Flashback: French FAQ

How long had it been since you last visited France before this trip in April 2025?

I kind of don’t want to think about it. Apart from a layover in Charles de Gaulle when I was coming back from Slovakia in 2023, my most recent visit to France was to Paris in 2000. My first visit, to the same part of the country that we traveled to this time, was in the early ’90s. On this trip we revisited some things that I know we’d been to my first time around, but that I didn’t have much memory of. This included the Tour Magne above the Jardins de la Fontaine in Nîmes, where, I was told, I’d complained about climbing up to. This does not sound like me at all.  On this trip I made sure to get dropped off at the tower, rather than down in the jardins, so I didn’t have to climb up to the tower before I climbed the Roman tower itself.

How long were you there before you could articulate a full sentence in French?
Until about the penultimate day. I would sit there and think up fairly fluent sentences in my head, but they never came out of my mouth when I needed them. Fortunately, I didn’t need to speak anything more than broken French. Our host spoke French, and many of the people with whom I interacted spoke at least a little English. It surprised me how much English I saw on signs (and that’s not including obvious loanwords). Of course I can’t think of any examples that I saw, and seem not to have taken any pictures that would demonstrate this phenomenon.

At one point you were worried about not knowing Occitan. Was that an issue?
Of course not. It was interesting to see it used on signs, and I was surprised to hear that it’s taught in schools—for some reason I’d thought it was more endangered than that. To the best of my knowledge I didn’t hear anybody speaking it, but I don’t think I’d have been able to aurally discern it from French anyway.  (The two definitely look different: here’s the Wikipedia page on the Tour Magne in French and in Occitan.)

Was anyone on strike while you were there?
Not that I know of.

Did you drink a lot of wine?
More than I expected to, and I enjoyed it more than I expected to. Apart from the regular bought-from-the-supermarket wines we had with dinner, we got to try a couple of unusual varieties. One was vin sable (“sand wine”), a gris named for the sandy soil of the Camargue region. Since it was a local specialty I bought some in Aigues-Mortes.

More exotic than the vin sable were the wines we tried at a place called the Mas* des Tourelles. Mas des Tourelles is a winery built on the site of a Roman amphora workshop and winery. Their exhibit includes artifacts found on the property, as well as recreations of different aspects of the ancient industries. This includes using a Roman-style winepress during living history events. In addition to producing regular modern wines, the vineyard also makes three Roman-style wines based on ancient recipes. I love a tasting at the end of a tour, but I was especially excited to try these.

The Roman wines, carenum, mulsum, and turriculae, are based on recipes, or at least descriptions, gleaned from period texts.  Mas de Tourelles’ website calls them “Archeological roman wines,” and their French ecommerce site describes them as beverages with a wine base (though I wouldn’t be surprised if French law were very specific in defining “wine”).

Of the turriculae, the International Wine Review blog says, “It’s delicious and well-balanced,  revealing sherry-like aromas and flavors with herbal and dried stone fruit notes.”  Turriculae has fenugreek in it, which gives it more of a savory flavor than the others have.  It also has a bit of seawater in it as well.  One of the others, possibly the carenum, would make a tasty mulled wine.

*When I asked what a “mas” was I was told that it was a farm, which made me accuse the French of making up new words in the many years since I had studied the language in school and learned the word “ferme.” Same with “brebis” being used more than “mouton.”

How did you get around?
Our very accommodating host drove us pretty much everywhere we wanted to go. A few times I took the bus from the house to the center of Nîmes and back. It was convenient, safe (enough; various drivers were possibly overconfident tackling some of the city’s curves and hills), and easy.

Should I use Google Maps for driving directions in a small town in any vehicle larger than a scooter?
Probably not! Especially not in, say, Saint-Gilles.  Many towns have quite narrow streets that are easy enough to walk through, but not accessible to even compact vehicles.  In Saint-Gilles, just park in the little public lot and walk through the gate up to the abbey; it’s a five-minute walk at most.

They just have tons of old stuff lying around in Europe, don’t they?
They sure do, and Nîmes has a surfeit of it. The Pont du Gard, a three-tiered Roman aqueduct north of the city, was built in the first century. Les Arènes, the amphitheatre in Nîmes, was built only slightly later (and I felt like I was also about 2000 years old when I was climbing around inside of it—some of those blocks of stone are rather tall and not the easiest to scale). It’s still being used as an entertainment venue all these years later: we just missed the beginning of Nîmes’ Roman festival, but the amphitheatre also hosts rock concerts, too. The Maison carrée, a temple for which the modern French name translates as “square house,” was finished in 2 AD.

