#and that when i went during a national holiday in a restaurant in the outskirts of turin -extreme north-

[ithacanradio]

Nun te preoccupa' guaglio, c sta o mar for

don't worry boy, there's the sea just outside

by Stefano Lentini, from the hit tv show the Sea Beyond.

[mmwm]

Welcome to day 3 of 31 Days of Heterotopias: Motels and Hotels, a month of posts about how motels, hotels, and inns function as heterotopias and liminal spaces in society.  (More about heterotopias and liminal spaces.)  Each post will look at these ideas from its own vantage point, which may not obviously connect with the others, and which may mention motels and hotels only peripherally or may focus on them without referencing heterotopia or liminality. I won’t attempt to tie the posts together. They’ll all be listed here, as they are posted.

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There are six motels/hotels that we (spouse and I) stay at over and over, in Savannah, Boston, Middlebury VT, Orleans MA, Boothbay ME, and Ogunquit ME. I’m not sure exactly what their appeal is. Prices per night range from $89 to $250, all fairly mid-range for their locations. The locations themselves are great but they differ — two are in the heart of cities, two are in the heart of towns — all four very walkable to the things we want to walk to — and the other two are on the outskirts of town, though still walkable into town (a mile or two each way, which we enjoy), and one of those is a few blocks from the ocean. Three accept pets, which mattered to us until a few years ago.

I’m going to highlight one of these hotels today, The Holiday Inn Express-Historic District, Savannah, GA. We’ve stayed here at least four times and would have stayed more but they were booked twice when we travelled and we had to stay at other hotels, including the Cotton Sail, which sits just above River Street, chic, modern, expensive, and the Planters Inn, on Reynolds Square, which is old-fashioned, falling apart (when we were there, the elevators didn’t work, almost the whole time!), and the staff was unfindable and not helpful. There was a complimentary bottle of wine in the room for my birthday, which was a lovely surprise, but things went downhill from there, and at more than $300 per night, things needed to be pretty perfect.

But I love the HIX.  Yes, it’s a Holiday Inn — which, when I was growing up in the 70s, was “the nation’s innkeeper” and its iconic sign was everywhere (my family stayed in family-friendly Holiday Inns and Howard Johnsons on our once-a-year vacation) —

(above, not my photo)

— but this one is on the corner of E. Bay and Abercorn, one block from River Street, a few blocks from the City Market, a block from Reynolds Square. The location can’t be beat. (Shown below with red tag. You can also see the Cotton Sail Hotel and the Planters Inn on the map.)

We come into town on the train,

take a cab to the hotel, and we don’t rent a car (from the airport, miles away) until we check out and leave for Jekyll Island, an hour and a half away — often via the Coastal Georgia Botanical Gardens:

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Somehow the HIX feels like a sanctuary from the moment I enter the wide, whooshing automatic sliding doors, usually for the first time each visit at 6:30 a.m., more than 24 hours after having fallen out of bed in New Hampshire at 4 a.m. to catch the 5:50 a.m. bus to Boston, then the 9:30 a.m. train from there, through a change to a different train line in New York’s Penn Station in the afternoon, with evening and overnight on the Silver Meteor (which continues on to Miami), to be awakened early again, at 5 a.m., for disembarking.

And just about always, our room is ready when we stumble in, bleary eyed, at 6:30, both needing showers and some sleep on a real bed before hitting Huey’s on the River for beignets, cafe au lait, and grits:

Nothing says “welcome” like the availability of the hotel room in the wee and exhausting hours of the morning, and check in staff who seem happy to provide it more than 8 hours before their normal check-in- time. (They also give us bottles of water and sometimes fruit.)

Chilling out on the bed in your hotel room watching television, while wearing your own pajamas, is sometimes the best part of a vacation.  — Laura Marano

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We’re usually at this hotel at Christmas and New Year’s, when it’s decorated cheerfully and simply.

There is something especially wonderful, for me, about spending big, culturally significant holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving away from home, and it is precisely because of the heterotropic feel of it: I like the way time passes differently when travelling, when staying in a city or town where I don’t know anyone except the person I am travelling with (and if I’m travelling alone, even more so). Time is open, the future is unknown rather than proscribed as it often is when surrounded by family or friends, when in one’s usual place, taking part in the same interactions as always on these occasions.

