Carcassonne Castles

Carcassonne is a town in the South of France that is split in two; there is the modern part which is a classic French town, and then there is the more impressive “medieval city” of Carcassonne which is a fully restored fortified town on a hill, complete with turrets, drawbridge and a castle. We spent nearly 2 days there, and had wonderful time. We took a number of photos of the medieval city which can be seen here.

We arrived late in the afternoon at the Carcassonne rail station from Nice after going through Marseille and changing trains in Montpellier. We headed straight into the centre of the modern town and managed to get to the tourism office minutes before they closed up shop for the day. We were given a map of both sections of Carcassonne and directions to our hotel.
We were staying in an Ibis hotel this time, which was a little bit different to the other privately owned hotels we’d stayed in previously, simply because we could get BBC news. This may not sound like a big deal, but by this point in our journey, we were craving any kind of English we could listen to, and the BBC was a source of great relief for us.

After checking in (and watching some BBC news) we decided to go and find somewhere to eat for dinner. The woman on the desk at our hotel gave us a couple of restaurant recommendations that were in the medieval city. Because our hotel was close to the medieval city, it was a short walk over a bridge, up the hill, past the walls until we were onto the cobbled alleyways of the medieval city. We found a restaurant that was recommended to us and got a seat inside. The restaurant was quite cramped and we ended up being seated next to a Canadian couple who we struck up a bit of a conversation with. It turned out they were feeling starved of conversation in English too! We had a marvellous traditional French meal and some entertaining waiters. We had two waiters during our meal who were the complete opposite of each other; one was a very friendly, polite and professional waiter who went out of his way to assist us with the menu, but the other waitress was extremely unfriendly, ignoring us when we tried to get her attention, and if she threw our plates on the table any harder the food would have been on our laps.

We headed back to the medieval city the next day; It looks just like a fairytale castle from the outside and has been used as a set in a few movies such as “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves“. It’s completely surrounded by a double ring of ramparts (2 surrounding walls) and has 53 towers in total.
When inside, we visited the Cathedral, had lunch in the main square area, took an interesting tour of the castle and city walls and browsed some of the local shops. Most of the shops were decorated in an old style, the most interesting we found was a large confectionery/sweet store which had wall to wall tooth rotting goodness (and some free samples!).
By the time we finished up in the medieval city, we had just enough time to head to the modern part of Carcassonne to get our train and hotel reservations sorted for our trip to Bordeaux the next day. While in the modern town, we had an Italian inspired meal which was good, but we were a little surprised part way through our meals when a couple of men entered the restaurant. One looked and was dressed normally, but the other was a 6 foot tall man in his 60s who wore a white lace little-bo-peep outfit. I had to suppress my laughter when he began talking to the waiter in high-pitched French.

The next day, after packing and watching some more BBC news, we caught our train to Bordeaux.