from Pierrerue: touching stories

There’s no question. When you are an outsider, you must be careful in the messages you send and receive.

Only, how do you figure out what it all means?

Through making mistakes, of course.

I go outside at 9:30 to wait for the bread lady. My next door neighbor, the adorable, wonderful Madame Marie-Rose (not her real name, but it is of the genre) comes out as well. She is friendly, inquisitive. She likes that I speak some version of French. She groups visitors around here into those who do and those who don’t.

I ask about the village notice announcing a forthcoming Fete, a celebration. I tell her I would like to go and she is delighted. She invites me to her house. I glance around, quickly, trying not to take in too much detail. It is very traditional, with dark wood commodes and tables. I tell her it’s lovely.
It is modest, nothing fancy, she says, searching for a piece of paper to write down the Fete information.

On June 10th we will go down together. It is by the Mairie (every village and town in France has a mairie, where records are kept and bureaucratic nightmares are resolved).
It is for young people, but we all come.
With each point, she touches my arm, my hand – it is the way of people here. Everyone touches.

You know about our boucherie-charcouterie?
No...
He comes in a truck, Thursday, today, at 2. He has everything! Meats, sausages – such sausages! Everything.

I really did not imagine myself to be cooking up a meat storm, here in my tiny kitchen of my tiny castle corner, but I want to project gratitude and friendliness and so I express great joy in this.

I will come get you when he is here. He comes right outside my door.

At once my afternoon plans are changing. No longer am I going to be down in St Chinian eating a hearty lunch at Mme Suzanne’s, I will be here, with Mme Marie-Rose buying meat. The price of friendship.

I pause in my work to amble down to the Thursday market. I need cherries, strawberries, tomatoes, one of those sweet tiny French melons, I check off mentally items to look out for, pick up my basket, park the car outside the city center and walk over.

The market is smaller on Thursdays and far less crowded. The British are visibly absent. Maybe they eat pasties and mashers other days.

By noon, the farmers are anxious to unload and get going.



my veggies man



my cherries and tomatoes duo


I wait in line for my turn at the weigh-in and a friendly guy with a fantastic moustache and a gold chain around his dark neck turns to me and shows me the enormous head of garlic he is purchasing.
It’s healthy! You should buy one. You mash it up, mix it with oil, cook up fish, potatoes, fantastic!

I smile, mumble something and turn to the vendor.

But it strikes me that he is right. These garlic heads here are huge and most likely extremely flavorful. And so I purchase one.

I walk away from the stand and think – what the hell am I going to do with a garlic head this size? I’m not going to chomp on raw garlic cloves. I need stuff with them.

And so I add eggplant, zucchini, onion, tomatoes, and then of course olive oil. And I pass this stand:



my fish guy


… and so I purchase some of those as well.
One head of garlic later, my basket is full.

As I leave the market, I encounter my garlic pusher.
I wave and dangle the garlic, indicating that I listened.
He scoots right over and talks about the virtues of garlic. He is a furniture maker and, along with his son, he is selling chairs.





I admire them. I do find them pretty. Had I a house that needed chairs and I lived here, I would consider buying one. But I don’t and I tell him that transporting said chair to America would be a project.

America? You are from America? Are you with a group?
Imagine the improbable: a tour bus full of Americans in little St. Chinian. Imagine, me on that bus. Horrified at the idea, I tell him:
No, I am not! I’m alone! (mistake no.1)

He whips out his card and shows me where his furniture workshop is located. His accent is so thick that I can barely understand him. He appears to be saying that I should visit his workshop. He underlines the name of the village it is in. Not too far, he assures me.

I smile politely and explain that I do not know where it is and besides I do not really live here, I am in Pierrerue.

He looks puzzled. Pierre-what? Write it down.
Pierrerue is a mouthful. Locals must say it differently. I write it down. (mistake no.2)
He goes on about his furniture, explains that the card is his son’s and his name is really Felix. He crosses out his son’s name and writes in Felix. And then says:
Your name?
I am sure that we are politely exchanging names after a protracted conversation about garlic and furniture and so I write down my name (mistake no. 3; indeed, I have singularly violated my motto of the other day).

I will come visit you!
A look of horror crosses my face. I am in possession of my wits. He asks for my phone number, I tell him I do not have a phone. Nor a street number.

