Carcassonne

Note: We're home in the US now, but we've got a lot of blogging to do to catch up, so we're continuing with the places we visited on our final trip, across southern France.

Entrance to the city walls of Carcassonne. Note the large
number of tourists.

From Toulouse, we took an afternoon train to Carcassonne, in the Languedoc-Roussillon region stretching along the Mediterranean coast. (Region-counting update: this was my twelfth of twenty-one regions and Lisa's fourteenth, although she's been in this one before.) This train trip was the first one we've had all year marked by significant delays. There was some sort of unspecified electrical problems at the Toulouse station that caused it. Our original train was first delayed thirty minutes then canceled outright so they moved everyone to a second, slightly later train, that was then further delayed another 45 minutes. Good thing we had a deck of cards to pass the time!

View from the walls of the castle.

Carcassonne is a city divided into two parts. The "new" part, where the train station is, was created in 1247 after King Louis IX conquered the city and settled the inhabitants of the old part across the river, away from the city walls. The old part, on the other side of the river, is on a large hill surrounded with two rings of walls forming a heavily fortified medieval stronghold. To get from the new part to the old part, we could either walk half an hour or take a bus. As we didn't feel like walking uphill with our bags on a warm sunny day, we opted for the bus.

Castle.

Our "hotel" room. Note Aaron's new hat on the table.

The old city of Carcassonne is like Mont Saint-Michel, but bigger. That is to say, it's a medieval town with huge walls, a church, twisty streets, lots of chintzy stores, and far too many tourists (although in Carcassonne they're mostly British and American, whereas in Mont Saint-Michel they're mostly Japanese). Like our December trip to Mont Saint-Michel, we opted to spend the night inside the walls of the old city and we're glad we did. It gave us a much different feeling of the city once all the day-tripping, tour-bus-utilizing tourists left. The place we stayed was great, too. It was one of three mini-apartments owned and managed by a woman who lives upstairs and runs a boutique next door. The one we stayed in was probably about the size of our tiny apartment in Cesson. It even had a kitchenette stocked with some basic food and lots of dishes (but almost no cooking utensils for some reason) and a nice little patio out back. The whole place had a beach-house kind of feel, despite being miles from the ocean! We loved it and the woman who ran it, Nicole (who had a beach-bum kind of look herself!), was quite chatty and friendly, too. In fact, the friendliness of the people we interacted with in the south was one of the first things we commented on, starting with the hotel clerk at the hotel in Toulouse who actually asked if there were any problems with the room to the tourist office woman in Albi who complimented Lisa on her French, all the way to the super-helpful hotel desk clerk in Lyon (more on him a few entries later).

Castle courtyard.

Anyway, once you block out the tourists, Carcassonne is a pretty awesome place. We started by touring the castle proper and walking around its ramparts, which afforded us some great views all the way to the Pyrenees. The castle also had an informative documentary and lots of interpretive plaques telling the history of the fortifications. It began as a Roman fortified camp in the fourth century AD, it was strengthened by the local lords in the twelfth century to resist the French kings (and to protect Cathar heretics, another act of resistance to the French), and, after the French victory over the local nobility in the thirteenth century, a second outer wall was added. After the seventeenth century, its military importance declined and in the nineteenth century, the whole fortification was restored (although not necessarily to the state it would have been in the thirteenth century - a lot of extra decorations were added to make it more "medieval"!).

Cathedral.

We also went to the former cathedral, next to the castle proper. (Because of a decline in population, the church is no longer a cathedral nor even a functioning parish church.) It's another one of these half-Gothic, half-Romanesque churches so prevalent in the south: the Romanesque part dates from the older, semi-independent period while the Gothic part (done in a northern style) dates from after the annexation of the region by the French kings and is meant to demonstrate the new "northern" power over the south.

Dinner.

For dinner that night, we decided to take advantage of our kitchenette and cook for ourselves. As there are no grocery stores inside the old city, we had to walk down the hill to a small store to forage for supplies before heading back up the hill to cook. We had bread, cheese, salad, beets, and tabouli for dinner on the patio. It was quite nice and a welcome change from all the meals out we'd been having.

Mostly-deserted street.

After dinner, we walked through the mostly-deserted streets, lined with closed shops, to get to the large space between the two city ramparts. We walked through the dusk between the walls, climbing up on to the outer ramparts at points for some beautiful views of the fading light over the countryside and the moon rising above the mountains. It became a lot less beautiful, though, once the massive floodlights down below were turned on in order to illuminate the town from the outside. Looking over the ramparts nearly blinded us! So we left the wall and walked down the hill to a bridge over the River Aude where we could get some great views of the city all lit up.

Our seat mate at the café.

After taking some photos, we climbed back up and on the way, we ran into a middle-aged Italian couple who had just driven into town in their camper. They wanted to know if the castle was open. We answered in broken Italian that no, the castle itself was closed, but you could walk around the walls as we were doing. It was only after answering that it hit me that they were speaking Italian, that's how confused my brain is with languages these days! Anyway, we finished walking all the way around the walls and then had a night-cap violet liquor and glass of wine at a bar on one of the plazas in the old city.

The next morning, we left early and walked down the hill to the train station (it's a lot easier going downhill on a cool, cloudy morning!) for the next stop on the trip: Avignon.

Sunset.

Turning the lights on at dusk.

Lisa on the bridge.

Carcassonne intramuros and moon.