Toulouse, France

On my very first trip back in 2008, I carried a naff second-hand backpack that went in the bin as soon as I got home. I then bought a new Berghaus backpack in 2011, and that's what I've travelled with ever since. It's a bit worn, but everything still works. Even now that I'm way too old for youth hostels, I still cling to the idea that I'm a backpacker rather than a tourist. I feel that buying a wheeled suitcase would be a kind of surrender to old age, an acceptance that I'm essentially giving up on life, rather like getting married or taking up golf.

My backpack isn't huge but it's too big for airline cabins so it always goes in the hold. I have a much smaller secondary backpack for the cabin. It's a soft bag, which means it never gets pulled over for weighing or measuring; it just goes under the seat in front. Both my bags generally weigh under 10kg so weight restrictions are never a problem. 

I used to take a slightly masochistic pleasure in walking long distances with one bag over each shoulder, and of course it's always nice to stretch one's legs after a long flight. But nowadays - with my 50th birthday coming at me like one of these high-speed French SNCF trains - that kind of thing does more harm than good, especially where my back is concerned.

Toulouse is probably my favourite French city so far. There's nothing particularly spectacular to see here. It's just a very nice place and I like strolling around it. I've been here a full week and you'd think that would have been long enough for me to think of something interesting to write in my blog. As you see above, it wasn't. I'll try harder next time.

Place du Capitole

Le Capitole itself

Rue de Metz

Along the banks of the Garonne

Basilique Notre-Dame de la Daurade

Basilique Saint-Sernin

Pont Neuf
('new bridge', though it is in fact nearly 400 years old) 

Edd vs Food #170
A croque monsieur for the ages at Mam Street Food, 11 Ave de la Gloire, Toulouse

Edd vs Food #171
Vietnamese-themed set menu at Zig Zag, 9 Pl. du Pont Neuf, Toulouse
L: Rouleau de printemps (spring roll) containing chicken & veg
R: Beef & onions with pilau rice
I don't think Vietnamese curry sauces are normally laced with red wine, but I'm not complaining.

Narbonne/Perpignan, France

"Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French."

― P.G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins

I'm far from Cannes, and even further from being young, but basically the above still applies. Learning French at school and via Duolingo, and then going to France and trying it out? Well, that's a bit like learning English from 'Downton Abbey' and Bond films, and then rocking up in Glasgow. It's a journey, and one with a very long way to go yet.

One thing that helps is the huge number of words that are spelled the same in both French and English. You just have to tweak the pronunciation a bit. Not only words where you can clearly see and hear the French influence (debris, omelette, reservoir, genre, ballet) but also some others that aren't quite so obvious (rectangle, apostrophe, occasion, parachute, machine).

Admittedly there are still a few foodstuffs on restaurant menus that I don't recognise. But in fairness the same applies back home. I was into my late twenties before I learned what a shallot was. Here they call it an échalote. 

People who are genuinely bilingual have a kind of unconscious 'switch' in their brains that lets them move between languages instantaneously. My own 'switch' is more like a big rusty lever that I've spent years laboriously hammering into place. Now I'm trying to make the lever go three ways, and at times the lever crumbles and my brain just shuts down altogether. It almost makes me miss the days of travelling in South-East Asia and happily using amateur sign language for 'chicken' (flappy side-arms) or 'beef' (finger-horns above head).

That said, I think I'm still doing better than most of the other foreigners here. In McDonalds I saw an Eastern European family clutching ticket number 97 and they were left utterly perplexed when the store manager yelled out "Quatre! Vingts! Dix! Sept!" ('four twenties ten seven', that's how they say 'ninety-seven' in French.)

Anyway I don't have much to report from Narbonne, or from my day trip on the train to Perpignan. Hence the waffle above, and the double dose of Edd vs Food below. Til next time.

Palais-Musée des Archevêques, Narbonne

Outside my front door in Narbonne

Weird statue of Salvador Dali in Perpignan.
He once proclaimed Perpignan train station to be 'the centre of the universe'.
If you look at his Wikipedia entry, whatever you do, don't scroll down to the part subtitled 'Sexuality'.

