Visiting French Catalonia (Pyrenees Mountains) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

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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Visiting Venice (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Venice (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

We made reservations to take an overnight train to Venice from Naples.  We ate an early dinner at the Trattoria da Giorgio.

We ate pasta made from the hard flour called durum with marinaria tomato sauce, which is just tomato purée with sautéed garlic, olive oil, and oregano.

We cooled off in the air-conditioned dining room and enjoyed watching the noisy television.  The newscasters in Italy looked cool in their black leather jackets.  Italian women newscasters in their leather jackets wear their hair long unlike French women newscasters, who wear it short.

I was tired and slept all the way from Naples to Venice.  We left our bags at the train station and set out in a ferry down the Grand Canal in Venice.

The palaces were beautiful one after the other, but I thought the logistics of living in Venice would be difficult with plumbing letting out into the canal, delivering mail by boat, and grand pianos being delivered by boat.

Water sloshed into the first floors of these palaces along the Grand Canal.  The palaces enchanted me, but I thought of the logistics involved in carrying out everyday life on water as we passed boats carrying garbage.

We did not have a map pointing out all the castles, but you really do not need to know the names to enjoy them – Peggy Guggenheim’s Palace has big lettering on it.  However, I liked the romance of not knowing what I was seeing, so I could come back to Venice again.

Finally, we stepped off the Palazzo San Marco.  I had already seen the most portable treasures of the Cathedral at an exhibit at the Chicago Institute of the Arts, but we still visited the church.

The musicians at the Café Florian were just beginning to play as we entered the Cathedral San Marco.  I am a Greek sympathizer and have to admit that I disliked seeing all the items that had been looted from the Orthodox Greeks at Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade.

I knew the Fourth Crusade still enrages Greeks, because they know most of the items in San Marco’s Treasury originally belonged to the Orthodox Church.

Next, we went to the Doge’s Palace.  My walks in Chicago made me able to skip up Sansovino’s Stairway of the Giants without a problem.

Every room seemed to be decorated with the golden colors of Veronese, Tintoretto, or Tiepolo.  Gold colors glisten in Venice due to the reflection from water.  Teacups with gold decoration look beautiful here for this reason.

We ate salty Venetian fish dishes at a restaurant.  Salt leaves your body with perspiration and can leave you feeling dizzy and weak in very hot climates.  I liked this food even though I did not eat it at home.

We walked around the Venetian Piazzas, which are like villages with markets.  We crossed bridges and walked.  I rested in a park by a graveyard while Laurent walked around.

Birds chirped in my lovely yet somewhat eerie resting spot before we took the train. 

Edgar Allen Poe would have written creepy stories about the people buried in this graveyard.  The truly rich had Palladian Villas on land and graveyards located on land as well. 

The Welsh writer James (now Jan) Morris wrote a book called Venice about living on Venice for a year when his/her children were small that I liked as well.  Scrambling for food, what I call food war games, were a daily occurrence. 

He/She stayed thin running around to each different village market buying food.  These markets were held on different days and you had to be friends with the vendors to even buy good food.

When my daughter Florence was born, the first I did was to learn to cook to insulate my family from “market food supply” shortages and price hikes after reading Venice by James/Jan Morris. 

By cooking I mean, cooking from dry goods in case of street rioting in a secured building.  We lived in Paris when I read that book, which does have a history of street rioting as did Detroit where I grew up.

By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting the Isle of Capri (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Isle of Capri (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

We started the next day out by going to Naples.  We found our way down to the port and caught the ferry to the Isle of Capri.

I turned my head around and thought the Bay of Naples look pretty in the distance with Mount Vesuvius behind us.

I never understood why people ranted and raved (literally) in Tiberius’s case so much about Capri until we arrived at the harbor of the Isle of Capri.  The crystal blue water around us glistened.  We could see down to rocks in the bottom of the water.

There were yachts all around us with white-haired men and blonds in bikinis.  The area all around the harbor was full of designer clothing stores and accessories firms. 

Once you started walking along mountain paths through all the hotels and villas, the Isle of Capri became very quiet.

Every place on the Isle of Capri was immaculately clean.  No cars or Vespas were allowed on the streets or mountain paths; it was very quiet. 

Bright pink and red flowers streamed down the side of whitewashed walls.  I wished we were staying in a hotel with a swimming pool.  The sunbathers at these hotels with swimming pools seemed to ignore their swimming pools, though.

We paid money to go to a private beach.  Groups of Neapolitan young people gathered at this beach. We swam through grottos and dove down to touch rocks that you can see at the bottom of the shallow water in the sun. 

We took the last ferry back to the Bay of Naples and admired the sun setting behind Mount Vesuvius in the background.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Salerno (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Salerno (Italy) by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

We went to Salerno (South of Naples) to look for a more bucolic place to stay than Naples on our vacation.

When the train came in to the station, we found out that as in France, August the 1^st is the beginning of a month-long vacation exodus to the South of a country.  The train resembled a sardine can, because there were so many people in it.

We hopped in and held on around the curves going to Salerno.  I lost balance a few times along with some other people standing on the train.  I just laughed knowing the tickets were oversold.

Absolutely no one in Salerno spoke English.  I was able to get directions in Italian.  At the tourism bureau, Laurent spoke in German to find out the names of some hotels. 