We often spend a day or two before Christmas in Savannah, then drive to Jekyll on Christmas Eve or Christmas itself, and we return to Savannah on New Year’s Eve or the day before, spend that night there, and take the train home on 1 January. I love subverting the procession of what is often treated as “sacred” time by making it feel ordinary (ordinarily holy) through the mundane activities of packing, picking up a rental car, driving on the interstate, unpacking, finding take-out Chinese food someplace or just nibbling on snack food when most others in our culture are buying, wrapping, feasting, gathering in groups. I like interacting with cab drivers, rental car agents, restaurant staff, hotel staff on these set-aside days; I feel I am part of an underground community in some way, and at the same time I know I’m not. Our schedule and plans for Christmas Eve and Day and the days before involve not decorating a tree, not wrapping and unwrapping gifts, not making holiday foods, not meeting family/friends for a meal, not going to church, and so on, but rather just checking out of a hotel and picking up a rental car on time. Then? Nothing is certain; time could unfold any way it will.

We exchange only one or two small gifts during this period and I make some rough decoration for the room from shells, branches, sand, rocks, ribbons and rope, a few shiny things. If we were at home, I’m not sure we’d scale down to this extent, but even if we did, I don’t think it would feel the same to me, because there is something about the usual place, home, that exerts a kind of sway on time, on plans, on what’s expected to happen when, and it really does seem like it’s the place itself that has this effect.

Michel Foucault says (slight paraphrase) that “the heterotopia begins to function fully when people are in a kind of absolute break with their traditional time.” To make “an absolute break with traditional time”  — by travelling away from home, by staying in a hotel or motel that superimposes and confuses public and private space, that functions as a temporary and transitional way-station, that allows personal (and perhaps “couple” or “family”) identity to float free of its boundaries in an anonymous environment — removes or rescues us from prevailing norms, allows time and self to dissolve and re-order to some extent, blurring the boundaries of time and self as the boundaries of meaning in the space itself are blurred (public/private, familiar/strange, feels institutional/feels like a retreat, etc.). And what period of time is more traditional in American culture than Christmas and the weeks before it?  (Rivaling Christmas for traditional celebration, Thanksgiving is the other time we tend to travel each year.)

Some years, we do feast on Christmas Day at the Jekyll Island Club Hotel buffet extravaganza, and New Year’s Eve is often a special dinner in Savannah. We may attend the Christmas concert at St. John the Baptist in Savannah, or take a nighttime walking tour with a sort of Christmasy Dickensian theme (a fund raiser for the local food bank or other charity in Savannah). Even those time-appropriate, traditional “Christmas” events, however, take on a different feel, because we are in the space of a heterotopia, where multiple realities are juxtaposed. We’re in a place that’s both familiar (we have been to Savannah and Jekyll before, we have certainly stayed in Holiday Inns before) and unfamiliar, even exotic, a place where the weather is mild enough that we can dine outside at a cafe table on the sidewalk in mid-winter, when there are feet of snow piling up on our driveway at home. We are among palm trees and camellias blooming everywhere. We are wearing light clothing. We are among other tourists, also enchanted and bewitched by their surroundings and how they feel in these strange surroundings, unmoored from the usual family, community, daily household tasks. It often feels surreal, disorienting in a mostly good way.

Instead of spending Christmas morning unwrapping gifts, we light a candle or two, open a card and a gift or two, and then take a long walk on the quiet beach, admire the shore birds, maybe walk in the woods and look for stinkhorn fungi. On New Year’s Eve in Savannah, we often eat dinner fairly early, walk about on the Savannah streets a bit as festivities are starting to gear up, then head back to the waiting hotel room, where we can perhaps hear a car horn, fireworks, carousers from inside the small impersonal space.

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Back to the hotel: The room itself is simple, like the lobby, with just what’s needed: good wifi, a refrigerator, a microwave, a desk and chairs, comfortable bed(s), well-functioning bathroom, some space, some quiet.

The staff are always attentive, and the place just works well. I don’t feel in any sense that I am home there, but I feel benignly looked after without feeling watched or intruded upon. I can be anonymous, I am unknown (even after four or more visits), but I also feel the tenuous and privileged connection that being a “guest” confers.