But really, everyone in Pierrerue knows of me. To find the American staying there, alone? Tres simple!
I retreat, believing that Felix is not actually going to drive his truck over to Pierrerue and inquire about the sole American living there, but I have to wonder how our casual conversation turned into this.

I walk hunched over, feeling like I did on the day I lost my passport. I goofed. The oomph is out of me.

I pass a mail carrier. In her twenties, she is spry and lively, bouncing from door to door with her deliveries. As I pass her she says the obligatory “bonjour madame!”
She looks at me and asks: do you have far to walk? Can I help you carry those?

My God! The mail carrier has just offered to take my bundles for me! I best put zip back into my step.

But I know it’s not that – it’s the hierarchy of village life. A woman my age is treated with respect, with deference. Her impulse was exactly right. She would, without hesitation, interrupt her work to assist someone older than her.

In the afternoon, Madame Marie-Rose is climbing over the fence at the back of my stone hut, trying to find me, to let me know the meat truck is here. I am glad I decided to stay for it.

She buys meat for the week. It is clearly a staple of her diet. She buys more meat than I eat in a month.



Madame studies the meats


The seller could not be a sweeter man. He sings loudly about love and a broken heart as he chops steaks and sausages. Marie-Rose says he is Dominique and has been driving his truck for decades.

I admire photos plastered to the back of his truck. Dominique is dressed as a cow and he has toddlers in his arms.

Grandchildren. Marie-Rose explains. Dominique is a very young grandfather.

Dominique winks and laughs and when I take a photo, he puckers his lips and throws kisses my way. Innocent to the core. I buy calamari and local dried sausage (I know, I know, what are you gonna do), I leave.



my sausage guy


In the evening I stop work. Before I hit the tiny stove I take a walk to the village further down from Pierrerue. The sun is warm, the air is fragrant, the wind has settled to a mild puff here and there. I have my camera, nothing else.




a few steps away from Pierrerue




looking at Pierrerue (halfway up the hill), from across the valley


I pass a house where a man, considerably younger than me, is working with cement. He is fixing his steps and cracks on the house wall. The house is simple but nice. There are roses everywhere.

I have never seen a guy wear such short cut-offs in my entire life.

He shuts off his cement machine and smiles.
Out for a walk?
Yes…
He continues speaking: I see you take photos. So it is a photo walk? His grin is a foot wide.
Yes… I hesitate, wanting to say more, but change my mind and walk on.

And so I have to sort this out: the vendors, the customers, the men, women, neighbors, postal carriers – they all have a code. Most every exchange is a sign of friendliness and respect. Except when it’s not. Me, I am only learning it. Sort of.

Back at home I cook up my cloves of garlic, with trimmings.

from Pierrerue: gift of gab, genius and goats

It is noon, I am restless. I quit work for the day. How easy it is to adapt the ways of those around you!

I want to go back to the Canal du Midi. I haven’t got a feel for its run yet. I haven’t walked along it, haven’t turned corners by its side, gone over bridges, watched boats pass through.

It should be an easy half hour drive from here, but there is no such thing as a straight road to it. Solo driving means pulling over, taking out reading glasses, studying the map, pulling back onto the road, coming to the intersection, being puzzled, pulling over, studying the map, understanding that I have gone too far, reexamining the map, turning back, forgetting the number of the road, pulling over, taking out reading glasses, studying the map – and this happens for the entire route.

I am still some kilometers away from the village where I am to pick up the trail of the Canal when I see a tiny sign saying “Auberge du Chat qui Peche, this way.” Cute little knife and fork below and a picture of a blue cat, fishing. It is 1:30 and I am hungry. If I do not stop for a salad soon, I will start encountering the closed sign and in desperation I will pound on a boulanger’s shop to reopen already and get myself arrested.

I follow the arrows. A country restaurant, in France. Mmmmm.

Around three more twisty turns I see it. An Impressionistic lullaby: a yellow building, by a stone bridge crossing over the Canal du Midi. At the edge of the canal, a wooden boat with a tall mast.





