that surrounds the Saint-Aubin church. The market operates on Sundays only, but is quite extensive. There were well over 100 vendors, maybe more, selling a wider variety of goods than I’m used to seeing at open-air markets. There were the usual staples: fruits, vegetables, cheese, meats, eggs, poultry, breads, olive oil, wine, dried fruits and nuts, olives, spices, honey, jam. Intermixed with these were a variety of more regional or ethnic offerings: enormous pans of cooked seafood, paella, vietnamese rolls, syrian breads, armenian dishes, honey soaked desserts, morrocan foods, belgian waffles, empanadas, macaron, and more. And together with the foods, there were many more durable items: knives and sharpeners, dresses, polished stones, hats, antiques, shopping caddies, wall paper, baskets, and mattresses.
Before canvassing the market I had a cup of coffee at a café, which claimed to be a pizzeria, but which was serving the standard coffee and croissants Sunday morning. Something like a third of the patrons were speaking Arabic, which was in line with the surroundings. From what I could tell this was an ethnically mixed, working class neighborhood; there were few tourists visible. A light rain fell on-and-off, though the weather didn’t seem to deter anybody. There were many, many people but not so many that it felt crowded. It was fairly subdued, an ordinary Sunday morning rather than a festival.
I walked the full circuit market twice, looking at everything, tasting a few proffered samples. Each vendor had either set up tables under one or more tents or was operating from a special-purpose trailer designed for showing their wears. Most every vendor was doing a steady business, but some had lines 20 people long while others had no lines. It wasn’t a question of the kind of goods sold, simply some vegetable merchants were preferred over others, some bread stands were oversubscribed, etc. The prices were quite low throughout (e.g. 0,70€ for a croissant), though I didn’t see a link between prices and line length. I bought a waffle made from pre-sweetened batter that came off the iron golden and sticky. It was delicious, crispy and slightly caramelized, far better than the ones I find in the U.S. (either spongy or cardboard).
After visiting Marché de Saint-Aubin I walked over to the permanent, covered market, Marché Victor Hugo. Along the way a French twenty-something walking with several buddies passed me and then turned back around to call «Quel beau chapeau ! Franchement, je voudrais le même.» (“What a great hat! Really, I want one just like that.”). It occurred to me that he could be pulling my leg, but he seemed sincere, and his companions did not break stride or snicker. Given that I’ve gotten similar comments on the hat in the U.S., I’m inclined to take it at face value. I bought the hat 18 months ago in Boston from a shop named Salmagundi. It’s a simple pale-yellow straw hat with a brown ribbon. I’ve seen many similar ones in France, first last summer in Avignon and then again this weekend in Toulouse. The going price around here seems to be 10€, though I paid considerably more for it in the States.
As I walked from one market to the other at a leisurely pace, it occurred to me that I know a lot of French words for “wander”: flâner, errer, arpenter, balader, sillonner, trainer. For some, I know certain nuances, but others not. For example, «sillonner» is more like “criss-cross”, while «arpenter» is more like “stride”, and «trainer» is more like “drag” or the yiddish “schlep”. Probably «flâner» and «errer» are the closest to a pure “wander”, thought I don’t know what subtleties either of those words carry. Funny how long it takes for vocabulary to grow, and also funny how many words the French have for walking somewhat aimlessly.
The Marché Victor Hugo was indoors, smaller (maybe 40 stalls), more modern, more ordinary, and more well-to-do. There were a few novelties relative to Saint-Aubin, but not a lot. The butcher stall sold a wider variety of meat products, including both fresh and aged pigs feet, aged cow feet, and also veal feet. Plenty of different cuts of fresh meat. Another vendor sold rabbit, whole and hind-quarters. Another stall featured hundreds of roast chickens (and an active rotisserie oven) one could choose from. There was a shop selling prize-winning aged ham, either thin slices priced by the pound, or a whole leg of jambon for 220€. There were a couple dozen of them at that price hanging from the ceiling. I wonder if anyone ever buys it in that quantity.
When I left the market it was raining again, more heavily now. I stood with a number of people under the arcade of the market building, waiting for a break in the rain. Next to me, a professional-looking woman in her early late 50s or so was talking in French with a younger friend of some kind, a well-dressed young man in his 20s. I couldn’t help but overhear the topic was how he could overcome his difficulties in learning English, which he expressed needing to master in order to advance in his job. Perhaps rudely, I started listening deliberately, and after five minutes I ventured to insert myself in the conversation and observed (in French) that I had encountered in learning French all the problems that the man avowed in learning English.
I’m not sure why I jumped in other than a general desire to interact with real French people and skin thickened by resolve and a baseline learned extroversion. But I’m very glad I did, as I earned with my bravery a delightful 20 minute conversation in French, followed by a 10 minute conversation in English. It turns out the woman was Nicole Yardeni Garbarsky, an adjoint to the Mayor of Toulouse responsible for music offerings by the city. She is also a practicing dentist, and married to an ex-patriot ENT doctor from New York, Eli Yardeni.
