Dear Mother,
We have returned safely to St Maurice after a wonderful week in the south of France. I took several thousand photos but will not do serious work on them until I have access to the desktop monitor which is correctly calibrated. I do want to show you just a few shots of several things we enjoyed seeing, though I hardly know where to start.
Before I got up this morning, I was thinking about our day in Perpignon, so I may as well begin there. Vivian and Stephen had visited Perpignon several weeks ago and we saw their photos, so Janice suggested that we take the train for a day trip. By this time, I had figured out how to purchase our train tickets on one of the numerous yellow machines in the train station (which require credit cards with chips), so we could do this without standing in line. The local trains (marked TER) do not require seat reservations and we each had but a backpack, though mine is quite heavy with all the camera lenses and a book to read. We got a new tiny cheap travel alarm clock with the most annoying alarm conceived by mankind, and this has helped us adjust to the new time zone. The walk from our flat to the train station in Carcassonne is about 15 minutes going at Janice’s very brisk pace. I seem to recall that the train took perhaps 90 minutes, changing in Narbonne to a train that headed south toward Spain.
It is reported that when Salvador Dali saw the train station in Perpignon, he proclaimed it to be the centre of the universe. We reached a rather different conclusion. This ancient city does have some Spanish influences, and we noticed right away that buildings used brick rather more than elsewhere, possibly because of Roman influence. They also use rounded elongated stones set in cement in interesting patterns, both in walls and in some sidewalks.
The cathedral is being renovated and, in any case, prohibits photography, so there was little to shoot (on the sly) and it was so utterly dark that shooting without a tripod would be folly. We kept walking.
There is an ancient burial ground (Campo Santo), considered holy, near the cathedral, and one very kind museum curator let us in, in spite of all the signs saying nobody was allowed there. We met her at a photography exhibit, and she was impressed that we were actually interested in seeing the city in more detail than is customary. There are no longer any signs of tombs, and it is possible many of the bodies have been interred elsewhere by now, but the area is carefully walled in, somewhat in the style of a monastic cloister.
One of these days, I hope to stop staring at the narrow streets and alleyways in France, but I just cannot help myself. They are intriguing, the more narrow, the better; the darker, the better. I supposed they make me feel young again, discovering some secret passageway. Perpignon’s oldest section abounds with these passageways, possibly because the city was not bombed during the conflicts of the last century.
I don’t seem to have a photo, but we ate in a charming tiny restaurant which had a very limited menu written on the slates on the walls. In addition to what seemed to be locals, there were a few French tourists families with young children on holidays and terribly well behaved. The French emphasize family in ways we might consider old-fashioned, doing all their holidays together (we once counted four generations), even every weekend. It would get to be a bit much, one would think, but that is indeed the French way, and I know we encountered the same thing in Switzerland. Anyway, we like to eat the main meal at lunch, which is slightly less expensive and far better for our digestion and sleeping. And we eat at local places, preferably on the small side. If anything is posted in English, we keep walking. We don’t frequent the very cheapest places, but go up a tiny bit to the next-to-cheapest places which also honour student tickets, and it seems to work really well..
Before leaving Perpignon, Janice visited a museum (Le Castillet) while I took photos of people on the streets.
Finally, we visited an old fortress/palace from Majorica days (in English, Palace of the Kings of Majorca), the oldest surviving royal palace in France. We would have found even this enormous place with difficulty without the assistance of my faithful pocket compass because without shadows (cloudy day), and with all the winding streets constantly changing names, we got hopelessly turned around, time and again. I enjoyed the medieval dining hall, all renovated, of course, imagining it being filled with people, noise, smells, and eating etiquette we would find appalling (for starters, forks were not yet invented).
From the fortress walls we had a good view of the city and it’s tiled roofs, and the dramatic sky as the weather changed constantly in the stiff breezes.
It is fun seeing how a single city can have a personality that is so distinct from any other city we have experienced. True, the differences are small and initially unappreciated, but they slowly grow on you.
Finally, as I write, I can’t help but recall what I used to feel last year when I knew that you would print out my letters, run your wheelchair over to Dad in nursing, and read them to him. In my mind, you and Dad are still together, reading and hearing my letters, even though I know better.
Hoping you are doing well and your days are increasingly filled with friends and reading,
Love, Evan
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