Is there a public restroom in the Jardins de la Fontaine?
Yes. It’s toward the back and on the right side if you enter through the main gate on the Quai de la Fontaine. There’s also a public restroom on the lower level of the Carré d’Art, across the street from the Maison carrée.

Did you successfully pack only things that you actually wore or used this time?
Alas, no. Since we went in April, which is fully spring, and since I planned to complete a circuit of the city walls of Aigues-Mortes, I packed a straw sunhat. Had this hat been at all water repellent it would have been useful, because that day it rained more than it did any other day. Which is great! The weather kept calling for rain, and in general it was wrong—it’d be overcast for a while, or get overcast, but it didn’t outright rain that much. Except for when I was walking the 1640 meters (1.01 miles) around the walls of Aigues-Mortes. My alleged raincoat isn’t at all waterproof, so it only slowed down the drenching. I ended up buying a souvenir t-shirt so I wouldn’t have to sit in a wet shirt the whole drive home.

I did, however, get to use the tool that I was most keen to, and had brought for only one purpose. (Bringing something that you’re only planning to use or wear once flies in the face of so much packing advice, advice I otherwise try to heed. In this case, it was worth it to make an exception.) Various sites online suggested that some of the best pictures of Carcassonne were to be taken at night, specifically from the Pont Vieux; so I brought my small tripod for that purpose. Given the weather that afternoon I was a little worried that it would be raining by nighttime, but after dinner—we wanted to get takeaway from a restaurant near our accommodation, and at first they didn’t recommend us getting the meals we wanted to go, as they wouldn’t travel well in their takeout containers; the advantage of having a fluent French speaker along was that she and the waiter arranged that we could carry everything over in their actual dishes and return them when we were done, which was very cool—and watching some French TV, including dubbed episodes of “Airwolf” («Supercopter»), I headed out. We stayed fairly close to the bridge, so it wasn’t a long walk, and I was able to find a few places to set up the tripod and get some shots. I’m really glad I was able to do it.

How many roundabouts would you say you drove through?
I can’t even begin to estimate, but it was a lot. And many of them were two lanes, not just one. It would have driven (ho ho!) many an American motorist bonkers.

Since you mentioned it on Facebook but never actually divulged the answer, how many churches (/cathedrals/abbeys/basilicas) did you go into on this trip?
If I’m counting correctly, nine:

Église Saint-Paul in Nîmes
Église Sainte-Jeanne-d'Arc in Nîmes
Église Sainte-Perpétue et Sainte-Félicité de Nîmes
Église Sainte-Baudile in Nîmes
Basilique des Saints Nazaire et Celse in Carcassonne
Cathédrale Saint-Just-et-Saint-Pasteur de Narbonne
Église de Notre-Dame-de-la-Mer des Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer
Abbatiale de Saint-Gilles
Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sénanque

On the way back from Carcassonne we detoured to Narbonne. From a distance the cathedral looks massive—it must be on a bit of a rise, because much of it is visible, standing tall over the center of the city. When you’re inside, though, it seems smaller than it ought to be. It turns out that that’s an accurate assessment, because the building didn’t get finished. At the back of the quire the whole thing stops abruptly. If you walk around the outside to the back you can see framing for where part of the rest of the building was meant to be; they ran out of both money and space to complete it, as adding the rest would have required dismantling part of the city wall. While the cathedral has a nice cloister, the overall impression I got of it was of oddness, because of its truncation.

What song got stuck in your head after visiting Sénanque?
“How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” Maria’s not an asset to the abbey!

Even if you don’t recognize the name, it’s entirely possible that you’ve seen a picture of Sénanque. There’s a long field of lavender in front of the abbey that looks lovely when it’s in bloom—or at least it does online. Since lavender doesn’t bloom until the summer, we weren’t treated to the sight. As it’s still a monastic community, there are some parts of the grounds that are off-limits to visitors. You can tour the medieval building, though, with the aid of virtual reality-enabled tablets. The tablets give information about the different parts of the abbey as text; then, when you hold them up, they overlay the present rooms with recreations of what they might have looked like in the Middle Ages. I thought this was a novel way to give visitors a better idea of medieval monastic life.

