Tolédo in 1 day

With a train every hour taking only 30 minutes it was easy to get from Spain’s current capital, Madrid, to the former capital and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Tolédo. In less than 10 minutes from exiting the train (station photo to the left), we were standing on the Azarquiel bridge admiring the view that you can see across the top of today’s blog post. We continued walking for 5 more minutes to what some might consider “cheating” but what we thought was “smart”: the free escalators that effortlessly take you up to the city. That saved a little time and a lot of climbing since the city sits about 40 meters (131 feet) above the river below. 

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Back to Madrid

Returning to a city that you’ve already visited has its advantages: you can revisit some favorite spots, explore some new ones that you missed before, and discover others that you didn’t even know existed. That was the case when our English friends Pete and Gaynor suggested meeting up in Spain, as we had done with them in previous years in Belgium, Switzerland, and the Channel Islands. They had already seen us in Carcassonne soon after we moved here, so we all liked the idea of meeting up elsewhere in Europe for another adventure. Madrid seemed to be the logical choice, since they could fly there non-stop and we could take a direct train from Narbonne.

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Halloween: north meets south

Our neighbor is creative. Sarah and family moved here from Brittany and brought with them a professional style crêpière so it wasn’t long before we got invited to their re-creation of a Restaurant Crêperie in their kitchen, complete with umbrellas for decoration to represent their frequently wet weather. The galettes had filling choices of ham, egg, sauteed onions, and cheese. For the dessert crêpes we could select sugar, honey, salted caramel or chocolate sauce, jams, and a hazelnut spread. Cups of cold cider were plentiful throughout the meal. While all of that was fairly traditional, her Halloween party foods were even more imaginative, starting with what Bill and I called “lady fingers” but Sarah labeled even more menacingly as les doigts de sorcières, witches’ fingers that you see at the top of this post. That’s their carved butternut squash, above to the left. A few more photos follow.

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Surprising Bari, Italy

Last month on the way to Greece we changed trains in Lyon from where we could have taken a plane and been in Athens about 3 hours later. Instead we chose the “slow travel” option via Milan that included travel onboard the Italian Frecciarossa train in Executive class. The car had 10 extra-wide leather reclining armchairs (photo in this paragraph) so we had lots of legroom with at-seat dining choices of 3, four-course meals. We were onboard long enough to enjoy both breakfast and lunch and below I’ll include a pdf of the menu. (Tip: don’t be shy about asking for what you want to eat and drink.) While all of this comfort on the train was a pleasant surprise, an unexpected bonus awaited us at our ferry port destination.

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Now, that’s strange

Every morning, Bill and I look at a variety of news and information sources online from both sides of the Atlantic. Often I’m simply scanning the headlines but whenever the words Les Américains pop up in a French story then that requires more investigation. Such was the case with the website StarsInsider that generally highlights topics including health, food, and travel. What in the world could be the “30 strange things in Europe according to Americans”? This was going to be a fun article to read.

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Mistaken identity

When Bill and I speak French it’s clear that we’re not native speakers and it will probably always be like that. Even when we get to the point that the words flow as easily as they do in English there will still be slight nuances that will give us away. We’ve been mistaken for German, Italian, English, Irish, Canadian, and Romanian but never American. I was thrilled with the latest guess, Moroccan, because the people we know who moved from Morocco to Carcassonne sound to us as if they’ve always lived here. That made me wonder where most of the immigrants to France come from and the government’s Office of Statistics had the answer.

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To your health

France 3 is technically one television channel yet it’s really made up of stations from each of the country’s 13 mainland regions and even those might be split into two or three parts. It’s kind of like PBS in the US with one nationwide channel that’s enhanced by local stories originating from state or city affiliates. Their mission statement includes, “France 3 reflects the diversity of economic, social and cultural life in the regions and through regional offshoots, including prime time, whose programs can be picked up nationally.” It’s thanks to that “national” reference that we found out about a newly-opened business in the north of France. The program carried the subtitle “A bar in a retirement home to make the residents smile again.”

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