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While in Savannah, favourite spots besides the hotel and Hueys are the Paris Market, with their unusual toys and stuffed animals, good-smelling things, jewelry, books, household goods, fantastic displays, and the macarons, especially at an outside cafe table …

… the fabulous Arches Bar in the Olde Pink House …

(Our Little Hummingbird cocktail)

And the tavern there for dinner, by the fire …

… and then there is the estimable Gryphon Tea Room, serving tea sandwiches and brunch, staffed by the Savannah College of Art & Design students …

the ceiling

Oh, and Savannah Bee honey, with two (maybe more?) locations in Savannah (and one on St. Simon’s Island) … Free samples of honey there, plus mead tastings, lots of lotions and potions …

… and the River Street Sweets and Candy Kitchens on River Street and at City Market (all with free praline samples) …

Other favourite food places are Jazz’d Tapas Bar for tapas and romantic atmosphere; Moon River Brew Pub for casual eats (big outdoor space); Churchill’s Pub in the wine cellar for special occasions; Rocks on the River and Rocks on the Roof at the Bohemian Hotel for a fun, hip nosh (Rocks on the River was open one Christmas morning when nothing else was, bless them); Vic’s on the River for great view and a comfy traditional spot. Once we get the car, we usually head to the Crab Shack on Tybee Island for seafood and cocktails. I’d love to get to the Crystal Beer Parlor next time; we walked there last time but they were unexpectedly closed that day.

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Then there’s hours spent strolling on cobblestone streets, along tree-lined streets dripping with Spanish moss, beautiful and interesting architecture everywhere …

… and the parks, gardens, squares, Colonial Cemetery …

… the stairs that are so fun to climb …

… the whimsical creche and the glorious Christmas concerts, with organ and choir, at The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist  …

I almost forgot the Telfair museums — which includes the Telfair Academy, part period house, part art gallery …

… the Jepson Center (a more modern art gallery) …

… and a tour of the Owens-Thomas House (no inside photos allowed) …

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And after walking, eating, drinking (cocktails on the street!), attending events and taking tours, enjoying tea, (mostly) window shopping, sampling gobs of pralines and honey, pounding the cobblestone and climbing up and down the stairs, it’s so nice to retreat to the unpretentious Holiday Inn Express at the corner of E. Bay and Abercorn for a little quiet, some privacy, a few Zots candies, and some moments or hours of down time in an uncluttered, embracing room, possibly overlooking a pocket garden behind the hotel.

Even after a long train ride and early morning wake-ups, no shower, gritty eyes, I always perk up a bit when I see this ….

When you get into a hotel room, you lock the door, and you know there is a secrecy, there is a luxury, there is fantasy. There is comfort. There is reassurance. —  Diane von Furstenberg

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  There is Comfort. There is Reassurance. Welcome to day 3 of 31 Days of Heterotopias: Motels and Hotels, a month of posts about how motels, hotels, and inns function as heterotopias and liminal spaces in society. 

[germainetrittle86]

A Glimpse of Bukidnon

2017 was the last busy year I had for travelling on an assortment of speaking engagements. The downside of my new position at work was that I no longer had much official trips and was compelled to remain in the office as “taong-bahay”. Add to that the fact that I had also reduced my hours spent on advocacy work to focus on family time. Fortunately, by God’s grace and the goodwill of a few close friends, I managed to land a few rackets here and there to keep me sane.

Towards the latter part of the year, I had back-to-back trips to the South to facilitate several workshop-dialogues towards developing a stakeholder’s manual for an elderly program. The audience were from really depressed and remote areas, so we had a great deal of coordinating to do to bring them all to a safe and convenient place. Most of the chosen locations were in urbanized centers of the province with enough facilities, but there were a few times when the best the host-organizers could do was to put us up in seedy pensionne houses and hold our sessions at the available LGU building.

One of our pilot areas was in Region X, specifically Bukidnon province. And while I had the opportunity to go around Southern Mindanao before, particularly the Davao provinces when I was working for the National Amnesty Commission, this was going to be my first time to really see Northern Mindanao. Admittedly, a few years back, I had the occasion of going to Cagayan de Oro and Camiguin island several times. At one point, I was able to make a sidetrip to Dahilayan Adventure Park in Bukidnon to try their zipline. But I had always been curious about Bukidnon and its famed abundance.

