Carcassonne Encore

This weekend I headed out to Carcassonne again, but this time with Emily. It was fantastic. She and I have pretty much the exact same sense of humor, so I have six-pack abs now because of all the laughing. We got to the city and found out that the castle and church would be closing early, so hurried up to make it up into the city.

 I didn’t take a lot of photos of this trip, because I’ve already got most of those photos from the first time. But I did get some more of the castle in different lights. After the castle, it was time for me to go shopping. I wanted several items: a small tapestry, gauntlets, a rapier, a particular statue, and a piece of medieval clothing. The store that sold the clothing was gone completely, the stores that sold the rapier, gauntlets, and statue were all closed, and the store that sold the tapestry was out of the tapestries that I wanted. Well, bloody hell.

Shower instructions: Be ashamed!

  We checked into our hostel, which was actually within the fortified medieval city, then headed out to the lower city to find something interesting. Well, we found it: there was a small fair in the city. It was awesome, because it had all the classic midway games. But after you knock down the milk bottles, or lasso a rubber ducky, you had the option to choose an AK-47 pellet gun. Or a samurai sword.

 We got a quick McDonald’s dinner before looking for a public toilet. Emily paid and went in to use the toilet, then when she was done she did what many other people do out of kindness: she held the door open for me so I could use the bathroom without paying. The problem was that moments later the toilet started cleaning itself by spraying down the entire interior. I ran out of the bathroom while only suffering water damage to my feet. Emily laughed hysterically.

 We headed back to La Cité, took some pictures, and headed back to our hostel room. The next morning, I went some more shopping (La Cité seems to be the only place in France that doesn’t completely close on Sundays). Finally, I gave up on all my other buying goals and headed into another store where I found a couple of pieces of armor that I liked. Then, we hurried down to the train station to make the train to Toulouse.

 In Toulouse we headed over to the Jacobin church, where we took a look around the strange interior. Emily’s an art/art-history major, so there was a lot of discussion of the architecture and décor of the church before we headed out to the cloisters.

  The cloisters disappointed me a little this time because the refectory was closed, and the scriptorium and chapel were barred off by scaffolding. But it was empty and quiet, so it was a nice twenty minutes or so that we spent out in the cold.

 We hiked back across town to St. Sernin cathedral. That was the Romanesque one that I got to go into the crypts. This time I managed to get a photo of the reliquary which contains a “Shard of the True Cross.”

 Overall it was a fun weekend and was good to travel with someone again (it’s been about a month since I had a friend with me on a trip). And Emily was really good about listening to my history and contributing her art-history, so it was a very engaging weekend in general.