Inside, a few tables are occupied. I hear French, I hear “British.” The menu – ohhh, so tempting: foods that are simple et vraie, it says. De la campagne. You got me where you want me -- salvating. Salade, Chicken Catalane with potatoes dauphinois, cake of the house. That does it. The transformation is complete. From now on, I eat my big meal in the afternoon, like the French.



la salade is now just the beginning of le dejeuner


Lunch is, in fact delicious. And protracted. No one is in a hurry. The one hour lunch becomes a two hour lunch, becomes a… Okay, let me ask for a coffee and the check. Wait, I hear the waiter in the next room, talking about me, about the other clients. Oh, how audacious! Surely he knows some of us can hear him. Oh, he is telling about the French table where they changed their mind, passed on the coffee and ordered lots of cake instead. I can hear it all!

It suddenly strikes me. He is not speaking French, he is speaking Polish. [Take note: do not assume, even on the banks of the Canal du Midi, in a small village in the south of France that you can speak Polish and no one will understand.] And so I hail him over, of course, in Polish.

He is Camile, he is half Polish half French.
I live here in the summer, then, when the Canal closes, so does the restaurant and I move for six months to Poland.
A winter in Poland, so cold!
The winters in Poland, they are not so pretty anymore. Less snow, more dampness, pollution. But still, I am also cold here in the winter! When the wind blows through, you run for cover!
Is it your restaurant?
It belongs to all of us in my family. I have been here for eight years.
So do you ever see Poles here?
No, never. Maybe once every three years someone will stop by. But we never see Americans any more either. Before 9/11, almost every week we would have some. Now, almost never. Once every few months. They stick to Paris if they come to France at all.

A man who is half French half Polish. An impossible combination! No one will ever get a word in edgewise. The quintessential storytellers, the Poles, the French. And indeed, I get my share.

The Americans, they are so uncomfortable here. Especially in the South, where not many of us speak English. Last summer, three Americans came in and they looked lost, confused and one asked for a coffee and another for a beer and the third turned to his friends and said “how do you say Coca Cola in French?”

It’s a story he laughs at, but there is also puzzlement there. As if there is something about the Americans that he doesn’t quite get. I see that often here. When I say I am an American there is, automatically, a reaction. Surprise, deference, caution. And usually, I am told of some trip over there that was nice, interesting, so different over there, so different.

How do we appear to the French back in our own settings, where we do not stand out, as we must here?

I leave, promising that I would try to find them again. God knows how I ever found this place on this day, though if I follow along by the Canal du Midid, there it will be, no?





I leave the Canal eventually and head back north, back into the hills and the vineyards of the Minervois. Within a brief drive, there is yet a completely different wine terroir than that of St. Chinian. The soil is different, the slope, the climate, all call for a different wine label. The town that gave the wine region its name is Minerve. And it is stunning.





At this time of the year it is empty. Now, on this last day of May, I am almost alone. A few store owners are working to put things in order, waiting, I am sure, for the tourist season to begin.

I climb down into the river bed and look around. There is no river any more. It’s like the Internet that has command of our need for information, usurping other tools, so too you see these wondrous inventions and the demise in their usefulness because time has abruptly messed things around. The river has gone underground. The need for the magnificent bridge is gone. The development of efficient ground transport has made the Canal du Midi nearly obsolete. The inventors create and then time wipes out the need for their particular genius. Had they known that the bulk of “users” would someday be tourists and only tourists, would they close shop and do something else, like carve sticks, or blog maybe?



underneath, staked tomatoes



...and peaches


Driving back, I stop at a random roadside wine producer. There are dozens and dozens of them. The entire south of France is one huge field of grapes, interspersed with mountains, pastures and a few towns and villages.

This Domaine looks pretty. Their wines must be a success – the house is lovely, kept up well.



Domaine de Peyremale


I drive up, madame opens the door.
You are open, right? (Walk-ins are the norm here.) Her daughter, maybe 9 or 10 hovers, bouncing a ball around the little cave where the vats are.
Oh, stop bouncing that! The noise! The mother tells her.
She stops, grins, comes over and watches. The mother insists that I sample the three types they have. The wines are light but so very lovely, smooth, delicious.
Alright, a white and a rose. I look at the prices: 1.70 Euro for the Rose, 2.5 Euro for the Chardonnay. I can’t have bothered her for two bottles only! And so I buy four.

Visitors, I need visitors here in Pierrerue!

Ten kilometers to St Chinian still. I see a sign to a goat cheese maker. I follow. Four bottles of wine, one goat cheese. Perfect supper, no?

The path curves up the hillside. Signs warn me to drive slowly, there are goats and little children.

