Corinne CrawfordI ended up staying an extra night in Carcassonne before heading to the French countryside to visit my friends Alice and Bart, the couple I had met when they were traveling in Colombia. I felt I needed to extend the stay by a day because due to some unforeseen circumstances, I had to conduct a work meeting over Zoom that was scheduled for 6pm California time. That made it 2 or 3 in the morning for me so I was pretty useless the next day. During my stay in Carcassonne I did some laundry and as I mentioned before, I prepared all of my meals at the apartment. I had gone grocery shopping the first day there and all went well except for the tomatoes. Sometimes when you are doing the mundane things like grocery shopping, which most of us all feel pretty comfortable doing, you forget that perhaps there are differences in other countries and languages that you may not pick up on. I had grabbed two tomatoes and put them in the provided plastic produce bag just like I would in the US. I usually buy things to make a salad. I get to the cashier line and it was pretty busy with a line ahead and behind me. The cashier was ringing things up and he gets to the tomatoes and looks at me and says something to me in French while holding them up. I of course have no idea what he is saying and I admit this in English but I am not sure he understood what I was saying either. He continues to hold them up and then lowers the whole bag into his other open hand gently and then points to the bag. Uhhhhh, still no clue. So finally after a few rounds of this as the entire line is waiting on me and staring, I just say… uh, no never mind. He understands this and sets them aside. I realized later that I was supposed to weigh the tomatoes in the produce department and put my own sticker with the weight on the bag. I just bought tomatoes at the produce stand near my apartment instead. Grocery shopping fail! The town was on the smaller side, which I like. I didn’t go to any restaurants for meals but I did sit at a café or bar or two for a drink when needed. I was speaking to my mother discussing how it might seem that I am just drinking my way around Europe but keep in mind, I don’t write about the times I don’t have a drink (so I walked around and didn’t stop for a beer…) In the evenings there really weren’t many bars around but I did find one called The Celt and enjoyed a conversation with some French folks that were interested in practicing their English. I spent another day visiting the old town on the hill and walking around the cobblestone streets, visiting the old church and along the city walls and then the cemetery.
I was hoping for a medieval cemetery as it was right outside the walls of the medieval city but it seemed to only be from the 1800’s.
Still pretty neat though with large family plots. I spent another afternoon going to the free art museum that was just across the street from my Airbnb. It was quite large and I am not sure why it was free but I enjoyed it and was grateful to continue to save a little money. Finally the day arrived for me to leave so I made my way back to the train station for the first leg, which was just over an hour to Toulouse before heading back the other direction to Mazamet where Bart was picking me up from the train station. As the crow flies, it is only about 30 miles away but the train tracks make a big semicircle around it so it was a total of just under 3 hours on the train.