On the Bottom Half

France, cont'd

No trip to France would be complete without a visit to La Tour Eiffel. There is, however, a 2 hour long wait for the elevator to the second level. It's much faster to take the stairs, with the added exercise bonus and the extra time to take in the views. Because seemingly all the buildings are white in Paris, one understands why it was called "the city of light" in times past. This was the second and final day of our lightning trip to the big city, so we soon departed the vicinity of the Tower and hopped a boat cruise up and down the Seine (the river through Paris). That is quite possibly the most concise means of seeing the city, without actually experiencing it.

Luckily, the cruise passes Notre Dame, gargoyles, flying buttresses, and all. The French are well known for their flying buttresses, which you don't see in England. The Gothic style, pioneered, more or less, in Durham (England), had well and truly taken hold. Amazing what was done at the behest of the church. There is an endless variety of (to we Canadians) fabulously old architecture to see in Paris. Later in the day, we went up to the artsy precinct Montmartre. Fans of broadway movies may remember it from Moulin Rouge. There we listened to Evensong in the Sacre Coeur and ate a sloping, sloppy, delicious meal at a roadside cafe (the roads ain't built for Hummers, either).


The Sacre Coeur (above). The rest I leave to you.

The trip continued on its next phase the following morning when I was able to fulfill a life-long goal: riding the TGV. This is, like, the original high speed train, and high speed it certainly is. Wikipedia tells me that there are a couple of different grades of TGV lines with the highest grade of them capable of sustaining trains at 320 km/h. It just so happened that the line to where we were going, Narbonne, is one of the high grade ones. Let me tell you... 320 km/h with your eyes a couple of metres above the track feels like warp speed. But the decadence doesn't stop there, oh no, we had first class tickets, so we were at the pointy end of the train. After the trains left Paris, it was very soon at cruising speed and stayed there for about 3.5 hours of a ~4 hour trip. The track is all welded, so there's no clickety-clack of the rail joins as the wheels hurtle themselves past. There are no level crossings, either, and the stations and signs go by so fast that you can't anticipate the sign, locate it, read it, and process it before it is past you and well on it's way to the horizon. The whole thing is very elegant and soporific. Hoo-wah.

On reaching Narbonne, we were picked up, lunched, then driven to Albieres, which is where Louise's parents were holidaying. Albieres is not terribly far from the Mediterranean or the Pyrenees, which mark the Spanish border. The following morning was beautiful and sunny and the flowers outside our room in Albieres were resplendent in the low temperature morning light.

What a start to a fine day. This was the day I got see my first, proper, defensible, meant-to-keep-nasties-out castles.

We started at Peyrepertuse, which is a chateau first mentioned historically sometime around 1000 A.D. There are Roman influences in its construction, but it's not clear exactly when it was built. The most significant events in the recorded history of this area of France, called Languedoc, occurred in the 1200s with the Cathar Heresy. The Catholic Church (in those days) didn't care very much for the Cathars and over the course of ~40 years, went on a series of rather horrific, genocidal crusades to eliminate them and their beliefs. The crusades basically culminated with the initiation of the Inquisition in 1233 and what we know about Catharism is mostly through the Inquisitors own records. Poetic justice.

There are a series of such chateaux throughout Languedoc where many Cathars took refuge before they were found out, taken out, and massacred. In the distance from Peyrepertuse, you can see another one: Queribus.

Queribus is a castle that never truly fell; it was handed over because it was impregnable and it's occupiers could no longer hold out the siege. This is the obstacle facing attackers of Queribus. Eek. And it could be defended completely with 20 men.

On that note, enjoy the architecture, and the next installment will be about the rest of the trip: Bristol, Cardiff, and Hadrian's Wall in the north of England!

posted by Kyle @ 14:19