Madame is young. Her toddlers are running between the fromagerie and the barn. I hear goats. It is their post pasture time where they chomp down stuff in the barn, get milked, and basically settle in for the night.

Madame gives me five cheeses to sample. How do you decide?
This one is very fresh, unsalted. You can put sugar on it for dessert. This one is very strong.
But I like all of them!

I visit the goats.
Would you like to see the babies? Yes, except that it will make me miss my babies. Baby goats, babies, not so babies anymore back home.



La Chevrerie de Combebelle



the babies


I turn into St Chinian. The grocer is open. Pick up some tomatoes, endive, enough to tide me over until the Thursday market.

from Pierrerue: local time

It cooled off considerably overnight, but the sun remains brighter than bright. No matter, I spent most of the day in Pierrerue. For me, there is no greater motivation to get stuff done than to have the reward of places to go, foods to eat there, waiting. And so I settled in to work.

Not that Tuesday was a total throw away in terms of indulging the senses.There is something to be said for keeping your nose to the local ground. For example: in the morning, I went out in front of my stone hut to search out the legendary bread woman who careens around the villages with the daily supply of breads and baguettes. She came. I purchased.





And so my breakfast is on the front step of my hut.



could not resist a bite


From the step, I watch people in my village move into the fields and I visit with my neighbor. I swear she has the tail of another breed of animal. She sits between the two flower pots for most of the sunny hours of the day and comes over if I so much as look her way.





At noon, I take a short walk around the village, stopping by the notice board at our one intersection. Announcements included a fete coming up on June 10, the "bar" will open in the village center at 19:00 (is there a center? Is it where the number of houses is equal to that going the other way?), dinner at 20:00, make your reservations, here’s the menu. Other announcements: watch out for these caterpillars in your garden. Children, there is a nature walk scheduled for you at this time. All: visit the exhibit of 1936 photographs from the region, at St. Chinian, until May 31st.

I hear it takes twenty years to live in a French village before you are accepted as authentically one of them. And yet, the sense of good will, at the superficial level of greeting, of explaining, of helping, of inviting is there from day one.





Back to work. By 6, I am ready to quit. I have already worked probably three hours longer than the average French person. I take a walk along the country road. No great sight in the world could inspire a sense of tranquility in the same way that a country walk can, especially amidst blooming golden brush and rocky hills, with freshly green vines filling every spare crevice.

The soil is so poor here, but so pretty to look at. Red soil, gray rock, green vine, golden brush. A palate for an painter. The sun now feels warm, but the winds are there, famously strong. They account for the cloudless skies here. And for the huts built in fields, so that the farmers can find shelter when they gust through unexpectedly and dump stuff on a winter soil.









In the evening I am with car, but I stay local. One more attempt at finding a good eating place at St. Chinian. Yes! It’s there! I am your devoted client, your fan, your admirer for life, well no, for three weeks. Madame Suzanne, you are a genius. Or, your husband (M. Regis) is, or both of you are. We shake hands at the end. She knows she’s got me in the palm of hers.

It’s called La Caleche and it is right on the village square. As in every French restaurant, there is a set menu and I leap to try it: menu du terroir – of the region, combining the flavors of St. Chinian.

I wont fill you with details. A quick photo run should do it – from the melted chevre with pine nuts, in puff pastry, to the duck breast with fig sauce and a cheese ravioli, selections from the cheese board and a warm local chestnut flan.



with melted chevre and pine nuts



with fig sauce and a cheese ravioli



regional



from local chestnuts


I am so glad to have the car to drive back up the hill to Pierrerue at night. If I use it for nothing more than that, it will have been worth it. (Ridiculous statement. Of course I use it for more. The very next day.)

from Pierrerue: good men, bad men; good food, bad food; nudity and all beautiful things surrounding water and being fifty and then some

[Caution: this is an awfully long post. Tomorrow’s will be shorter, I promise.]

Should a woman, traveling alone, be cautious about putting herself in potentially troubling situations? Well, yes, but without necessarily avoiding potentially interesting (and information generating) encounters. I go with the motto that so long as there are people around, no harm can come my way. The accompanying motto is do not give out your real name or phone number if you are at all thinking that you may actually have someone make use of it.