My UP Los Banos classmate, Sen. Migs Zubiri used to boast about the rich farmlands of his home province - the sweetest pineapples and horseback riding amongst the cattle on the hills. He proudly portrayed it as the “land of milk and honey”, and perhaps with good reason. Not only were they blessed with fertile agricultural land and sufficient water sources from the rivers and waterfalls from the mountains, high elevation and the passage of very few typhoons granted them good weather all year round.

However, because of Bukidnon’s land-locked and mountainous location, the closest commercial airline entry point was the new Lagunduingan airport by way of Cagayan de Oro. So there we were, coming in by plane and driving through El Salvador in the outskirts of CDO where the airport was actually located. Heavy traffic usually plagues this area but at least the view of the blue sea was a refreshing sight, albeit in between the numerous seafood restaurants which line the road.

Upon reaching the city proper, we headed directly for the bus terminal to catch the earliest trip to take us to Bukidnon. Like Victory and Dagupan buses heading up Northern Luzon, buses here leave within regular intervals, not waiting for the bus to fill up. So besides getting seated comfortably, the aircon bus itself was clean and well-maintained, with its own CR, on-board movies and wifi. Since it was going to be a long 4-hour trip, I managed to buy some food to snack on. Lo and behold, I found the biggest and juiciest grapes this side of the world!

Exiting CDO once more, my eyes were again treated to the beautiful sight of the blue sea. Cagayan de Oro has one of the busiest ports in Mindanao next to Davao. From a distance, we can see that both passenger and cargo shipping lines congest the CDO pier. Leaving the coastline, we suddenly ascend a zig-zagging route and the air changes from hot, humid sea air to a cool, mountain breeze. I am reminded of our summer route from La Union’s beaches going up to Baguio every Holy Week in my youth and the childhood memory made me smile. Soon, pine trees and fog are what I see through my window, and I realize these highlands are a perfect holiday destination because of its cool weather.

In about an hour, we entered Manolo Fortich, best known as the location of Asia’s largest pineapple farm - Del Monte Pineapple Plantation in Camp Philips. Because of its elevation, Manolo Fortich also gives one an idea of the wide expanse of the Mt. Kitanglad mountain range which characterizes Bukidnon. Manolo Fortich is also where the famous Dahilayan Adventure Park is situated. Once touted as having the longest zipline in Asia, it is still a favorite holiday destination of families and tourists.

Along the way, we traversed various croplands planted to rice, corn, sugarcane, and coconut. I am told smaller farms also cultivate bananas and other fruits and vegetables. We crossed some rivers with rampaging waters from the mountains and I can only imagine the power generated by these bodies of water.

After two hours on the road, we reached Malaybalay City, the provincial capital of Bukidnon and its center of political and economic activity. With its government buildings, various transport terminals for buses, inter-municipality jeepneys, and tricycles, it is what would pass as “urbanized” in these parts. The only other “urbanized” place in Bukidnon would be an hour away - Valencia City with the same aura of economic hustle and bustle with its assortment of shops, stores, and restaurants for people passing through. After token stopovers at these main hubs to unload and pick-up passengers, our bus once again traversed the tree-lined mountain roads. At times it opened up into rolling, green hills dotted with free-range horses and cattle gorging on the lush and verdant grass.

Worth mentioning is the fact that we passed through checkpoints where every one was asked to disembark. My legal background has taught me that at checkpoints, one should never to get down from your vehicle, and never let them open your glove or baggage compartment, because anything the authorities wish to confiscate from you should only be in plain sight.

Lining up outside, we were told to show our IDs while the military men boarded our bus to check inside. Only senior citizens were exempted from disembarking, so they stayed inside the bus. There would be a few more of these checkpoints as we continued our travel because Bukidnon and its mountainous areas are also havens for the NPA rebels. It just shows that because the wealth in natural resources doesn’t necessarily translate into reduced poverty for all people, this kind of peace and security situation results.

Nonetheless, I appreciated the times we were stopped and asked to get down for agricultural quarantine issues. We had to dip our shoes in some disinfecting solution placed on mats or rugs so that contamination from Foot and Mouth disease in pigs and avian flu in chicken is prevented. Apparently, the province was afraid of a repeat of an animal epidemic a few years back which gravely depleted their poultry and livestock. These had dire consequences for an agricultural-based province like theirs, so they also impose similar restrictions to protect their crops.