Looking west over Perpignan from the Palace of the Kings of Majorca.
The mountain in the distance is Cañigo (9,134ft), about 30 miles away as the crow flies.

Perpignan again

Edd vs Food #168
Set menu at Au GousTous in Perpignan
Paté for starters, pork cheek with mashed potato for main course.
('Mashed potato' sounds much less sophisticated than écrasé de pommes de terre.)

Edd vs Food #169
Taco/fries/drink combo at Enjoy Tacos. Kind of like the French version of Taco Bell.
Special offer: 10 free chicken nuggets!
Felt a bit sick afterwards TBH.

Nîmes/Avignon/Montpellier/Arles, France

I've been quite busy on these French trains recently. You can get special offers as low as €1 for a single fare if you look hard enough. Also there's a French app called BlaBlaCar for car ride-sharing (as opposed to car ride-hailing) which can get you from place to place cheaply if you're travelling flexibly and solo, which I always am.  

Anyway, I have four places to report from:

• Nîmes is where I've been staying and it has a remarkably well-preserved Roman amphitheatre, at which Metallica filmed a feature-length concert movie in 2009.
• Arles is chiefly famous these days because Vincent Van Gogh lived there. There's a signposted walk that takes you round some of the scenes he painted.
• Avignon was where one of the Popes lived, back in the days when there were two Popes. (This has nothing to do with the 2019 film "The Two Popes". See here for details.)
• Montpellier, well, I can't think of anything to make your eyebrows go up. But it's very nice.

Wandering around places like these, or their equivalents in Spain or Italy, makes me feel a bit bashful about just how much wilful ugliness we put up with in our towns and cities in the UK. I know it's not fair to compare everywhere with Seville or Florence, but even so, it sometimes feels like even the most obscure and run-down continental towns have nicer architecture and more greenery and less litter than almost anywhere back in Blighty. 

In my own home town there's been a lot of redevelopment recently, and it's very welcome, but must it always be limited to glass & steel & concrete? Couldn't it involve water or grass or trees? And must 'regeneration' always mean just adding another street full of vape shops and bookmakers? 

It must however be said that France isn't immune to municipal ugliness. In Paris, the modernist area of La Défense is like some kind of huge dystopian sci-fi fantasy; basically it's Milton Keynes on steroids. Also, our beer is better & cheaper than theirs. So on the whole it's looking like a draw. Until the World Cup, at least.

Place de la République, Arles

Alyscamps, Arles

A sidestreet in Avignon. Painter at centre, painting.

Palace of the Popes, Avignon

In Montpellier:
an apartment building where balconies are taken very seriously indeed.

Hôtel de Région Occitanie, Montpellier

Place de la Comédie, Montpellier

Nîmes
L-R: Roman amphitheatre, Court of Appeal, and Pradier fountain

Les Jardins de la Fontaine, Nîmes

Edd vs Food #167
Chicken supreme at Le Bistrot de Tatie Agnès, Nîmes

Grenoble, France

Before arriving in Grenoble I checked the local weather forecast, and all it told me was: 'Moderate Avalanche Warning'. Thanks guys.

When my first Spain trip began in January 2017, I was already past forty, but it was the first time that I'd ever gone to sunnier climes during winter. Straight away I realised that going to sunnier climes during winter was an absolute no-brainer. Nothing lifts the mood like feeling the sun on your face. This is one reason why, on this trip, I've been heading south as fast as the TGV will take me.

That said, Grenoble is a fair way above sea level and it's been pretty chilly. Snow-capped Alps loom at the end of every street. And one inevitable sacrifice when travelling in winter is that the photos are never quite as good as the views. But I'm here for the memories, not the photos. Also, everything is much more pleasant when you avoid the high-season crowds.

While here I had one properly sunny day and I devoted it to exploring a small town called Vizille, a half-hour bus ride to the south. (People from Vizille are called Vizillois. This is the kind of detailed local knowledge that you never get until you're researching your travel blog on Wikipedia.) See pictures below. It's nice to get out of the big cities and I will try to do more of this in the weeks to come, even if I have to hire a left-hand-drive car in which to do it.

