From Sevilla to Saintes, getting ready for new adventures
Looking forward to Spain and backward to the cities of Strasbourg, Paris and Casablanca, Morocco.
There’s a lot of movement in my life these days, but I’m standing still while doing it. I’m still in Toulouse, but my plans for the next three months have started to come together and I’m getting excited about the next legs of the adventure.
First of all, I’m moving from the wonderful Toulouse house I’ve been living in for much of the last three months. It’s a great, bright and cheery place, with a wonderful Airbnb host who is hardly ever here, and where I have full kitchen access, laundry and my own bathroom. The only drawback is that it’s a bit suburban, about a 45-minute walk to central Toulouse, 30 minutes via public transit, 15 minutes by bike. So I haven’t been exploring as much since I’ve been staying here.
That changes in two weeks, when I move to an apartment in the heart of Toulouse, a block from the Jean-D’Arc métro and right beside the Marché Victor-Hugo. You could hardly find a better location from which to explore Toulouse and experience city life as people flock outdoors to welcome the warm spring weather and blossoming flowers. This will be the ideal place for me to cross off the remainder of my long Toulouse To-Do list, including the Saint-Sernin Basilica, the city’s most iconic attraction. I’ve been saving it for the end, hoping to share it with a visiting friend or something, but time is running out.
Because on April 30, I fly to Sevilla, to start a two-week road trip of southern Spain’s Andalousie region. Then on May 15, I’ll be grabbing a train to the tiny country of Luxembourg for a few days, then it’s off to Brussels and Bruges for a taste of Belgian French culture. From there I will drive south down the Atlantic coast and take in French seaside towns in Normandie and Bretagne. Then I’m taking a three-week pit-stop in Saintes, where I will be cat-sitting for a friend from Montréal. Free house for me, free gardien for Miss B while Patrice visits Canada, it’s win-win-purr.
I’ll be back to Toulouse for a few days at the end of June, but then I’ll be catching a flight back to Montréal, where I plan on finalizing a permanent return to France after the disposing and entreposing of the detritus of my lifetime in Montréal.
And the cherry on the sundae? I’ll be performing stand-up, in English, at a Toulouse comedy bar the night before my flight to Sevilla. I haven’t done any stand-up since before the pandemic, so I’m excited about a return to the stage.
(Video: there’s always something happening in Toulouse, like the Carnival drum and dance parade on Easter weekend)
Anyway, you’re caught up on my news now, so let’s return to our regularly scheduled recap of the Périples de Peter. This week’s instalment looks back at Strasbourg, Paris and Casablanca, which I visited in November and December.
Strasbourg
The city lies on the border between France in Germany in the Alsace region of north-eastern France. As a strategic site on the Rhine River, it has been a prize sought by both countries over the years, with Germany taking control in 1871 and 1940, and French taking it back in 1918 and 1945. The mixed ancestry had inspired competing architectural visions, so there is no shortage of heritage buildings representing major schools, notably the Rayonnant Gothic style of the stunning Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Strasbourg and the French Baroque style of the magnificent Palais Rohan. The old heart of the city in Petite France throbs with UNESCO heritage half-timber houses while the Palais du Rhin dominates the German Neustadt district and its grand Kaiserplatz, now known as the Place de la République.
Strasbourg is also home to the European Parliament and this attracts numerous international agencies and NGOs. I spent 10 very busy days here, with daily visits to multiple museums and churches and lots of casual walks through the central city. For a little taste of what’s to offer, check out my three blog posts from here: Going Gothic in Alsace, Time for a Little Astronomy, and my conclusion in Sayonara, Strasbourg.
Paris
What can you say about Paris that hasn’t been said a million times? Well, I decided to concentrate on homelessness in the city of lights and elsewhere in my November 4 post, entitled You Can't Play Peek-a-Boo with Poverty. That’s not to say I didn’t do the touristy things, I just didn’t blog about them. Until now. Actually, the most interesting part of my Paris trip was discovering that a sculpture of Adam and Eve holding their dying son, Abel, in the city’s Petit Musée, was a carbon copy of a statue I’d seen in Lyon’s Beaux Arts museum in September. Had I uncovered a major art scandal?
Nope. Turns out that Les Premières Funérailles, sculpted by Ernest Barrias in 1883, was so popular that he made a few copies. Not that the Lyon museum tells you that the original is in Paris. Of course, it’s in Paris. Where else would it be?
Eiffel Tower, check. Notre-Dame de Paris, not much to see. Louvre? You bet. Six hours and about 14 km in two of the three wings. Mona Lisa? Check. I even got close enough to shoot a selfie before wandering down the hall to see another Da Vinci of a demoiselle, but this masterpiece had no lineups, guards or fancy casing. See what happens if you don’t smile, ladies?
Paris is magnificent, but it is also overwhelming. I enjoyed my time there, but I was also relieved to get back to my adoptive town of Toulouse, where apartments don’t cost 2000€ a month or more and the pace and people are chill. So in sum, let’s go with the old cliché, Paris “is a great place to visit, but ….”
Casablanca
This modern Moroccan city has absolutely nothing in common with the 1942 Bogart-Bergman film except its name and a pricy little resto-bar called Rick’s Café. It’s a busy business hub with very few tourist sites of significance beyond the giant Hassan II mosque, which the king at the time (Hassan II, of course) intended to be the largest in the world
Of course, Muslims with even more money built larger and taller ones not long after. But the Hassan mosque remains unique in that it is one of the few mosques in the world where non-Muslims can tour inside. It can accommodate more than 100,000 worshippers, 25,000 inside and 80,000 on the outside square. A giant seawall runs along the western side of the mosque with a large and modern public promenade, and two western-style malls bookend the brief spurt of tourism enthusiasm.
(Video: Rick’s Café and Time Goes On)
The seawall and public beach near the western mall are quite impressive, but as a pedestrian, you have to brave several lanes of speeding traffic to get there.
I was supposed to be working on a translation contract while I was in “Casa,” so I knew there wasn’t a lot to see here, but it wasn’t supposed to matter, I’d be busy. Unfortunately, the work was delayed until I’d get to my next destination, Marrakech, so I ended up doing a lot of walking in my search for cultural diversion. And this is as about as far from a walkable city as I’ve seen in my recent travels. Good thing the ubiquitous taxis are cheap.
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On a final note, when I had booked my trip to Morocco, I had signed on with an international aid agency that was helping feed victims of the September 8 earthquake. I was supposed to help prepare meal kits, but by the time I had got to Marrakech on Dec. 13, the organization had finished its Moroccan operations and moved on to a new disaster, this time in Gaza. My condolences go out this week to all the wonderful volunteers and employees at World Central Kitchen, who lost seven of their colleagues after their vehicles were destroyed by repeated rocket fire from Israel Defence Forces. The deliberate famine in Gaza has now turned food workers into martyrs. That’s not what anyone signed up for. Ceasefire in Gaza Now.