Finally, we reached Maramag and got off at the highway for our provided lodgings. We were staying at the newer building of the only hotel in town because it had a swimming pool and they had a restaurant there. While our accommodations had free breakfast everyday, lunch and dinner were not included. Sadly, there are no fast food restaurants around, so the best thing was to eat at the carinderia stalls at their local wet market. To be honest, I was never a fan of Northern Mindanao cuisine after my bad experience in Camiguin island during my first visit. Except for the famous CDO lechon and occasional seafood buffet sans shrimps, crab, and squid because of my allergies, I was hardly impressed. So I steered clear of the viands I wasn’t accustomed to because even the longganisa and sisig were kinda weird tasting.

Note that Maramag is famous for having the cleanest wet market in the Philippines and has been featured in media often. There are no flies buzzing around, no blood and guts stinking up open canals, no muddy footprints going up and down the stalls. Instead, the beige-brown tiled floors are frequently mopped with disinfectant by designated cleaners. You can smell the Zonrox emanating from their mops as they went about, up and down the whole stretch of the meat section. Truly, it is even cleaner than some fast food restaurants’ floors!

The next day, we headed for the famous RR spring resort near the mighty Pulangi river. This great river has many tributaries and runs through several municipalities of Bukidnon before emptying out to sea. Probably because of its elevation, this river looks more like a mountain lake surrounded by pine trees with its clear, still waters reflecting the sky above.

The whole day workshop-dialogue went well, but since it wasn’t really safe to be going around a place where you are an unfamiliar face, we were told to stay close to our hotel. Not being one of those highly-populated municipal centers, nothing really happens after dinner and at around 7PM, the roads are seemingly abandoned. I opted to take a swim in the hotel pool while my companion took advantage of the cable TV in his room. The next day, we left early to be able to catch our respective flights back to Manila from Cagayan de Oro.

All in all, Bukidnon is a nice place to visit and experience its beauty if only momentarily; perchance to quickly pass through but never to tarry.

[tripstations]

France’s Chicest Hotel Family Has Come to Languedoc. Is That a Good Thing?

When the French painter Gustave Courbet depicted the flat pale gray beach of the Languedoc Coast in “The Seaside at Palavas,” in 1854, it was wild and empty, which is what makes the tiny man in a suit doffing his top hat at the low dark green waves rolling in off the Golfe de Lion so poignant.

Successive building booms tamed that wildness, first during the 1920s, and then again during the three decades from 1945 to 1975 that the French call “Les Trente Glorieuses” (the 30 glorious ones), when the country’s economy was thriving after World War II. In the early 1970s, the government of French President Georges Pompidou, frustrated to see so many Gauls heading south to Spain for their holidays, drew up plans for new resorts on the Languedoc coast, notably La Grande Motte and Cap d’Agde. These huge blocks of blunt-looking white-painted concrete holiday flats and hotels with affordable rates gave the Languedoc coastline its less-than-glamorous reputation.

So the Languedoc was an unlikely spot for the trendsetting brothers Jean-Louis and Guy Costes to have opened the family’s first hotel outside Paris, the 72-room Plage Palace, in the low-key beach resort of Palavas-Les-Flots, five miles south of the year-old TGV Montpellier Sud de France train station.

When Jean-Louis Costes and another brother, Gilbert, opened the family’s first hotel in 1995, its louche Napoleon III decor jolted the sedate world of Paris luxury hotels. If the French capital’s grande-dame palace hotels spun on the fantasy of spending a night in an aristocrat’s chateau, the Hotel Costes, with its low lighting, plush fabrics and carefully cast staff, seemed to suggest that it might be more fun to bed down in a bordello instead. The international fashion world promptly made it one of its favorite Paris addresses.

Like many people from the Aveyron region of central France, the Costes spent their childhood summer holidays in Languedoc, but nostalgia alone can’t entirely explain the daring of this newly built property, which cost between 25 and 30 million euros, or about $40 million according to the French press (the Costes have declined to comment on the hotel or its cost). The Plage Palace is a bold bet that there’s a market for something new, in this case, a style-driven luxury hotel on a stretch of the French Mediterranean coast that’s never had the glamour of the Côte d’Azur.

