Category: Travel

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 !

I’m in France for a few weeks, enjoying a much-needed summer vacation. It’s been a while since I posted anything to the blog, let’s see if I can remedy that a few times during my trip.

I arrived in Toulouse on Friday morning, June 30, and had to wait in the airport for an extra hour for my baggage to arrive. My Boston flight landed in Paris, and I had only an hour to make the connecting flight. I sailed through customs and inter-terminal security, reaching my flight with 10 minutes to spare. My suitcase was not so lucky, and had to wait for the next CDG-TLS flight. Fortunately it was just an hour.

The seat next to me on the flight to Toulouse was a friendly, well-behaved 3-year old. She took a liking to me, and her Mom was OK with it, so I played and talked with her a bit during the one hour ride. Sang a few French kids songs I knew and animated her stuffed animal a bit (she kept dropping it on the floor beneath my seat). Good times.

Took the shuttle bus to Toulouse, walked 3 minutes to Hotel Héliot, left my bags with the clerk, and went to lunch at Café Maurice at Place Saint-Georges. It was OK, but the salmon tartare has about twice as much raw salmon as one can reasonably eat. I left much of it over. It was fairly chilly out (15C-18C, intermittent light drizzle), not great for a walking tour. I barely slept on the plane (though I did complete five or six French crosswords) and was exhausted, so despite best advice to the contrary, I went back to the hotel, checked in, and slept for seven hours.

For dinner I took the hotel clerk’s recommendation and ate at Le Bon Vivre on Place du Président Wilson. I had “gazpacho andalou” (which I would have called simply “gazpacho”) and breaded veal cutlet with noodles. The soup was very good, the pasta was excellent, and the veal was OK — again, far too much veal for one sitting. I don’t remember restaurants in France serving such large portions. The restaurant is very much a “farm to table” kind of place, featuring both local ingredients and local producers. I was seated facing a wall-mounted screen that ran a full series of marketing videos like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QGDvwIt64U. The sound was off, but the closed captions were on, so I got to practice my reading while watching the smiling faces of various farmers and cattle- and goat-raisers talk about their work and their relationship with the restaurant. It was very interesting, actually.

I had a little trouble going to sleep, but after reading (Les fiancés de l’hiver), I slept from about 1AM – 9AM on Saturday, July 1. I spent the morning writing up some long-overdue pre-work for my language immersion course that starts tomorrow. I ate lunch at The Flower’s Café on Pl. Roger Salengro: a “bagel” with mozzarella and sun-dried tomato and a side salad. I indulged in my first cup of coffee since leaving Boston (I figured mixing coffee and jet lag was not a good idea), and also a slice of almond tarte with berries in syrup for dessert. I probably should have skipped dessert, as I felt unpleasantly full for much of the afternoon.

After lunch it was still chilly, maybe 18-20, overcast and on-and-off drizzling. But it’s my last full day in Toulouse, so I toured the city anyway. I followed the self-paced walking tour that I found at Visiter Toulouse en 1 jour : les essentiels de la Ville Rose. :

1. La place du Capitole: lots of people in a big open square in front of an 18th century capital building. Big and imposing. A lot of brick, which is quite common in Toulouse. Apparently much cheaper and more locally available than stone. Interesting “occidentie cross” of metal inlaid in the stone on the ground in the center of the square. Zodiac signs at each corner. I spent while looking at the ceiling fresque in the arcade opposite the Capitol. 29 panels painted in 1993 or so depicting various famous Toulousiens or events in Toulouse history. The panels at eye-level of each column of the arcade provided explanations.
   
2. La rue de taur: I followed the blog’s recommendation and went to La Compagnie du Chocolat, purchased some crystallized violet leaves. Haven’t tried one yet. Had a nice chat with the shopkeep. Browsed briefly the various bookstores and open-air book stalls along the street.
   
3. La bibliothèque du Périgord is a public library in a very nice, modern-ish building. I walked the length of the high-ceilinged, vaulted reading room. It was well populated with patrons, and very silent. Nice windows on either end, some interesting art over the entrance.
   
4. La Basilique Saint-Sernin: the largest Romanesque (as opposed to Gothic) church in Europe, it was completed around 1120, making it 900 years old. I took the free guided visit led by a French-speaking seminarian. It’s a big place with a lot of relics and various small chapels and artworks. Nothing too remarkable, but I’ve never been one for churches. Still, it’s the jewel of Toulouse, so I figured it was worth 45 minutes. One curious thing I learned: if you look up the length of the nave from the fount at the very back, by the western door, you see that the fount is lined up with the door and with the center axis of the nave. But the altar and the canopy at the far other end, the eastern tip, is a bit off-center to the left. The guide asserted that this is the case in many latin-cross European churches, and so unlikely to be an accident. Apparently there is no firm record for why things were laid out this way, but the prevailing explanation is that the latin cross floor-plan of the churches represent the crucifixion,  with Chirst’s feet at the far end of the nave, Christ’s arms extended to the north and south transept, and Christ’s head at the apse. He is often represented in death with his head nodding down and to the left, and so correspondingly the apse was made to be off-center the left. Interesting phenomenon and evocative explanation.
   