What site you visited had the best gift shop?
Chauvet, even though they didn’t have anything with the bear on it.

Last year I read a book called The Cave Painters about prehistoric artists and the discoveries of the sites in which many examples of their art were found. Then we watched Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams about Chauvet. Having done all that, when we started searching for places to visit, I was excited to see that the site was within a reasonable driving distance of Nîmes. Visitors cannot enter the actual cave, in order to protect it from deterioration, so, as at Lascaux, a replica has been built. Grotte Chauvet II is the impressive result. The team recreated the whole interior of the cave (though made it safer and more accessible in the process), from the paintings and etched art to the cave bear remains to the texture of the walls. On a tour a group of people enters the replica cave together, each one with a radio-frequency headset with narration in their own language; when you reach certain marked spots in the cave the headset automatically begins the proper description.

Though masterfully done, Chauvet II surely isn’t able to replicate the entire experience of the original cave, with the smell of damp stone and chilly air, and the flickering firelight that would have brought the animal portraits to life. It’s probably a good thing that I personally wasn’t able to go in the actual cave; I would have been overwhelmed.

Since this question was about gift shops, the items that I most liked and bought several of from the Chauvet shop were lenticular bookmarks and mini notebooks. They showed various artworks from the cave system in 3D.

Runner-up goes to the gift shop at the Pont du Gard, which is where I remembered that my true calling in life is to tell gift shops what they should sell. I feel like I’ve said this before, but here again is my free idea for museums of the world: have a 3D printer in the shop and let customers print themselves little replicas of the most famous items in your collection. (Yes, I know based on complexity it could take a while to print. Make it an app and put a QR code on the tag for those items so that people can send their job to print while they’re still walking around. Sorted.)

How many statues of Jehanne did you see?
At least four, one of which was on the apex of the roof of a church dedicated to her.

Along with the St. Christopher medal that I wear while traveling long distances, I took my St. Joan medal. (Am I a bad Protestant or, as has just occurred to me, a really bad Catholic? Feel free to share your thoughts.) But I didn’t ever actually wear the latter while I was in France, because the far right has co-opted the image of the saint to support their own xenophobic agenda (by their way of thinking, fighting against an English takeover of France in the 14th century means that she would also fight against immigration to the country in the 21st). Since I don’t want to be mistaken for a supporter of the far right, I kept the medal out of sight. I did, however, light a candle in the Église Sainte-Baudile and stuck it in front of her statue there.

Would you be okay being buried in a French cemetery?
Yes. The two I was able to visit were wonderful. I’ve seen pictures of Père Lachaise in Paris, but, knowing the kind of famous people buried there, I wouldn’t have considered it typical of cemeteries throughout the country. Unfortunately, the larger of the two I visited, a Protestant cemetery in Nîmes, had a clearly posted and unmistakable sign prohibiting photography. This is of course fair to request, but a bummer for me personally, because it was very cool. Maybe I need to learn to sketch so I can draw things I’m not supposed to take pictures of. In terms of personality and ambiance the cemetery was somewhat reminiscent of Highgate in London. The other, where photography is allowed, is smaller, and stands just outside of la Cité in Carcassonne. It’s an impressive neighbor to have. What struck me most in both was not necessarily the graves themselves, but the decorations on them. Instead of real or artificial flowers, many graves had ceramic flowers left on them. Some of these were affixed to plaques with sentiments like “Regrets” or more personal messages, while others were on similarly ceramic crosses; but many were wreaths or swags of flowers. The practice makes a lot of sense to me, since these flowers looked better for far longer than silk or plastic or even natural flowers would. Had we passed a store that sold them, I might have bought a little arrangement to keep at home.

What’s a good time of day to visit Carcassonne?
If you don’t mind crowds, any time is fine. But if you want to see it without many other people around, go around eight in the morning, if not earlier. We first went up to la Cité after we’d gotten settled into our lodging on Monday afternoon, and despite the wind and threatening clouds, there were plenty of fellow tourists clogging the narrow reconstructed medieval streets. (La Cité is a worse than usual ship-of-Theseus-medieval situation.) The next morning I returned not terribly early, but early enough that there were more people just starting their workdays within the walls than there were tourists around. I even crossed paths with the garbage truck more than once as it made its rounds picking up rubbish, which I imagine it may have to do more than once a week.