Palavas-les-Flots, a 20-minute drive from the TGV station, is over a bridge from the mainland on a long narrow barrier island with a series of lagoons on its northern shore and the Mediterranean on its southern one. It’s a motley mix of low-rise 50s and 60s apartment buildings, small bungalows covered with ivory, umber or pink stucco, and cafes and souvenir shops brightened during the summer by huge banks of oleander.

First step, find the hotel

Since it’s hidden by thick plantings and a wall of weathered planks and has no signage, the Plage Palace was not easy to find. Three times I went through a gate I guessed was the entrance looking for a place to park, only to quickly find myself in front of the sign that said Sortie (Exit) and back on the road by which I’d arrived. On a fourth try, the road was blocked by a car with Swiss license plates, and a smiling bellhop-cum-valet parking attendant dressed in white suddenly emerged from the greenery.

“Hey, welcome! Leave your car here, and I’ll take care of it,” he said, and escorted me up a curving boardwalk to the hotel. When I mentioned I’d had a tough time reaching the hotel, he nodded.

“Eh, oui,” he said. “The Costes are very discreet people, and they want the hotel to be a surprise.”

The hotel, a new-built, all-white, Cubist-style, two-story building, is pure Costes. The staff have been carefully cast from the young and beautiful, the property has a major design pedigree: the Paris-based interior architects Buttazzoni, Imaad Rahmouni and François-Joseph Graf collaborated on it. Lounge music thumps from speakers in the restaurant, and the wooden deck overlooking a heated saltwater pool and a neatly groomed stretch of beach is furnished with sun loungers, white umbrellas and a bar-restaurant. Checking in, I noticed one big difference in the Costes’ Languedoc hospitality style: Unlike the hauteur that characterizes the service in many of their Paris establishments, the staff were welcoming and friendly.

Rooms, most of which have sea-views and private terraces or balconies, come with appealingly minimalist beach-shack décor (they start at 300 euros a night, or about $336). The restaurant has almost exactly the same basic — and expensive, menu as the brothers’ several dozen restaurants and brasseries in Paris — dishes like steamed shrimp dim sum or tuna and avocado tartare, and in a rare feint at local gastronomy, a stew of bull’s meat eaten in the adjacent Camargue and grilled cuttlefish from the neighboring port of Grau-le-Roi.

In the bar before dinner, the crowd was chatting about their winter vacations in Saint Barth’s and Thailand. I couldn’t help but wonder what the pampered clientele would find to do if they decided to step outside this carefully created bubble of luxury.

Outside the bubble

So after an excellent buffet breakfast at the Plage Palace, I set out to discover the appeal of the Languedoc coastline as a destination, whatever your travel budget might be. Driving 12 miles east, I passed through La Grande Motte, and arrived at Aigues Mortes, a walled medieval town surrounded by marshes and salt pans. In 1240, King Louis IX ordained the construction of a port in what was then a village of fishermen and salt harvesters that would serve as the embarkation point for French troops heading off to the Crusades in the Holy Land. His son Philip III ordered the construction of stone ramparts to completely encircle the town, and today these formidable fortifications are a French national historic monument.

I enjoyed the briny breezes and sweeping views over the town, the surrounding marshes and the vivid pink salt pans during a leisurely hourlong ramble around the ramparts with just the occasional noisy sea gull overhead to keep me company.

From Aigues Mortes. I backtracked a few miles to the pretty little seaside town of Le Grau-du-Roi, the second largest French fishing port on the Mediterranean. At Le Vivier, a restaurant in the old town, I tucked into a 24-euro, prix fixe lunch of locally caught shrimp cooked in a crust of salt and rouille Gaulenne, a succulent casserole of stewed octopus and potatoes served with lashings of garlic mayonnaise, a local specialty. I enjoyed this very good value meal with a glass of white Picpoul de Pinet, a Languedoc white.

After lunch, tipped off by a friend in Paris, I spent a lazy afternoon at the magnificent Plage de L’Espiguette, a six-mile long strand of dunes and white sand just outside Le-Grau-le-Roi. As a New Englander who habitually went to the beach with nothing more than a towel and a good book, I preferred this vast empty wild shoreline to the carefully groomed beach at the Plage Palace.

