Bordeaux and Palmiers

Barcelona is a large city that is spread out over a vast amount of land. Coming from Manhattan, seeing a city that is so large is always surprising. Especially after the city hosted the Olympics not long ago, even the previously run-down sections of town are being built up, and it’s difficult to pick a must-see true city center.

However, for years now, tourists and locals alike have been drawn to the Plaça Catalunya, the huge square that sits at the head of La Rambla.

La Rambla is a boulevard that runs all the way from Plaça Catalunya to the sea, and now it even extends onto the sea, with the walkway that is known as La Rambla del Mar: the Rambla of the sea.

While cars are certainly permitted on La Rambla, they will have a hard time getting anywhere: the street is always covered with pedestrians. Checking out the shops, stopping for a bite to eat, checking out the street performers or simply walking and enjoying the scenery, people are drawn to the vivacity of La Rambla.

When I was recently in Barcelona, we walked on La Rambla every day that we were there. Yes, the shops and restaurants on this very touristy street are expensive, but it’s worth it to simply walk down the street and see what there is to see. Street performers here take their task very seriously, and the typical metallic-painted mummies are kept company by people dressed in full princess, pirate or “chiquita banana” regalia.

While all of these performers were fun to watch, I have to say that my favorite thing I witnessed on La Rambla was this.

A pet store had set up a large area on La Rambla to sell, of all things, pigeons. I don’t know of any city that needs more pigeons.

While I sort through my Barcelona photos, take a trip down memory lane with me to Gruyères, a little town in Switzerland, where I went more than three years ago now… it doesn’t seem that long ago, somehow.

In Europe, there are some towns that are so quaint, so perfectly enveloped in the stereotype of what a little town in the mountains is meant to be like, it seems impossible that they actually exist. Gruyères is one of them.

I visited Gruyères when I was in Bern in 2005. My friends and I had been backpacking for several weeks by then, and when our hostel offered an organized trip to see the town and factory of Gruyères, as well as to have some fondue, we couldn’t turn it down.

The factory was very interesting, and we got to try free cheese, which is always a plus, especially to hungry backpackers, but my favorite part of the trip was to see the small town of Gruyères. On our backpacking adventures, we didn’t stop in many small towns: it was too difficult to get around without a car. Our focus on our escapades through Europe was the big metropolises: Rome, Paris, Barcelona. Gruyères was so different from anything we’d seen before.

Yes, it was more touristy than some small villages I’ve been since, especially after two summers in Paziols, where there’s really no tourist industry at all. But there’s a certain essence of these tiny towns buried in the mountains that I’ve since come to love, no matter how many mugs and postcards and snowglobes they try to peddle.

As we sat in on a terrace enjoying our fondue and looking over the mountains, I paused, as I find myself doing more often than not these days, to consider the fact that this—this traveling around, seeing places and falling head over heels in love every minute of every day—is my life.

Despite the fact that it may appear from this blog that I’m still in Paziols, camp actually ended more than two weeks ago. Since then, I’ve been to Barcelona, Breuillet, Orléans and now I’m back in Paris.

I have tons of stories and tips from Barcelona, but arriving back in Paris last night got me thinking about Paziols again and the stark differences between the north and the south of France, so I’m afraid that you readers (if there are any of you out there…) are going to be stuck with at least one, if not a few more days of me rambling about the little 500-person town that somehow managed to steal my heart when I wasn’t paying attention.

The cliché is that small towns are slower, quieter… more relaxing than the big city. Cities are supposed to be busy and full of people, with so much going on that you don’t have time to notice that you’ve never met your neighbors. So how can I end up in Paris feeling so alone?

I used to have the same perceptions of small towns. I looked at some of the reflections I wrote when I was in Paziols last year, and I was surprised at how different my recollections are from then. My journal entries are full of musings about how quiet, how still, how dead the town was. How many places (including the Prade and the Pachaire… how strange to read that now, after having waited patiently in line behind the dozens who come to the Pachaire to use the rope swing in the summer) you can go to be alone. I was even looking forward to the solitude at the beginning of the summer… and so I was surprised to find that my memories were edited, created in the mind of a New Yorker who wanted the small town to be the kind that had been described in endless memoirs of people who knew their butcher by name.

I don’t know if these towns even exist, but if Paziols is any indication, that sort of constant solitude is impossible to find in the country. Sure, you can head out to the middle of a field for some peace and quiet, and no one will find you until you want to be found, but in the midst of the day-to-day, it’s impossible to be alone.

There’s always a neighbor coming along to ask you to participate in a town function or a backyard grill. Since we moved to town, there’s always a pickup game of badminton or hopscotch, or just some kids deciding to dig in the dirt for awhile. Heading to the market to pick up some milk in my PJs is a frequent morning ritual in anonymous Paris, but it’s unthinkable in Paziols, when you’re certain to be recognized by nearly everyone and asked what you were doing still in bed at ten.

Life in Paziols is nowhere near similar to life in New York or Paris, but not for a minute would I consider describing it as slower. I’ll miss everything about it… the fact that everyone comes out to the town festivals, recognizing everyone in the street, accidentally leaving the door opened all day and coming home to find computers, stereo equipment and iPods exactly as they were left. I’ll be waiting lazily in Paris for the day when I can head back down to the real fast-paced life, where knowing everyone holds you accountable for actually getting yourself out of bed and living.

Even though we take a lot of field trips, with a group of 20 kids, we almost always eat at home. The one exception is the restaurant at the campground in Tuchan: La Peirière. Known for its pizza, it also sometimes throws themed evenings complete with a dinner, such as this Soirée Africaine with paella from a few weeks ago.