In just a brief time, and with minimal prompting from me, Mme Garbarsky told me her story. Her parents were Polish Jews who emigrated to France via Germany, arriving in Toulouse in 1939. They spoke Yiddish at home before coming to France, and a mix of Yiddish and French to Mme Yardeni Garbarsky as she was growing up. She met her husband when she was in dental school in Toulouse and he was in medical school there. She explained to the 20-something fellow (Florian, a purchaser for one of the aerospace companies here in Toulouse) that the experience of growing up in a family that was trying to assimilate, and then marrying a man from yet another country, prompted her to do a lot of thinking about how to learn both another language and another culture. Florian nodded along.
Just to keep the conversation going, I observed that I had been at the Saint-Aubin market earlier and that it was considerably different. Mme Garbarsky nodded vigorously and then gave me her impressions on the characters and socio-economic make up of the several markets in Toulouse (those two but also Marché Cristal and Marché de l’Aveyron at the Capitole. While I described Marché Saint-Aubit above as “working class” and “multi-cultural”, she described it as having a self-consciously political identity — “on the left” she clarified, in case I’d missed it. I confessed that I hadn’t seen anything that struck me as particularly political and she asked “Did you see folks passing out leaflets ?” I replied I had, but had not taken any nor noted what they were about. “Ah,” she said, “Political.”
Mme Garbasky’s husband emerged from the market and joined us, which occasioned a switch to English. I’m sure he was quite fluent in French, but after she introduced me (and got my name for the first time), he started speaking in English and I decided it would be weird to insist on speaking French with a native New Yorker (with a thick, classic New York Jewish accent). We talked for another 10 minutes, and then they announced they had to go as they were attending the opera in Toulouse later that afternoon. Mme Garbasky asked for my card, and I was glad that I’d thought to put a couple in my pocket this morning. She smiled broadly when she saw my French Theater Project logo — and promptly asked if it covered music as well, and if I could get Google to fund it.
One last note on that encounter. I’m always pleased when French people tell me that I speak French well – though of course many, many of them speak English notably better than I speak French. But Mme Garbarsky made a remark that could be somewhat ambiguous. When she introduced me to her husband, she told him I had lived in France for 10 years. I corrected her gently, and clarified that I had been studying French for the past 10 years after putting it aside post high-school. The only reason she knew the 10 year figure is that she’d asked me about my history with the language 20 minutes earlier and I gave her the information. So while I’m flattered to think she could have believed I’d lived in France for 10 years based on my French fluency, it’s also quite possible that I garbled the story so badly that I communicated to her I’d lived in France for 10 years rather than that I’d visited several times in the past 10 years. I think I’ll stick with the version of the story that puts me in the best light.
The rain had cleared up by the time we parted company, so I headed west to the spot on the map marked “Canal du Midi”. Of course, the canal runs for some 240 km from the Garonne river in Toulouse all the way to the port city of Sète on the Mediterranean. It’s been a working navigational canal since before the Revolution. The point on the map corresponded to a pair of canal locks that were fun to look at. There were a couple of guys in their twenties fishing from the bank further up, which surprised me as I don’t usually think of fish living in a canal. Looking at it, I was reminded of the George Simenon novel Le Charretier de la Providence, which takes as its setting a different canal (le canal latéral à la Marne, due east of Paris), and from which I learned a whole bunch of canal-specific vocabulary and practice. There were walking trails next to the canal du Midi, so I walked a bit before turning around and heading to the hotel.
I recovered my bags, walked to the Matabiau train station, bought some new crossword puzzles, had a cup of bad coffee, and took the train to Carcassonne. The train was quite full (it’s the start of July vacations) but the ride was uneventful. Éliane met me at the station and we drove to her house. I renewed my acquaintance with her husband Benjamin (Lonnie and I did a homestay language study with Éliane in 2018 when she and Benjamin lived near Compiègne in the north) and I got to meet their 18-month-old daughter for the first time. We sat on the deck overlooking a pool and talked for an hour or two in the afternoon sun, catching up on five years of events and reviewing the plans for the week. Then business time was over and family time started, a.k.a it was politely indicated to me that I was on my own for dinner tonight. This was not a surprise, as the stay is advertised as half-pension, not full-pension, and it was similar the last time I stayed and studied with Éliane.
It turns out that they don’t live in Carcassonne proper, but in a small village named Pezens northwest of Caracssonne. It’s pretty sleepy, with just a handful of shops. The only place open for dinner on a Sunday night was an unremarkable pizza joint that was only serving takeout. So I took myself a pizza back to the student apartment (which occupies the bottom floor of Éliane’s house and has a kitchen). The pizza was adequate, but I think next time I’ll accept Éliane’s offer to drive me into Carcassonne in the late afternoon and then take a taxi back after dinner. This will give me a greater range of dinner options, and is what her car-less students usually do.
After dinner I was fairly sleepy and turned in early — 9pm. I slept for a few hours, then woke up and finished writing this bulletin. It’s 2AM now — I’ll post it and then try to get a decent second helping of sleep so I can be up and ready for our 9am breakfast. Hooray for biphasic sleeping !