Grenoble is one of five French communes that were honoured by De Gaulle for their particularly active part in the Resistance during WW2. Back home in the UK, while we rightly revere the memories of the Blitz Spirit and the Battle of Britain, it's important to remember that it takes a whole new level of spirit to keep fighting back when the enemy is literally knocking at your front door. 

Obviously the memorials and the monuments here are annotated tactfully. They don't refer to Germany or to the German people. But at the same time, they don't cover things up. I saw a plaque in Dijon paying tribute to the 'victimes de la barbarie Nazi'. There are no bland platitudes about 'the fallen', as if what happened during 1939-1945 was a natural disaster like an earthquake or a tsunami. We should always call things by their real names. Because the same thing might come back one day, and we never quite know which direction it'll come from; and from a British perspective, when you remind yourself who makes up the five permanent members of the UN security council, it fans the flames of Francophilia a bit. As does being here, and eating their food, and drinking their wine. Vive la France.

Looking east from the Bastille. About the same climb as Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh.
That little blotch of reflected orange sunlight on the horizon, left of centre...
It's Mont Blanc, France's tallest mountain, roughly 70 miles away to the north-east.

Central Grenoble at dusk, looking west along the Isère river

Château de Vizille

Château again, from across the park

Looking southeast from Le Péage de Vizille

Fish and chips. Served with...chips???

Edd vs Food #166
French tacos at Snappy Food, Vizille.
Merguez sausage and fries within. Cheese throughout.

Lyon, France

Here in Lyon I seized my opportunity to make France the 11th foreign country in which I've attended a professional football match. (It'd be 12 if I included Scotland.) 

Olympique Lyonnais ('OL', just like Olympique Marseille get called 'OM') are one of the bigger French clubs, 6th on the all-time title-winning list. I had hoped they'd be playing Toulouse, so that I could make a witty pun about "to lose", but it wasn't to be. Anyway the home team won 2-0. For the first goal I thought the striker should have chipped the keeper when he was 1-on-1; in the event, he did it the harder way, but he did it well.

OL's home ground is now named after their sponsor Groupama, but it used to be called the Stade des Lumières, ie the 'Stadium of Light'. It's literally about 8 miles out of town - as if Sunderland had built their own Stadium of Light in Murton. The Groupama has a capacity of 60,000 but the crowd was still smaller than what Sunderland attracted against Crystal Palace the night before. Just saying.

As is almost always the case when watching football abroad, I was impressed by the atmosphere and the constant singing, but I couldn't help noticing that the singing in question was a) rigidly orchestrated by drums & loudspeakers, and b) completely unrelated to the game. It's always the same songs, over and over again. Whereas I think there's something genuinely precious about the way British football crowds constantly refine their repertoires in response to what's happening on the pitch. In 2003 I was at a match where we somehow managed to score three own goals in eight minutes: the crowd erupted into 'Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life', and then when one irate fan (who hadn't seen the funny side) got forcibly thrown out by the police, he was serenaded with 'there's only one lucky b*****d'.

Incidentally, did you know that for several years there was a French TV programme covering the English Premier League called 'Match Of Ze Day'? Priceless. It was presented by former Newcastle-based shampoo salesman David Ginola. Sample here.

Anyway I promise that there'll be no more football-related content in this year's blog. And there won't be any beer-related waffle, because France is a bit of a desert where good IPAs are concerned. Fortunately the wine situation is rather more satisfactory. I'll endeavour to enlarge on this and other more wholesome topics in the coming weeks.

Lyon from on high

Court of Appeal. Roughly the reverse of the photo above. 

On the banks of the Rhône

Western entrance to the Tête D'or parc

Hôtel de Ville

Roman amphitheatre (estimated date of construction is 15BC)

Pre-match shenanigans at Olympique Lyonnais

Edd vs Food #165
Set menu for lunch at the Midipopote cafe, 140 Ave Félix Faure, Lyon 69003
Tender beef shoulder bourgignon with carrots & pasta.
Creamy broccoli / chorizo / cranberry / walnut / red onion salad on the side

Dijon, France

As in the mustard, yes.

