vendredi 13 juillet
Carcasonne was hot, windy, dusty, fabulous. We caught a 9 a.m. train from Gare St. Roch in Montpellier, and within just over an hour, we were ensconced in the Place Carnot, at a café, fortifying ourselves with lots of coffee and panini (apparently, the street/semi-junk food of choice in France) in order to make the walk up to the old city. 
Carcassonne is proud of its ancient history of outsider-ness, its very embodiment of the Occitaine (from which came the "Aquitaine") against the Gaul, the langue d'oc (Languedoc) of southern France against the langue d'oil of Paris (and therein, the southern "yes"--oc--against the northern "yes"--oui). From that last example, you can probably guess who won the official language war. Of course, the Pope launching the Albigensian crusade in the 13th century to wipe out southern resistance to Parisian rule helped ...
I think that the Occitaine's still a little pissed about that.
From the official site, here's a lot of pictures, and here's a better history than I'll come up with this morning.
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