Monday:
Honestly, not a whole lot. I went to the doctor and evidently I had some sort of minor infection, bronchitis of some kind...nothing serious. He prescribed some antibiotics and something for the cough and sent me on my way. And that was about it for the day.
Tuesday:
I took a long walk in the morning before the five-hour train ride and found a gorgeous old house that looked quite a bit like a chateau...and when I turned around, I realised that it could very well be a chateau, since this is the region for it. I still need to ask Catherine about it. When I have the answer, I'll let you know. The train ride was nothing spectacular; I started by reading and ended up playing round after round of Memory with Lea so that she wouldn't get too bored (she didn't have books or anything for the train). We found Camille almost immediately and walked for a while around Toulouse's plaza (evidently it's quite common for the towns in the south of France to have plazas like Spanish cities). From there it was another hour and a half's drive to Foix, where Camille is studying and thus has her apartment. We got in at around ten thirty/eleven and went to bed more or less immediately.
Wednesday:
We got up early this morning in order to go skiing at Ax-les-Thermes. I loved Camille's breakfasts: she made bowls of hot chocolate and then dipped Nutella-covered slices of brioche and baguette in. Even apart from being sugary and wonderful and chocolate by itself, it makes for a pleasant wake-up in an apartment with fritzy central heating.
Because her car doesn't do well with snow, we took a train and then a bus to get to Ax-les-Thermes. Normally the train runs direct from Foix to Ax-les-Thermes, but they were doing work on the tracks while I was there, so we took the train to another small town that I've forgotten the name of and then took the bus the rest of the way. All wearing our ski gear, because we're that fabulous. I had to borrow more or less everything because I hadn't anticipated skiing when I packed for France (Tours is in central France, remember, far from the mountains), so I looked very mishmash and thus doubly fabulous.
Camille took Lea on one of the green runs to practice since it was Lea's first time skiing and told me that I could go ahead and ski wherever I wanted for an hour before we met up for lunch. The skiing, I have to say, wasn't brilliant-- there hadn't been new snow for nearly a week, so it was crusty and icy on a lot of the runs. I did find a couple of nice ones going from a lift farther from the entrance but only got to ski them once since I had to leave early to meet Lea and Camille. We did the green run together again and stopped about halfway down for a picnic lunch. After that, we left Lea on the bunny hill to practice some more and Camille and I did some more difficult runs together. By the time we finished, it was beginning to snow quite heavily. I thought we were going to leave, but Lea was so put out by only having done two real runs that we went out for a third...which was a mistake. Everyone was cold, miserable, and it was nearly impossible to see. But in the end we made it to the bottom in one piece, if a bit frozen, and back at the apartment we took hot showers to warm ourselves back up. Happy ending.
Thursday:
We got up early-ish again in order to drive out to Carcassonne, which has one of the better-preserved medieval chateaux of the region (there are two basic types of chateaux, the medieval or "strong" chateaux, which are for defense, and the Renaissance chateaux, which are for showing off how rich you are). Having never seen a chateau like it before, I took pictures like a madwoman, as you'll see tomorrow. We spent the morning and the first part of the afternoon there, touring the battlements in high wind, which was about as fun as it was cold. On the way home, since we got back a bit early, we also went to the Chateau de Foix, where I took more pictures and got even colder. In the evening, we bought warm baguettes and Camille introduced me to the region's cheese and sausage specialties. Delicious as usual. I'll never get tired of French cheese.
Friday:
This time we could sleep in a little more, since the two things we visited weren't too far away from Foix. We set out first for the Grotte de Niaux, one of several caves in Europe where well-preserved paintings from the Stone Age have been found, dating back over 14,000 years. I've been wanting to see them for ages, ever since reading about them in one of my history classes in middle school (and, okay, I'll admit, after reading Jean Auel's Children of the Earth series). It was truly incredible, seeing them and imagining the people that painted them, and the simple thought that their traces have survived so perfectly, for so long. What was equally as interesting was that in the cavern we visited, there were two paintings of bison, nearly identical and about twenty feet apart on the same wall, that were made a thousand years apart. Given how much has changed in the last thousand years, it was, for lack of a better word, mind-blowing to imagine a culture that changed so little for thousands and thousands of years. It gave me shivers. And it made me wonder.
After that, we went to the Grotte de Lombrives, evidently the largest cave in Europe. It was impressive in size-- we only saw a small part of it in our hour-long tour. There are tours offered that last seven hours, and even still there remain still huge portions of the cave closed to visitors for reasons of research and preservation. There were some interesting formations (my favorite was a strange little projection close to the ceiling called, "les cuisses de la femme pendue:" the hanged woman's legs. It looked like what the name says, and amazingly realistic for cold stone), but all the same I was slightly underwhelmed after the first cavern. The other trouble was that I had a hard time following what the guide was saying; he had an extremely thick southern accent, which made him difficult to understand. The first guide didn't have much of an accent and she spoke English, so she could translate the words I didn't know, such as "bucatin"-- ibex (don't worry, I only asked her to translate a couple of words; for the rest, I listened to the tour in French like everyone else. What was funny was that Lea and Camille were the only two people on the tour whose native language was French-- there was me, an Australian couple, and then an Austrian man. But the tour was given in French nonetheless).
On the way back from Lombrives, we stopped off at a little bridge dating from the 12th century and I took some more pictures, as you'll see. Later in the evening, we all watched the Enfoirés on TV. The Enfoirés are an annual music special for the benefit of the Restaurants du Cœur, France's system of soup kitchens. Evidently almost every big name in French music was there, and they sang all the French as well as American hits (they even did "I Kissed a Girl," to give you an idea). It was certainly quite the show; the costuming alone was incredible. And for such a good cause, too.
A good ending to a good day, certainly.
Saturday:
Once again, we got up early in order to drive out to Collioure, a beautiful little town on the Mediterranean. We dipped our feet in the water but not much else; it was frigidly cold. Instead, we walked around the town and saw the painters, the colorful houses, and toured the chateau (a medieval chateau, if you're curious. I took pictures). On the way back to the car, we stumbled upon an ice cream shop/patisserie that sold churros with Nutella-- evidently a Catalonian specialty, according to the lady who made them. Whether or not this is true is irrelevant to the fact that churros and Nutella are a match made in heaven. I'm going to open a shop with just that and perhaps crêpes in the US, and I'll be rich. Who needs college anyway?
On the way back home, we stopped off in Perpignan and tried some more Catalonian pastry (as if we hadn't been sugared up enough already). We split three desserts: a cream dessert called 'Lema', a millefeuilles cake (which I don't think is Catalonian, but it looked good so we got one anyway), and a small cookie/cake thing that reminded me quite a bit of Mexican wedding cookies. Interesting the cultural echoes, how they distort... Anyway, all were delicious, but I think the Lema was my favorite.
Sunday:
Not much. We drove out to Toulouse and walked around the plaza again in the hour we had to kill before the train left, saw one of the more famous churches, and then left. Five hours on the train, reading mostly (Camille bought Lea a magazine, so we only played Memory for the last thirty minutes after she'd finished reading it and started asking me every five minutes what time it was). And now I'm home and writing this.
That's it, since it's late and I have school tomorrow. I don't see much happening this week, but you never know what surprises are around the bend. Don't expect anything greatly exciting, though.
'Til tomorrow for the pictures. Ciao!
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