5. Arnaud Bernard, le quartier «street art»: Fairly underwhelming. I have a feeling I didn’t find the main parts where much art is visible. I didn’t look that hard.
   
6. Le Couvent des Jacobins: I was getting tired at this point, and didn’t look to hard for this landmark. As it happens, I wandered by it on my way to somewhere else, but it was already closed for the day. Not much to see from the outside.

At that point, I had had enough for the day and gave up on the self-guided tour.

Somewhere during the tour I did a little shopping. I bought toothpaste at a Monoprix and tried to buy shampoo, but the selection was bewildering and too fancy. The Monoprix website offers basic shampoo, but I couldn’t find it in the store. Asked somebody unsuccessfully, then gave up. I later bought some at a Carrefour City without difficulty. I tried to buy a cleaning cloth for my glasses at Les Binocles Toulousaines, Rue Gabriel, but the very friendly man wouldn’t take my money. He insisted I take the high-quality cloth for free. I thanked him and chatted briefly before leaving. Around 6:30pm I bought 130 grams of a semi-soft cow cheese from Fromagerie Verlac, rue Arnaud Bernard, and a small loaf of bread at Maison Janin just next store.

I was headed for the Couvent de Jacobins when I decided I could use some social contact. My map showed me that I was not too far from a games store, Le Passe Temps, so I walked over there and asked if by any chance they knew of a game-salon or other store where one could sit and play games with others. I introduced the question and off-beat, but the sales person gave me a broad smile and said nothing could be more natural to ask in a games store. Friendly people, these Toulousians. He wrote out for me three places to go, two «Bars aux jeux» and one video game parlor. «BlastoDice» was in a part of town I walked through before, so instead I headed over to «Les Tricheurs» by the Garonne river.

Upon reaching the river, I discovered I had stumbled on … a WateRugby festival. Rugby is a big, big sport here in Toulouse, and in south-west France in general. Toulouse is hosting the Rugby World Cup 2023 in September, and there’s lots of signage everywhere. While I knew rugby was a thing, I had never encountered Water Rugby before. It’s a friendly, no-contact version of the sport played on large floating raft, with the river itself as the perimeter of the playing field. Players wear swim trunks and vault into the water cum end-zone to score a point. The organizers attach a long floating bridge for the teams to enter and exit the raft, then remove it for each 15-minute match. The ~7-person teams file on and off the raft for each match while several hundred fans watch and drink beer in stands erected on the bank of the river. There was a play-by-play announcer broadcasting over a loud-speaker, lots of food trucks and merchandise tents set up in the small park between the street and the river. The whole thing is a deliberately silly marketing event set up by various rugby organizations. Ridiculous.

I watched for a while, then headed over to Les Tricheurs. It was humming, with a couple dozen parties playing games and eating/drinking inside and out. I presented myself to the host and asked if he could help me find playing partners. He said something might turn up, but that he couldn’t really act as match-maker. I canvassed the place and made one attempt to offer myself as an additional player to a group that was just finishing, but without success. So I ordered a beer and sat at a table by myself for a bit, hoping someone suitable would turn up.

As luck would have it, a 50-year-old Frenchman named Fred showed up 20 minutes later under the mistaken understanding that there was an organized trivia night happening (it was slated for Monday, not Saturday). I saw my chance and invited him to play. We hit it off quite well and spent an enjoyable couple of hours talking and playing games (one was named Patchwork, I forget the name of the other). Fred arrived just last week in Toulouse, where he’ll be working for four months as an organizer of the Rugby World Cup. He was outgoing and friendly, and we swapped what we knew of Toulouse. He took my phone number, saying he might make the trip out to Avignon for a couple of days if he gets bored of Toulouse. He’s from Pays de la Loire, and hasn’t spent much time here in the south of France. I’ll be amused if he follows up.

Fred and I left the bar around 10:30pm, walked back towards the city center together until our paths diverged. I made myself a small picnic in my room consisting of bread and cheese, then wrote up this bulletin. Tomorrow I need to check out at 11am, and my train to Carcassonne doesn’t leave until 3:15pm, so I have some time to finish the rest of the Toulouse walking tour. Good night!