While the paella was mediocre (this really is a pizza joint), the night itself was a lot of fun. We started off with a swim in the campground’s pool, which is free both for people who are eating at the restaurant and people who are staying at the campground. When the pool closed at 7:30, we moved on to the festivities.

During dinner, which consisted of paella and an ice cream dessert, there were women doing African-style hair braiding, which one of our counselors and one of our campers took advantage of.

Afterwards was the real show: an African band that played music and danced. It took only a few songs before the kids got into it, and fairly soon, the small dance floor between the stage and the bar was flooded with our Americans. As the sun went down, everyone else joined us, and the band began to teach us some of the words to their songs.

I have no idea if we sang them properly. It almost felt like Club Med, the way that they repeated one or two words over and over to allow our challenged, foreign ears to try to latch on to the African language. But everyone had a blast, even if we had no idea what we were singing.

Alex recently brought it to my attention that, while I post a lot about where we go on day trips here, I have yet to do a comprehensive post on the town of Paziols. My excuse was that I didn’t have any pictures of the town, but I finally took a few when we were coming back from the Prade one afternoon, and now I have no reason not to talk about the place we have all been calling home for the past five weeks.

Paziols is a very small town in the region of Aude. No one ever knows where it is when you mention it: nearby Tuchan or Estagel are better recognized. But for some reason, this small town has started to attract a surprisingly large population of summer tourists, mostly from England, and now, us, “les américains.”

Paziols is home to a small épicerie, a café, a brand new tennis court and some pétanque courts, a post office and two wineries: one communal winery, where farmers can bring their grapes and participate in the tradition of communal winemaking, and one private winery called Bertrand Bergé. The winemakers of Betrand Bergé, contrary to the communal winemakers, control all aspects of the process, from the growing of the grapes to the harvesting to the actual making of the wine, bottling and exporting.

The owners of Bertrand Bergé were kind enough to give the older group of campers a guided tour of the winery one afternoon, and we hope to do more with them and with other wineries in future summers.

Other than these businesses, Paziols is made up mainly of residences. At the very top of the town is a church, which can be seen from miles away. It’s often the beacon leading us home after a long walk to the Prade or the Pachaire.

A bit lower down than the church is a cemetery, which, morbid as this may seem, is one of the most beautiful places in the entire village. One of our students in the second group is an accomplished photographer, and she spent several hours taking pictures amongst the ancient gravestones.

In fact, all of this town is seemingly ancient to our American imports: from the actually ancient Roman footbridge just outside the town to the “ancient” maisons des vignerons like the one where we live, nothing is new and shiny like it is back in the States. I think that may be one of the reasons why I like it so much here.

Other than the Pachaire and the Fontaine des Eaux, there is one more bank of the Verdouble that we like to bring the kids for a little bit of swimming on the hot summer days here in Paziols: the Prade.

The Prade is a hugely social meeting place for the community here. On a nice day, nearly everyone in the town has made the trek, either by foot, as we do, by bike or by car to the river, where you can sit and bask in the sun on the rocky banks, swim in the cool and shallow water, or give yourself a mud facial using the natural resources at the bottom of the small waterfall at one end of the river.

I love the Pachaire: it’s my personal favorite of the three. I love the waterfall, I love the rope swing, I love the campground. But there’s something about coming to the Prade with a large group of children and being able to wade into the water and watch them swim and play. These kids are used to the shores of the Atlantic and the huge waves that come crashing down on the beaches of the Jersey Shore and the Hamptons, but they seem to enjoy themselves anyway, splashing the counselors and doing handstands in the shallow water of the river.

One of the most interesting things about being here in Paziols are the real-life connections between the things we learn and the things we see in the real world.

Many of these are planned. We watch Marcel Pagnol movies such as Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, which stress the importance of water and growing in the region, and then we go out into the garrigue to see the real trees and plants that thrive here. We study knights and princesses, and then we visit the sites of Carcassonne, Aguilar, Queribus and Peyrepertuse. We learn about wine production, and then we attend the wine festival in Tuchan.

Some of these connections, however, are purely coincidental: they cannot be planned. A few days after our second trip to the prehistory museum in Tautavel with the younger group, some of the kids were digging in what will soon become our garden when they found this: a horse bone buried amongst the rocks that cover the plot of land we inherited along with the house, conspicuously bare next to the vineyards that cover the rest of the area.

The kids were thrilled to find that the same bones and fossils that they had seen in glass cases in the museum could be found in our very own yard. They started searching and since then have found a half-dozen specimens of animal bones. They made their own labels and displayed them in the house, a Paziols extension of the exhibit we saw in Tautavel.

The pachaire is a pretty common place for people in this area to hang out. There’s a small waterfall and two basins for swimming, as well as a swing to fling yourself into the water and an area for camping.

The pachaire is one of my favorite places to go in the area. I have always been attracted to water… I need to be near the beach as often as possible. We’re inland here, so I’ve had to content myself with the Verdouble river, but the Fontaine des Eaux and the Prade (check back tomorrow) don’t hold a candle to the pachaire, in my humble opinion. There’s just something about the seclusion of it, combined with the gorgeous falls that draws me to it.

Most people are under the impression that it’s a public place for hanging out and camping, but we know better.

When you buy a house here, you don’t necessarily get a backyard. When we bought this house, all we got was the house itself and a small plot of land next to some vines directly behind it. This “yard” is slowly becoming a garden, but we also inherited several terrains, or other small plots, out in the garrigue. The pachaire is one of them.

Because of this, the pachaire has become a place where we take each group of kids on a camping trip. We set up tents, Dany brings his guitar (and Derek brought his violin, when he was still here), we roast sausages and marshmallows, and we take comfort in the fact that our little “camping sauvage” is technically in our own backyard, an hour’s walk away from the house.