I arrived at the recently renovated and very popular 10-room Hotel Les Coquilles in Palavas-les-Flots at the end of the day, where the owners were exceptionally welcoming and friendly (they also own La Cave d’Aristide, a very good wine store on the premises). They also volunteered a very good recommendation for dinner, Le Saint Georges, where I had an excellent meal of shrimp tartare with fava beans and rhubarb vinaigrette and grilled sea bream, squid, zucchini and artichokes.

With spacious rooms priced at about 90 euros a night, Les Coquilles highlighted the appeal of being in a place mostly overlooked by foreigners.

Forty minutes west of Palavas-les-Flots, the brawny old port town of Sète was built in 1666 to encourage commerce on the Canal des Deux Mers, which is today better known as the Canal du Midi. The port boomed after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830.

The outskirts of Sète are gritty and industrial, but the heart of the city, which is built on a series of canals, has a sepia-toned, 19th-century charm exemplified by Le Grand Hotel, a delightful three-star property with great canal views and an atmospheric interior atrium with wrought-iron balconies. Sète, long well-known for its tieilles — pastry tarts stuffed with a ragout of octopus in a spicy tomato sauce — has recently become a great food town, too. I had a quick but delicious lunch of deep-fried merlan (whiting) and panisses (fried chickpea-flour beignets) at Fritto, a French style fish-and-chips shop, and rushed off to the Quai de la Resistance to catch the jousting on the canal.

The first jousting tournament in Sète took place on July 29, 1666 to celebrate construction of the port. Originally, tournaments opposed young bachelors in a blue boat to married men in a red one. Before the tournament starts the jousters parade with an oboist and a drummer playing the traditional jousting tune. Then the battle begins, with the jousters using their spears to try and make their opponents fall into the canal. In Sète, jousting takes place from June to early September, and the tournament schedule is available from the tourist office.

A friendly Dutch couple with whom I fell into conversation during the spectacle told me they come to see the jousting every year at the beginning of their annual beach holiday, and then invited me to join them for dinner at the Michelin one-star The Marcel, where the talented young chef Fabien Fages took over the kitchen last year. Over an excellent meal of marinated Mediterranean tuna with crunchy vegetables in a tonnato sauce and red mullet in an anise-spiked court bouillon with chorizo oil, conversation flowed as easily as the white wine.

Oysters, wine caves and the option to bare it all

The following day, the drive from Sete to Marseillan along the Etang de Thau on a road shaded by plane trees was blissfully bucolic. I was on a mission to scarf down a dozen oysters at Le Saint Barth just outside of Marseillan. This simple water’s edge seafood shack is run by the Tarbouriech family, who farm the meaty, iodine-rich oysters that many consider the best in France at the foot of the wooden deck adjoining the restaurant.

After lunch, I took a guided tour of the Noilly Prat caves in Marseillan, where the Vermouth maker has been based since 1855. Noilly Prat is made from white grapes — Picpoul de Pinet and Clairette, grown in the vineyards that surround the town — and aside from the secret mixture of herbs and spices that season the dry full-bodied amber-colored wine, its character, I learned, comes from a two-step aging process. This interesting visit concluded with a tasting of the four vermouths they produce: Original French Dry Vermouth, Red Noilly Prat, Ambre Noilly Prat, and Extra Dry Noilly Prat, which is primarily produced for the cocktail-loving North American market.

Slightly pickled, I walked into the old town of Marseillan to the five-room B & B Rue Galilee, where I discovered one of the most delightful small hotels I’ve ever found in France. This old stone house with blue wooden shutters and boxes of red geraniums was meticulously renovated by the Swedish owner Janne Larsson. The generous Scandinavian style breakfast, including herring and house-smoked salmon, that was served the next morning was excellent, too.

Nine miles south of Marseillan, Le Cap d’Agde is the last major beach resort on this stretch of shore and was developed in the 1960s by architect Jean Le Couteur in one of France’s largest state-run development schemes. It also has one of the country’s largest nudist colonies.

Deciding to spare the bared my rather portly presence, I regretfully ended my trip and hopped a TGV train home to Paris in nearby Beziers.

As the train pulled out of the station, I thought of my new Dutch friends. During our dinner, I’d asked them why they’re so loyal to the Languedoc.

“It’s cheap, pretty and unpretentious,” said Esmee, a doctor in Rotterdam. “Good beaches, but lots of history, too.”

