Chateau Brametourte

We have made our way to just outside Toulouse, France... the nearest village is Lautrec, in fact. We are living in a 12th century chateau, helping to renovate it. We have been here for about four weeks and it's our last day. Tomorrow we leave for Paris tomorrow, taking a night train from Toulouse.

The chateau is a small, three storey fort built mainly for defense, nothing too fancy, but some arrow slits in the side make it fun to pretend you're fighting off ancient invaders. It is at the bottom of a hill with a woodland on top of it. Next door is a field that was full of dead sunflowers until the day Teagan and I went to have a photoshoot in it and but an hour later a huge truck/machine thing came and mowed them all down, leaving nothing but a barren field. Brametourte (www.brametourte.com), which stands for wailing dove, is owned by an English couple, Paul and Allison. They have been having volunteers like us for about a year now, I think, and when we arrived there were about 6 others. There are now only three others and everyone is clearing out for Christmas as Paul and Allison's family will arrive on the 21st. They have been mostly americans and english, with the exception of an Aussie and a Canuck. There are also two Romanians here who don't really associate with anyone due to the language barrier. There are here on a contract and work 12 hour days, 7 days a week to feed their families at home. It is amusing watching Paul and Allison try to communicate with them, as the Romanians speak a little Spanish, and obviously Romanian, but Spanish is the language Paul and Allison know the most of, which is very little, if any at all. Despite the language gap between them all, everything seems to get done. We sleep in a fort in the temporary kitchen area, all sheets and blankets hanging from the ceiling blocking us off from the public view. We watch a lot of movies and have hardly left the castle, the cold keeping us in hibernation mode not noticing the time go by. It's been a month and we have felt like it's been a few days, nearly all of the grandiose plans we had for passing the time here going undone.

There is a spring on the land where in the days of old, people on the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage would stop and wash their feet. Two yew trees tower over the spring where the lord and lady of Chateau Brametourte are buried under. James, one of the land caretakers who stayed here for about eight months, carved an axe handle out of the yew wood of the lord's tree to have his power behind the axe. The black mountains loom in the distance only peeking out on the occasional clear day all jagged and covered in snow. A small cemetery is just down the road a mere ten minute walk away, right across the road from an old gothic style cathedral.

We made a day trip on bicycle to Castres, the nearest town of a significant size, Lautrec being only a two or three pub town (for those not in the know, I have a habit of measuring the size of small European towns by how many pubs they have, it started in Ireland, where is is, admittedly, most apt). We had heard of a Musee Goya, boasting many Goya paintings, which we found odd, as Goya was a Spanish painter, but upon arrival at the museum, we came to discover that it only has three Goyas, but a cool collection of antique guns; luckily it was a mere 2 euro entrance fee. We hoped to go to the 'Yankee Grill' which is a TexMex restaurant in Castres, but in typical French fasion it only opened at five, leaving us doubly unfulfilled and dishing out torrential rain for our hour bikeride back home to the Chateau. We were left with a bitter taste in our mouths for the out of doors and our thoughts often wander back to that occasion when we think of how long time passes before we realize we hadn't been outside for a few days. Last night we finally got a taste of the Yankee Grill as Paul and Allison like to ceremoniously take volunteers who stay a few weeks there. A little frenchified and not quite as good as what you'd find in our neck of the woods, but it still satisfied our appetites for some Mexican food.

Tonight we head to Toulouse to catch an overnight train to Paris to spend a week there with Teagan's mother, Sandra. Her friend, Ann, a librarian, has had a romanticized view of Paris her whole life. Now in her seventies and never yet been to the place she has fantasized about her whole life, Sandra has insisted upon taking her on a tour of the City of Light. We will spend a week in Paris doing the tourist thing, taking a vacation from our vacation, before Teagan and Sandra head off to Vienna for a cruise up the Danube, leaving me all alone for Christmas. Not to worry, though, I have found a host on the couchsurfing site that are opening their home near Munich for a traditional Bavarian Christmas. I know not what a Bavarian Christmas entails, but it's a place to stay with some cool people, so I'm not wandering the streets of some unknown European city alone on Christmas... though that would be kind of cool. Teagan and I rendezvous back up again in Munich on the 30th to spend New Years there. We will then head back down to Spain, near Malaga on the coast, forget this coldass weather! for a helpxchange host where we may be able to earn a little bit of money to perpetuate our wanderings. See you next year, friends!