Day 42 – 44 - Carcassone

Carcassone is another ancient medieval walled town. This one is though is slightly different to the others. Whereas all the others I have seen so far have been an ancient wall with essentially a modern town inside, this is a complete original medieval castle, with its wall, ramparts and all the buildings inside essentially maintained at the same standard as the day they were built, only now converted into bars and cafes etc. The castle, intended as a fortress, stands on a hill but of course the modern town has outgrown its walls so there are in fact two towns. The old one, which attracts hordes of tourists and the new one which gets barely any.

The main gate to the old town

I found my way to the ‘camping de la cite’. I knew that from this campsite I could walk to either parts of the town so I could sleep in the camper and not have to worry about using the car.... as a car! Despite not being near the sea Carcassonne is a huge attraction and Bastille day is close so the campsite was still expensive; 28 euro including electric.
Again I am at the back of the campsite with the fence behind me, again a fence separating the campsite from the river and the path alongside. No gate here though. To walk into town you have to walk out the entrance and follow the fence of the campsite back around to the river. From there it’s a lovely 20 minute walk along the river in the shade, ducks and all.





On my first day I walked into town and rounding a corner in the path the old town came into view. It was quite an amazing site. For a minute you could imagine that you are back in the 11th century. Returning from the crusades only your horse developed a fault and you had to proceed the last 500 miles on foot and your almost home.

Festivals

I could hear music emanating from the town. Obviously from some loud speakers where they are rehearsing for some production of the working theatre, but back in those days it would likely be trumpets announcing the start of a jousting contest. The whole area has a kind of festival feel to it. I don’t mean that strictly in the music festival sense but also in the medieval jousting sense, which really, when you think about it, it’s the same thing. People go to eat, drink and be entertained, and a mere 800 years hasn’t changed human nature very much at all. Im sure that during the jousting contests they had the equivalent of burger vans and people with the eye to earn a fast buck.

Most of the people on the campsite here are young couples with kids. There is about a 50/50 split between motor homes and tents. There is a very large pool area with about 4 pools all of which are totally busy. There is a bar, shop, and an area where they often have evening entertainment, typically a band of some description.




I’ll skip most of my time in Carcassonne because I was doing a lot of work again and so there wasn’t a great deal to report on. Instead of going to the beach for an afternoon break I used to head into the town, either the old or the new, to buy some provisions for dinner, or a bottle of wine, or some biscuits... but really just for the walk.

Morning joggers

Typically each day would start at about 8 when I naturally tend to wake up. I am right next the fence with the path and the river on the other side, and everyone uses this path for jogging before the day gets too hot. Literally every 10 seconds someone comes running past and they get a good view of the camper tent in all its unusual glory, and so lying there I often their comments... they are often quite amusing...

Trot... trot... trot.. Sacreau bleu... trot... trot (French)

Trot... trot... trot.. Mumma mia... trot... trot (Italian)

Trot... trot... trot.. F*ck me! Look at that! – yes the English here too!

The posh bar

During one of my excursions to the old town and found a bar that someone recommended. You enter into a small doorway which looks like nothing from outside, but inside is a huge courtyard, no roof, bar at one end and a terraced area with lots of tables and chairs and trees! There is a DJ area and it gets quite lively here at night apparently. It backs directly onto the medieval wall so it’s a great place to sit and soak up the ambiance. It is a super-cool place and as you would expect is graced by the some of the super-posh, super-snobs, for whom being friendly is incompatible with being cool. I see this type of behaviour as deep rooted insecurity, which is definitely not cool. I mean why would you even WANT to be ‘better’ than your friends unless in reality you somehow feel inferior to them? Now that’s ok, I’m not here to make friends today, I’m just giving my brain a rest from work, so I do a spot of critical people watching. It’s about 7 pm and a good time to be here. A lot of the tourists have got back on the coach and gone back to the hotel California (Americans are in the old city in vast numbers but curiously none in evidence on the campsite). It’s also cooler at this time, but also too early for the lively places to be packed.



While sitting there I became aware of a group of early twenties types. Super-cool to be sure. But one of them seemed to be treating his girlfriend like something that dropped off the back of a dog. She was a very attractive girl but seemed to have no will or mind of her own. His attitude seemed to be, ‘don’t talk till your spoken to and if you play your cards right I might give it to you when we get back’. He seemed to be using this attractive girl to build his own status amongst his mates... the thing is, it appeared to be working!



It was then that a kind of penny dropped. I’ve seen and heard of this kind of thing before, many times. I’m not for one minute suggesting that most, or even many French people are like this, but for sure there is a far bigger element of it than you see in British society. It’s the one-upmanship thing taken a step further. I believe that there is an element of French society that are social climbers, and the mentality goes that the person that is the least kind to you is probably the person who has a higher status, and who’d do well to get in their good books. It seems that many French girls end up with guys that treat them bad, but it’s ok, cos he’s good to be seen with! This of course is entirely a personal view and I do revise my views all the time! I reserve the right to change it in future if I want.

Cassoulet

I also tried many of the local food products. Castelnaudary Cassoulet was one in particular I was very much looking forward too. Talking to my father one night on the phone he joked about my sausage based diet and that maybe it should feature in the title if I ever got the blog published. “Nah” I said, had enough of sausage for a while, I got a tin of Cassoulet for tonight. Now Cassoulet as far as I was concerned was white haricot beans with some kind of meat... in this case, confit of duck. My dad points out the cassoulet is sausage and beans plus anything else mentioned on the tin. He was right!