Thanks to this trip I finally ordered a new (used) copy of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, some scenes of which were filmed in Carcassonne. (The DVD I’d had was so old that you have to flip it over halfway through the movie, like it’s a record.)

What’s that on top of the wall at Carcassonne? 

ENHANCE

Quel majestueux canard.

Is the south of France as terribly picturesque as the travel bloggers make it seem?
They were.

When we were leaving the airport in Marseille, the landscape—the hills with scrubby vegetation, and the knobbly piney trees—reminded me of Southern California. Later, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer reminded me of southern Spain, with blocky white-washed houses near the sea. (I always forget that the south of France is really on a similar latitude with the north of Spain, rather than the south of Spain. I guess it’s because both countries have a Mediterranean coast. True to her name, the Med will always feel to me like a, if not the, center of the world, and it was good to see her again.)

Within not so great a distance we visited several varied landscapes.  The Camargue is low-lying and generally flat, with fewer trees than other areas; we drove through hillier areas to the north and west, along winding roads above gorges, though from what I can tell we just skirted the actual mountains of the Massif Central.  (We were also within a hundred kilometers of Spain at one point, and it made me wish for even greater freedom to roam.) 

What is that symbol that’s ubiquitous in the Camargue?
I was surprised to learn that the croix camarguaise or Camargue cross is only about a century old.  The cross portion is made up of three goads used by gardians, those who work with the bulls and semi-wild horses of the region.  The heart represents charity, and the anchor hope.

With this trip, you’ve now gone up to the roof of two churches, haven’t you?
Indeed I have, and though the two were in countries that border each other, the experiences were quite different. There’s a massive difference in scale between the size of the Duomo in Milan and the church in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer; the former is, according to Wikipedia, “the largest church in the Italian Republic,” while the latter, as a fortified Romanesque church, is somewhat squat and of course thick-walled.  Wikipedia says that threats to an earlier church on the site came from “Saracens and Vikings,” while bandits during the Hundred Years’ War inspired increased fortifications to the present building.  It’s best known for being a site of devotion for the Roma, since the Saintes Maries had a servant named Sara who may have been Egyptian or Roma herself, but was almost certainly Black.

The spiral staircase up to the roof is therefore not very tall, but it was quite narrow.  Once you emerge at the top it is obvious that, in true European fashion, you are responsible for your own safety in not tumbling over the walls to your death, or at least your extreme discomfort.  One can walk around the edge of the roof, or go right up to the railing at the peak.  While I was there I watched multiple people scamper up to and down from the top with apparent ease, but it was steep enough and my trust of the shingles little enough that I had to hunch over and keep one hand on a rib that ran up the side so as not to lose my balance, skid down the shingles, and tumble headlong over the wall to the square below.  Then when it was time to leave I gradually scooted down the slope again, trying to look casual and cool the whole time.

You’ve spoken before about how it’s not bad for tourists to do touristy stuff. Do you have anything to add as a counterpoint?
My one “like a local” thing that I really like doing is going to a regular old grocery store in a foreign country. Buy the bread and cheese and a fizzy drink and sweets at the same place normal residents do. The best is if you can buy a reusable shopping bag from said store, like the one I got at the Carrefour.

Doesn’t it seem like the limon Fanta is less intense than it used to be?
Maybe it’s a regional difference. I think the Fanta I got in France was citron twist or something, not just straight limon. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t have the intense crispness that I was hoping for. I did have a really, really delicious fresh-squeezed orange juice in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, though. You simply cannot beat a fresh-squeezed orange juice in a Mediterranean country, particularly if you’re on the coast, where it tastes like distilled sunshine.

What souvenirs can you buy in Munich airport shops?
Aside from the usual liquor/perfume/chocolate stuff in the duty-free shops, they had: a giant Haribo gummy bear-shaped tin filled with actual gummy bears; several varieties of Toblerone, Ritter Sport, and Ricola; four-packs of bottles of beer; and tinned and jarred sausages. You can bet I came home with like four flavors of Ricola that I’d never seen before, including cranberry and orange ginger, and a couple of Ritter Sports, one of which was white chocolate lemon.

When on this trip did you feel most yourself?
Charging up the hill to Carcassonne, wearing the previous day’s outfit and hair barely brushed, shoving a scone in my mouth as I went.