On Sunday I had my worst meal yet of the entire trip and I had my sleeziest encounter as well. Not deterred, on Monday, I had a wonderful meal and a wonderful encounter. Both had innocent beginnings and, thankfully, innocent endings. I’m used to traveling alone and I am used to reaching out to strangers. And I am used to this leading to good outcomes and occasionally a not so good one.

I was psyched for trying out one of the three or four eateries in St. Chinian. This is to be my town, the place where the waiters will know me by name and kiss both cheeks every time I enter, the place where I know the menus by heart. Okay, I am eliminating from further consideration the place I went to Sunday eve. It may be fine by North Dakota standards (no insult there, it’s just that I’ve not heard anyone ever rave madly about an eating establishment in North Dakota), but here, you come to expect a lot more.

But before even sitting down to dinner, I was passing by a rowdy group just outside a bar next door. They were so exuberant! So I asked one guy to explain what was going on. It turns out they were supporters of a local rugby team. The team had lost that day, but this certainly would not keep anyone from coming out to cheer about their non victory.

The guy I asked was a chatty type. In providing full and detailed explanations of everything having to do with the sport of rugby, his home town and all in between, he bought me what he considers to be a local aperitif (kir, claimed as local by nearly every village in France) and he got quite close. You know, so that he could be heard. In the ten minutes I spent there in that crowd, I had nearly a dozen people come up and tell me that I should watch out for this dude. My camera and my entrance smile make me look quite like the innocent abroad. In any event, it’s never impossible to leave when you are in such public places and so I did. Only to have a bad meal. It was a gloomy and very dark fifty minute walk back to Pierrerue that night.

On Monday, I took a public bus (with all the village high school children from this area) to the big town of Beziers. They were going to school, I was going to pick up a car. I cannot move much without one and the intended motorbike rental turned out to be too difficult to contemplate.

In Beziers, I finally had one of those moments where you are in love with your setting. My setting actually wasn’t that spectacular – Biziers is just alright, acceptable only if you are passing through ever so quickly, but the café and croissant were nothing short of magnificent.





And so now I have this car. And I am on this morning close to the coast. I had wanted to see what the coastal towns and beaches were like here, at the point in France where it is almost Spain but not quite. And I wanted to see the first segment of the Canal du Midi.

You know about the Canal du Midi, right? It is more than a three hundred year old canal and it came to be built because of the pirate issue around the Rock of Gibraltar. One good way to avoid the pirates is to dig a canal through France between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

The canal is a fascinating 240 kilometers of locks and water slopes, connecting waterways all the way to Toulouse where it dumps boats into the rivers leading to the Atlantic. It is also a work of art, with the recognizable rows of old, evenly spaced trees making it all extraordinarily photogenic. So expect to see a lot of Canal du Midi photos in the next three weeks.



resting places for barges and boats




bridges


But the other body of water that I fell madly in love with on this day was the sea. I was driving along the coastal road up to the historic port of Sete and finally, I could not resist it. The sun was strong, the water was breathtakingly beautiful, there were gusts of wind and really, you cold not ask for a finer day to walk along hot golden sands.

Two things surprised me. There were cars parked along the side of the road and every several dozen feet there would be an umbrella or two, but not so many. Surely this place will swell with people in July and August, but now it is extremely uncrowded.



one umbrella here




on this windy day, another one here...


And the women are topless.

We are not talking about a nudist beach. There are those as well, but this is just one very public stretch of sand, right next tot the road, and there they were, not all, but a great many, old and young, walking around and wiping an occasional grain of sand from under an often sagging breast.

It was such a beautiful hour, there in that Mediterranean sun. I stretched out by a dune, rolled around some in the warm sand, walked by the water’s edge and studied these:



...wait, friend or foe?


…and generally thought evil thoughts about Victoria’s Secret and the post sixties generation that rejected early attempts to burn that damn bra for good (except for jogging – I can see its virtues then).

I did not stay too long because, brown as I am, I am not brown all over and without sunscreen, you can do some serious damage to yourself on those beaches, but I have to say that this was one great hour of bliss this week.

In the town, my little info booklet told me that I should climb up a hill to take in the spectacular layout below. Surrounded by sea on two or three sides, connected to the mainland by strips of sandy beach, broken up by an old canal running through the town center, it really is quite the marvel.



canal down the middle



looking at it (later) from the top



to the south, the beaches


And so I ask for directions of a person who looked like he might know the area.

