Life in France

Haunted castles

I saw an estimate online that there are approximately 45,000 châteaux (castles) in France and right after that was an article perfect for Halloween: Haunted Castles of France. The website Discover France had listed 4 spooky sites around the country with a description of who…or what…you might see if you visited there. I checked several other sources on the same subject and there were a few that appeared on everyone’s list so I will put those details and a couple more in today’s blog post. Above, on the tab marked “Topics & Tags” you’ll find how to use the train to get to other castles and ghostly spots around the country.

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Travel in France & beyond

French horreum story

Narbonne is only 30 minutes by train from Carcassonne. We’ve been there several times, usually with friends, since it’s an easy day trip that gets us to another French city for even more culture, food, and history. There’s plenty of that last item given that the Romans founded the colony as Narbo Martius in 118 BC to provide a Mediterranean coast stronghold that could provide ample amounts of olive oil and wine for the empire. About a 25-minute walk from the train station, the city recently opened a large archeological museum with 6,000 artifacts from the Roman era, including sculptures, mosaics, and everyday objects found locally. Right in the heart of downtown, however, is another reminder of those ancient times, L’Horreum, that we went to see underground.

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Life in France

Wine is back in France

To be honest, I had not realized that wine had ever left this country (he said, tongue in cheek, after reading that newspaper headline above). I did know, however, that while Italy and Spain ship greater quantities by volume than France, this country is the world’s largest exporter of wine by value. That would highlight the reputation and prestige associated with French reds, whites, rosés, … Continue reading Wine is back in France

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

A wedding in Paris

That title says it all, doesn’t it? No, it wasn’t us but a couple of whom we’ve become very fond. Baptiste is the great grandson of our 105-year-old neighbor and although he and the new bride live in Paris, they’re in Carcassonne at least monthly for a visit. Naturally they wanted “Mamie” (the French diminutive for Grandmother) to be present on one of the most important days in their lives. It was an honor that Bill and I were invited and we were interested to see how this big event compared to American weddings as well as what we’d seen on TV and read in books regarding the traditions of the ceremony.

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Life in France

No way in, no way out

If you were hoping to fly into or out of Carcassonne last weekend, you were out of luck. The airport was closed to all commercial traffic yet the city was still expecting up to 50,000 people or about 2 month’s worth of passenger traffic in just two days. Why the crowds? It was the 5th annual “Meeting Aérien Des Etoiles et Des Ailes” that we would just call the Air Show that in previous years had been held in Toulouse, an hour west of here. Given that we live about 40 minutes by foot from the airport or perhaps 40 seconds in a plane that’s landing, we even had part of the show overhead.

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Life in France

Does this make me look French?

Ben, the editor of the online newspaper The Local France tells the funny story of his first visit to a doctor in this country. He had gone in with a sore throat but soon found himself naked, on all-fours on the floor, scrambling to collect the coins that had fallen out of his trouser pockets and rolled under the doctor’s desk. Knowledge, or lack of in this case, was the problem since Ben had not yet perfected his language skills (“take off your shirt” doesn’t mean “take off everything”) and he didn’t know that practitioners might give you an overall exam even if your ailment seems limited to one spot in your body. Accompanying this story was an article with several points on how to feel more at home in France.

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Sailing to Strasbourg

Typically we would be writing about taking the train to a vacation destination, especially in France, but today it’s about travel on the Canal de la Marne du Rhine from Lagarde to a city we’ve visited several times, Strasbourg. Two of the times that we’ve been there were in December to experience the colorful holiday atmosphere when it truly earns the nickname, “Capital of Christmas”. This time, however, it was only last week when we were gliding past this Alsatian city’s familiar sites aboard a 22-passenger péniche, a canal hotel barge identical to the ones we cruised with on other French canals.

Gliding along the canal
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