Visiting French
Catalonia (Pyrénées Mountains) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
I
slept on the train from Venice (Italy) to French Catalonia, which is in the Pyrénées
Mountains range between France and Spain.
The historic capital of French Catalonia is Perpignan while the capital
of the Spanish Catalonia is Barcelona.
Our
train was waiting to enter France in Ventimiglia (Italy). Laurent told me we were in the longest city
in Italy, because Ventimiglia means “twenty miles.”
The
water along the French Riviera glistened blue, flowers in many colors lined our
path as the train sped by, and the fields just needed some black crows to look
like a Van Gogh painting.
People
swam here all along the coast. We passed
Cannes and Monaco, which I did gawk at looking out the window.
We
arrived in Nice and took another train bound for Marseilles, which was waiting
in the station. We hopped on and sped to
Perpignan.
There
is a wonderful painting in the Perpignan train station by Salvador Dali on the
ceiling called The Center of the Universe.
You have to look up at and turn around to see the painting. You can walk right under it, if you do not
know that it is there.
From
Perpignan, we took a train to Villefranche le Conflant and a funicular train up
the hills into the French Catalan hinterlands where we would be staying in a
tiny, Catalan village. Laurent spent most
of his childhood summers in this village.
We
stayed in a typical Catalan home, which Laurent’s parents arranged for us. My French mother-in-law took charge of our
laundry to wash and dry on a line. I
would iron everything when it was done and volunteered to iron clothes for the
rest of the family, too.
For
dinner, we ate trout that my father-in-law caught in a mountain stream. My mother-in-law sautéed the trout in olive
oil with sliced and baked almonds. It is
hard to eat like this all the time, but on vacation I like this kind of food.
Laurent
took me on a tour of the village where we were staying. The church was cute, but it was more
important for Laurent to show me where he and his brother played Cowboys and
Indians. Laurent was always the Cowboy.
Laurent
showed me which mountain peaks were in Spain and which were in France.
I
wanted to ask, if it always “rained on the plain in Spain” in the valleys by
the Spanish mountain peaks as in the musical My Fair Lady.
We
ate Spanish Serrano ham for lunch. The
hot weather with no air-conditioning made me crave a lot of salt.
You
cannot live without salt, which is why food in hot countries is salty. I learned in my chem-bio classes in high
school (pre-med curriculum) that salt promotes the healthy functioning of brain
chemistry (synapse communication if I remember correctly).
(The
surgeon-general should list how much salt (NaCL) a person needs and provide
some kind of way to measure salt in the body.
A home urine test could do this.
People who live in hotter climates need more salt due to the greater
loss of salt through sweat they experience. Also, urine tests can be done for many things that you test with blood tests.)
The
heat in the South of France makes you want to take siestas as in Spain.
I
flopped into bed after our walk and slept again. I wanted to be in great form for more tourism
after lunch when I woke up.
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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