Diego lives here, alone. He looks local, speaks local, eats local. Early in our conversation, he had been telling me about his beautiful grown up children and so I pointedly asked:
do you have a…(momentarily the word for wife escaped me)
Concubine? He asks, completely seriously. No.

He had once married a Parisian woman, had children with her, then decided she worked too hard and he wanted, instead, a life of beaches and fishing and singing late into the night (he is Catalan and earns money as a Flamenco singer). You could call that either romantic or foolish. She saw it as the latter and stayed up north. He’s been here for years.

He was giving me directions, in fact leading me up toward the proper roads when I interrupted to ask where I could get a good lunch salad. Sete does not lack eateries. There are lots and lots of them and so one must be suspicious, particularly after last night’s poor dinner.

Diego’s accent was thick and sprinkled with dialect, but he knew to speak slowly and I could easily follow along.

These places, they are mostly bad. For tourists. But there is one place that you will really like. Le Pique Boeuf. They make excellent salads, fish dishes, local foods. It is excellent. I know it well, I sing there every Saturday evening.

I ordered the bouillabaisse. Anyone who has eaten with me in seafood restaurants knows that I always order a bouillabaisse if it is on the menu. And here I am, practically at the birthplace of this flavorful concoction.

The staff was effusive. They brought tasting plates of mussels and olives and dates and on-the-house aperitifs (it’s a local one! Kir!) and I was there for more than two hours. Diego invited himself to accompany me, sipping on a cup of sweet tea and watching me find pleasure in eating.



a little extra, on the side



displaying what he'll place in the bowl



almost ready



ready


He invited me as well to come back and hear him sing. I protested – it’s a two hour drive to Pierrerue. He assured me that I could stay over at his very large apartment, but that violates my motto number two and so I nodded and spoke of trying, but really I will not do any of it, interesting as a night of Catalan-Flamenco would be.

Several post scripts and then I’ll stop. First, The waitress there was thrilled that she could chat up an American. She has this dream. She wants to be a make-up specialist for film. The kind that puts on fake old noses and wrinkles the skin some, etc. She is adamant about this. She will go to study in the one school here that teaches this craft (in Strasbourg) but she feels sure there is in America a school that does it better. She was not able to find anything on the Net. I told her I’d ask around. Let me know if you know of one.

Secondly, Diego, my all around problem solver for the afternoon, also finally cleared away my coffee issues. I am renting the apartment from an English woman. The English haven’t the need to start the day with a great coffee and so their coffee making utensils are of the uninteresting kind. I wanted to purchase my own stove top espresso maker for my use here. But where? So far I had wasted time on this found nothing.

Diego told me that I needed to go to what he referred to as the Arab bazaar. Sete, as most cities in France, has a significant community of Muslims. They tend to form clusters in the poorer sections of a city and they operate a number of stores which are geared toward their own families. And sure enough, my Italian moka pot was there, at the bazaar, priced at 5 Euros (one fifth of what I would have paid in a department store).

Thirdly, so long as I was in this bigger town, I decided to also put to rest my search for sandals. I cannot find anything ever for the summer in the States that fits well, looks stylish enough and is reasonably priced. In France, none of these are a problem.

Indeed, I found two pairs in a cool store and I loved both. So much so that I was working hard on developing my justification reasoning so that I could convince myself that buying both was okay.

A woman, a shopper, herself stylish, of course, paused and looked at me inquisitively. I can’t decide between the two, I explained.



which one?


She pointed to one and said: that one of course. The other, it is for a little girl.

With those words, she unwittingly dismissed half the women’s footwear sold back in Madison. Practical and like a little girl would wear.

And here is why I love being my age and in France. This is the age that you look forward to here. You have style. You have superior knowledge. You teach young women how to do right by themselves and young men how to make love with care. You are in your prime. People look up to you, admire you. Being young isn’t nearly as attractive as being in your fifties. A midlife crisis must manifest itself when you are experiencing great frustration that you are not yet there. Like purgatory, it is your limbo time. The summit has yet to be reached. And when it is reached, it appears to last for a long long time. It is an attitude I love and share.

from Pierrerue: living the good life

Several corrections to the previous post: first, my patron (neighboring) town, St. Chinian, is bigger than I thought. In addition to the grocery store and bakeries, it supports at least two meat stores.