“The food and wine are excellent, too” added her architect husband Carel.

I agreed with them both.

The post France’s Chicest Hotel Family Has Come to Languedoc. Is That a Good Thing? appeared first on Tripstations.

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[newstfionline]

Fairy Tales Overcome Nightmares at South Korea’s Militarized Border Town

Reuters, July 25, 2017

SEOUL--A half-hour’s drive north of Seoul, along a highway lined with barbed wire, lie two shopping malls the size of several football stadiums, a stone’s throw from the world’s most militarized border.

The malls are in the city of Paju, gateway to the U.N. truce village of Panmunjom, where military officers from the combatants of the 1950-53 Korean war discuss armistice matters--when the two sides are on speaking terms, which they aren’t these days.

“Fairy tales come true in Paju”, is the advertising lure from the Korean Tourism Board. But it was nightmares that were all too true here during the Korean war, when Paju featured some of its fiercest battles. Paju is home to the country’s only “enemy’s cemetery”, where the remains of Chinese and North Korean soldiers are buried.

That’s all but forgotten history now. On the rooftop of the Lotte Premium Outlet, children and their parents can view North Korea across the Imjin River through binoculars. The mall also features a merry-go-round, cinema, and a mini-train.

At Shinsegae Paju Premium Outlet, about a dozen children jump and scream around a fountain inside the mall on a sizzling, July summer day. Just a couple miles away is a village modeled after France’s tourism center of Provence, where restaurants, bakeries and clothing shops are decorated like a children’s playbook.

Elsewhere in Paju, kids carved wood to make Pinocchio dolls at a museum, while adults tasted wine made of meoru, a Korean wild grape, at a farm.

Paju, indeed, shows little signs of the tensions that have arisen since North Korea marked the U.S. July 4th holiday with a successful launch of what it said was an intercontinental ballistic missile. The missile test prompted the United States and South Korea this month to conduct air force bomber exercises in the skies near here.

But at Paju’s Provence Village, Kim Ki-deok, a 41-year-old office worker from south of Seoul and father of a 4-year-old boy, said he doesn’t feel any more danger from being close to the border.

“If North Korea really wants, they can shoot missiles far away,” said Kim. “I feel refreshed and would like to come here again.”

The sense of insouciance can even be seen at the U.S. military’s Camp Bonifas on the outskirts of town, home to a three-hole golf course that Sports Illustrated once called the “world most dangerous golf course” because of the Korean War vintage land mines littering the area.

The Korean War, in which the United States fought alongside South Korea and China with the North, ended in a truce that has yet to be replaced by a peace agreement and has left the two sides technically at war.

It means South Koreans have long grown accustomed to living in a doomsday scenario, one that includes up to 10,000 artillery guns pointed toward the South and capable at any moment, in the words of North Korea’s propaganda machine, of turning Seoul into a “sea of fire” and a “pile of ashes.”

For 30-year-old Park Chol-min, it’s nothing more than empty threats.

“It’s just a show or performance. I think North Korea has a lot more to lose than to gain by turning Seoul into a sea of fire,” said the video game producer from Seoul, visiting the Shinsegae mall with his girlfriend to buy her a birthday gift.

Paju stepped up North Korea-related tourism in the 2000s, when liberal governments launched a “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with North Korea. Foreigners and locals flocked to Panmunjom to see stony-faced North Korean soldiers on guard and an underground tunnel built by the North, and to Imjingak, which houses the Bridge of Freedom, where prisoners of war were traded at the end of the war.

The tourism push took a huge leap late in 2011, when two massive premium outlets run by South Korean retail giants Shinsegae and Lotte opened. More than 12 million visitors went to the two malls last year--more than Seoul’s population of 10 million.

It was not long after the malls opened, though, when North Korea dramatically stepped up the pace of missile and nuclear tests under Kim Jong Un, who took power in Pyongyang when his father Kim Jong-il died in December 2011.

“The tests have not dented visitor interest at all,” said a Paju city official in charge of tourism, who asked not to be named. “It has become just part of a daily life, although it is sad to say so.”

Normalizing the North Korean threat is part of a “defense mechanism” for South Koreans, says Kwak Keum-joo, a psychology professor at Seoul National University.

“I feel anxious about North Korea when I travel overseas. Once I return to Korea, I forget it,” Kwak said.