In fact they don't make mustard locally any more. It's not a protected name linked to a specific place (eg champagne or halloumi). Dijon mustard doesn't have to come from Dijon, just like Scotch eggs don't have to come from Scotland. So now you know.

So far France hasn't been too stereotypical. They do seem to smoke quite a lot, but not as much as the Italians. The only people I've noticed wearing berets were foreign tourists in the capital, young American women getting their friends to film them skipping bohemian-ishly up and down the Champs Élysées, evidently doing the 'Emily In Paris' thing entirely without irony. I haven't yet encountered a single stripey T-shirt (this garment is officially known as the marinière). Though here in Dijon I did see one young man with a twirly moustache.

Paris to Dijon is a journey of 200 miles. The TGV train is blissfully comfortable even in 2nd class. It takes 90 minutes and costs €30. In my original draft of this blog I spoke at quite nerdy length about high-speed trains and how wonderful they are, but events in Spain have prompted me to cut it out (I've taken that Madrid-Malaga line a few times myself.) 

Instead I'll settle for leaving it as a short one this week, along with a pledge that Edd vs Food is not ever going to go back to McDonalds and is instead going to start taking French food a bit more seriously. Starting here in Dijon: see below.

Looking south from the Philippe le Bon tower

Palais des Ducs et des États de Bourgogne
(reverse view of the above picture)

Rue Auguste Comte

Arc de Triomphe
A bit smaller than the one in Paris obvs.

Place François Rude

Les Halles
Central public market, designed by Gustave Eiffel (him off the tower)

Edd vs Food #164
3-course set menu at the Café du Pont, 36 Rue Hoche, Dijon
L-R: bacon & onion quiche, roast ham with potato/mozzarella waffles, chocolate crêpe.
€21, just about heading into mid-range. I'll go up & down the scale a bit in future editions.

Paris, France

In recent years I've developed the annoying habit of not telling anyone where I'm going before I start a trip. The veil of secrecy on this one has been record-breakingly long: 629 days. I can be very precise about this because each morning the Duolingo app updates me on my current French learning 'streak', which began in spring 2024. At that time I already had plans for Italy and India, but I knew France would be next. And here I am.

As a result of those 629 days of Duolingo - plus a big slab of podcasts and YouTube and reading and study - my conversational French is 'just about there'. Hopefully, by the end of the next two months of total immersion, it'll be 'there'. Learning Spanish was a hard slog and I assumed I didn't have it in me to do it all over again. But Spanish itself gives me a useful head start in French, as does my GCSE from all those years ago. And I do like a challenge.

I began well in Paris by conversing intelligibly with my landlady about what I was reading (de Maupassant), although I probably lost most of that newly-gained credibility when she saw what I was cooking with (Bisto gravy granules). My digs are in a distinctly posh western suburb called Saint-Cloud. I'd been there a full day before I noticed that my bedroom window has a view of the Eiffel Tower. In my defence, it's partly hidden behind a tree.

Paris was buried under quite a lot of snow when I arrived. Fortunately it's melted now. I can handle the cold and the wind, and the rain and the snow, but it was no fun walking everywhere on black ice, having to keep my eyes down and concentrate on not falling over rather than taking in my surroundings. Taking in my surroundings is the whole point of my travels, after all. Incidentally, it's cheaper to take the Paris Metro all the way across the entire city than it is to take the Tyne & Wear Metro from Pallion to Park Lane. Discuss.

Anyway, you all know what Paris looks like so I won't bother going into too much detail. Token photos are below if you're interested. The rest of this trip will be devoted to the slightly less-well-known parts of France, and to my hopefully not-totally-farcical attempts at asking my way around them in French. To say nothing of all that luscious French food...Mange tout, Rodney. Mange tout.

Inevitably...(1)

Inevitably...(2/3/4/5)

Inevitably...(6)

Bohemian book-laden duplex apartment.
I'm only renting the spare room.

I'm sure you can all translate this headline.

Here's a map of all the European places I've visited (as an adult) outside Great Britain.
France was plainly overdue.

Edd vs Food #163
At a Paris McDonalds: "Royal Cheese" burger, and French fries with mayonnaise.
IYKYK.
Disappointed beyond words to learn that you cannot, in fact, wash it down with a beer.