Road to Toulouse

PAU, FRANCE (Aug. 12)—As you all know, I’m not a morning person, but these big French breakfasts sure are worth getting up for in the morning. This morning, like every other morning, I had fresh fruit, cheese and a croissant and washed it down with a blend of different fruit juices and two cups of strong, but smooth coffee. On the recommendation of a colleague, I slathered my croissant in Nutella, which I never tried before. It was quite good. I discovered that a little bit of Nutella goes a long way.

After breakfast, we checked out of the hotel and drove to Toulouse. On the way, we drove through more beautiful French countryside, and we got to see the Pyrenees in the far distance.

Toulouse is a university city. It has a grittier look to it than Paris, but it’s still quaint. The town has an abundance of different ethnic storefront restaurants, traditional French cafes and lots of shops, including some American chains.

Once our bus dropped us off in a town square, we walked to Saint Sernin, a basilica dedicated to a bishop and a major stopping place in the pilgrimage to Compostela. The bishop was Saturnin, a martyr saint and the first bishop of Toulouse, who lived in the first half of the 3rd century. A pamphlet at the church tells of how he died in 250 after being dragged through the streets by a sacrificial bull. The church is older than Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.

The church is architecturally very different than all the others we have seen so far. It’s a massive structure that goes straight up and looks boxy from the outside. That’s because the structure has no flying buttresses for support. They had to compensate for that by using massive pillars in the middle of the church not for decoration, but to actually hold the church up so it doesn’t fall apart.

The church also is known for the fact that under its main altar are the remains of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Click here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Theologica if you would like to check out Summa Theologica, his greatest work. Aquinas died in a monastery in Italy. Back then, they didn’t have a way to ship whole bodies. And apparently, Aquinas was a large man. So, according to the Rev. John Rybolt, C.M., Aquinas’s body was rendered. And by rendered, I mean cooked in a pot. “They put him in a pot, got rid of his flesh and left him with his bones,” said Father Rybolt. “They thought so much of him that they put him in a pot with red wine. His bones were red. It’s a wild story, and it’s probably true.” Cooking him in wine apparently was a way to show him great respect. If it was most anybody else, water would have been used.

St. Vincent’s connection to Toulouse was that he lived there while he was a university student and for four more years as a priest. As for the Saint Sernin, we visited the basilica, Father Rybolt said, “because it is an artistic treasure, and since he was a student here, St. Vincent most likely walked in there at least once.”

After our visit, we had a nice long break for lunch and shopping. Lunch was my first disappointing meal on this trip. I ordered a kebab sandwich with fries. The fries were OK, but the kebab was a mystery meat. It was so processed, fatty and thinly sliced that I couldn’t tell if it was beef, lamb or a combination of something else entirely. It had the consistency of Carl Buddig meat. I ate it because I was starving.

After a little shopping, we boarded the bus for our trip to Carcassonne where we are staying at the Mercury Carcassonne Porte de la Cite, a nice, comfortable and modern hotel with slightly smaller rooms than we are used to.

It was a scenic ride to the hotel, which is located inside the city walls. Carcassonne is the largest fortified city in Europe. From a distance, it sits high on a hill and made it look like we were approaching Disneyland.

We had a nice dinner in the hotel restaurant of salad, beef so tender that you could cut it with a fork in a tasty light brown gravy and fancy mashed potatoes decorated with thick carrot slices. Dessert consisted of cream puffs filled with some sort of ice cream topped with whipped cream. I ate the whole thing. It was worth every calorie.