Everything was full except for a place about 2 miles outside of town.  I was willing to go there after lunch in an air-conditioned restaurant.  We found a fast-food place called Golden Burger and ate there.

I knew all my walking would burn off the fat in those fries in no time and ate every last one of them.

After eating, we walked to the hotel, which was about two miles away from the train station.  We made our reservations and looked around our neighborhood.  There were many apartments and markets in this area.  Salerno’s streets were also very clean.  (When I was growing up in Highland Park (an enclave inside Detroit) Michigan, the streets were cleaned every two weeks for public health measures. 

There was a famous Medieval medical school in Salerno that focused on nutrition and commissioned tucinae paintings showing the Mediterranean Diet of their day.  Clean streets for walking to the market must have come down from this period.

The next day, we changed hotels from Naples to Salerno, which required taking a full train again and bus out to our hotel.  We stood with our suitcases and swayed around the curvy mountains down to Salerno.

We unloaded our bags, took cold showers to deal with the heat, and went out to buy some yogurt.  We ate and slept until 4:30 p.m.  Laurent went out and bought roll-up, reed mats for the beach.

After swimming, we rested on our mats and watched the sun go down.

As we were going out for dinner, the hotel managers invited us in for a glass of sweet, white wine and slices of watermelon.  They were happy that a couple on their honeymoon had come to stay in their hotel – The Hotel Suisse.  Laurent and our hotel managers chatted away in German.

We went to the restaurant next door where Laurent ordered spaghetti all carbonara with proscuiutto or pig’s cheek as the ingredient depending on the supply in the local region. 

This Italian version of this dish is good, but I like my American better.  I fry up a ton of bacon until crispy, drain it, and chop it up. (Pancetta is bacon without salt added or pork bellies.)

I add grated parmesan or gruyere and cream to the bacon and serve this over spaghetti or whatever cooked pasta I have on hand.  (I know the value of the commissary.)

I ate large cannelloni filled with ricotta cheese while Laurent regaled himself with deluxe pork.

Then, we ate a light summer entrée of seafood salad with octopus, shrimp, scallops, and mussels in a lemon-and-oil dressing.

I went to sleep on a full stomach all happy with a real Italian seafood meal. 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Naples (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Naples (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Our train for Naples arrived early in the station, but would not depart.  I was anxious to get to the “Land of the Mid-Day Sun” or the “Mezzogiorno” in Italian.  I took the time to write a few notes in my journal:

On the way to Assisi, we passed Lake Trasimeno.  Haze and blue sky hovered above us.  It looked just like the background in most of Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings.  I always thought his landscapes were contrived, but there are parts of Italy that have misty sfumato atmosphere on a clear day.

Around Florence, Sienna, and Pisa while we were on the train, we could see from our windows that Italian farmers practice what is called “slash-and-burn” farming techniques. I thought only African countries practiced this fertilization technique.  (North Africa was part of the Ancient Roman Empire when they finally defeated Carthage.  Flaubert’s novel Salammbo has Carthage and Hannibal and his elephant tanks as a subject.)

I learned about this farming technique of slash-and-burn in an East Asian Geography class at the University of Chicago and my AP Biology Classes in high school.  Slash-and-burn fertilization is good for the soil for only about 3 years before harming it.

The train finally started moving, and I spent the morning staring out the window.  Blood-red tomatoes ripened in the sun and made me want to cut them in half, slather some Dijon mustard on the bread, and add the slices of tomato to make a sandwich.  I liked my version of tomato sandwich.  Mayonnaise can easily spoil in the heat.

On the way to Naples, I thought of how dirty Rome was.  Rome, however, seemed downright clean when we saw the garbage strewn on the streets of Naples when we arrived at the train station.

We walked to the hotel.  All along the way, people with sidewalk displays sold cigarettes, razors, and soap.  People tried to sell us watches in several languages until they arrived at French.

Communist graffiti covered the walls.  Inequitable housing codes and standards and lack of enforcement might have caused that form of protest.

Two girls zoomed by on a Vespa and cut off a car.  The car honked at them and the girls shook their fists at the car driver.  The girls were not wearing helmets.

When we arrived at the hotel, I showered and sat in bed while Laurent went out exploring and buying groceries.  Going to the grocery store overseas is a fun marketing research exercise.  You can ask yourself questions such as, “What do they make in a microwave or instant here?”

I picked up my journal and wrote some impressions:

The dirt in Naples unsettles me.  I wrote that both Rome and Naples were dirty and made me think that no one valued the architecture in these places.  It seemed like these cities had no civic pride.  Had corruption taken over everything?

The dark grime probably came from pollution.  Since our visit in 1988, many of the buildings we saw have been cleaned to prevent the grime from eating away at the monuments.

Everywhere in Italy, I noted that people wore fashionable clothes with creases ironed into sleeves, even if they did not have them.  I knew from helping with this chore that we also did this in Detroit and in the South, so insects would not lay eggs in the “burned and smooth” fibers of cotton.

The Appenine Mountain Range runs down most of Italy from North to South.  The mountains keep regional foods distinct as well as accents.  Italian television helped make Tuscan Italian, the language of Dante, the national language.

I watched television and listened to how words were pronounced the rest of the evening as I ate bread, water, and chocolate muffins.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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