St. Chinian, from across the river


Second, I do not mean to imply that the French opt for leisure the minute the week-end begins (sometime early on Friday). They work hard, for example, at eating. 24/7. It is, therefore, no surprise that food stores are open Sunday morning and St. Chinain’s market days are Thursday and Sunday. And it is a big deal market. More on that later.

Third, though it is true that St. Chinian is not geared for tourism, neither is it 100% French. It is 95% French. And 1% miscellaneous European (guess German), here to sample and buy up some good wine options. And a solid 4% British. I could tell from the market. They were there, turning pink under the fierce southern sun (this part of the country is in the midst of a heat wave so that it is sunny and bright and in the low nineties, though nicely breezy and not at all humid).

I think the British must be doing well by themselves because they are the new Japanese as far as traipsing around European destinations goes. No cameras though. Just hats to keep the sun at bay and walking sticks. They seem to like a good walking stick to help push things along.

We first encountered them in Dubrovnik. There, they were just passing through. Lots and lots of pensioners, slowly passing through. A day, no more, and off to the next destination.

In St. Chinian, they are here for the season. Or for good. They have purchased simple homes and they go to the market and they turn pink and I’m sure they thank the Lord that they are not up north under the murky drizzly British skies.

My landlord at Pierrerue is such a person (hence the lovely flowers at the doorway). She lives somewhere in the vicinity of St. Chinian and she keeps this flat for occasional family use, but mainly I imagine to help the budget along. And she is not the only one. Downtown, I saw a real estate agent’s ad plastered on the wall with “English spoken” written at the bottom.

At the market today, I was a puzzle since I obviously am not local-sounding but I also do not turn pink; I am actually quite dark by now as a result of Sicily, Croatia and now here. The newset guess is --Spanish? I did overhear several of the sellers muttering a few English words, clearly prepared for the invasion from the Isles.

The British expats do seem to retire for the day early. Last night, when I stumbled into town late in the evening, I saw none of them. But the market brings them out. They drive in from their country homes, in their modest cars, and they shop and sip a beer or coffee and chat up the other expats mingling about.

Okay, that brings me back to the market. It was one of those extravagant markets that brings to town all that is needed to make life move forward. Half food, half practical clothing, it is there to ensure your survival until the next one (Thursday). I took some photos of course, but only of products I myself bought. So if you see it here, you can assume that it made its way home with me (among other unphotographed purchases). Heavy bundles, hot walk, uphill most of the way. But with a water bottle. I learn.



called a "country baguette," it has a thicker texture and a beautiful crust



I've been asked if food is more expensive here, given the emphasis on quality. Is it?



...no, it's not



farmer's son gets to pick his own cherries



which would you buy?




absolutely passionate about his organic oils




I ask, so, what's local here? He answers, I am!



everyone carries one; it saved my foods from becoming soup on this warm day


I did also visit a wine store – it is this town’s raison d’etre, after all. And I am glad, because wines of this region (the general area of Languedoc, running basically from the western edges of the Mediterranean down to the foothills of the Pyrenees) are my staple back home. I love a good Bordeaux, but my budget loves Languedoc wines even more. Needless to say, here, they a steal, rarely topping 5 Euros a bottle.

I desperately need visitors. I cannot myself drink all that I want to sample.

St Chinian (the AOC ones) are predominantly red so that makes it a little easier since I am a predominantly white enthusiast. But still, they have a fantastic selection of my very favorite summer beverage – French rosés and so I am back to panicking that my three weeks will end and I still will only begin to know the different choices. Life can be so difficult.



at a store selling only wines of Languedoc


Back at the apartment I would have collapsed, but remember, I am a changed woman. Not only do I sit down for lunch in cities, I cook my own if I happen to be in a village with nowhere to sit down except at my own table. The market foods need to be cooked and eaten otherwise I cannot justify shopping for more next market day. Again, guests are welcome to help move things from market to table, only please find your own place to stay. It would be too cozy in my little apartment for more than the most intimate of guests.

N.b., I had fancied myself eating lunch on the little terrace with the spectacular view, but it’s not going to happen. It is toasty hot in the afternoon and the shade of the tree only means that the are wonderful little tweetie pies out there, mating and eating and basically using the patio as their loo. Inside the cool stone house it will be and I am not sorry. I feel like others in the Mediterranean region who retire for several hours, close the shutters against the heat and do the eat and sleep number. Only in my case, it’s eat and blog.