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Geo: 43.2126, 2.3561
I fell asleep last night to the sounds of cheering and music in the square.
We were out of the hotel by 8:15 and on our way. Virginie gave a talk about the French education system using Anne-Sophie as a student. The only requirement for a child to start school is that he or she be potty trained, so one-third of French kids go to the maternelle (preschool) when they are two years old. Ninety-nine percent are in school by the age of three. However, school is not mandatory until the age of six (until 16).
After preschool, children go to the école primaire for five years. Among other things, they are given 1.5-2 hours for lunch, which consists of good food and includes a real plate and proper cutlery. (Virginie's comment was: "In the U.S., kids bring guns to school but they can't have a real fork!"😉 It used to be that kids this age went to school on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. There was some education reform, and now kids also go to school on Wednesday mornings.
Then Anne-Sophie would move on to le college (middle school) for four years, starting with sixth grade. French school
levels count down instead of up, so the following year Anne-Sophie would be in fifth grade, and so on. (The year after first grade would be the equivalent of senior year in high school, and this is called "la terminale."😉 The marking system in le college only goes up to 20 points; if you earn 18-20 points in a class, you are an A+ student. Points in all your classes are averaged together, and if you get a score of 10 or less, you will likely be made to repeat the entire year.
In the sixth grade, Anne-Sophie will start to learn English, and by eighth grade she will need to also learn a foreign language, probably German or Spanish. If Anne-Sophie wants to play a sport, she will need to join a club, as kids' sports are not linked to schools at all. School is for learning and if she wants to have fun, Anne-Sophie must do it outside of school and on her own time. She will also have a lot of homework, so she mustn't let her extra-curricular activities interfere with her grades.
When she moves on to the high school, or lycée, she will be required
My room at Hotel Montmorency
All that red is a little oppressive.to choose a course of study in her junior year; she will be 16 years old at this point. Does she want to go to college after the lycée, or does she want to attend a vocational school? She'd better know what she wants to do, as this will determine her course of study at the lycée. If she decides she wants to go to college, she can choose to study more literary topics (history, languages, etc.) or more scientific topics (biology, math, chemistry). If she's really in the middle, she can choose economie sociale, which covers a little of both worlds. Once she's chosen, she needs to get really serious about her studies. Tests will mostly be written essays; there isn't much in the way of multiple choice or true/false. And tests will be returned by the teacher in front of the entire class, starting from the lowest mark. Laurent gave us a taste of this the other night after our wine-tasting test. There's a lot of snark and sneering involved; there's no such thing in French schools as "everybody's a winner." If you don't do well, your teacher will let the entire class know.
When Anne-Sophie is
finished with the lycée and ready to graduate, she must sit a national exam called the baccalaureate. It's a weeklong ordeal starting with a four-hour philosophy exam. French media cover the baccalaureate week and keep an eye out for the best students. By this time, it's incredibly difficult to score 18-20 out of 20; kids who do score that high are considered geniuses. This past year, a girl got 21 out of 20 (she had taken some sort of elective classes that gave her extra credit), and Virginie says that for a couple of weeks this girl was in every newspaper, on every newscast, and interviewed on TV several times. Getting a perfect score is a massive achievement. (Anne-Sophie will find out her baccalaureate score (and those of her friends) when the results are posted on a wall at her school. ) Eighty-five percent of kids pass the baccalaureate on the first try (with a score of 10 or above); 15 percent will wait a week and take an oral exam on two subjects that they thought they would do well in, but didn't.
We decided that Anne-Sophie went the science route and passed her baccalaureate with an 11. Now
she's ready for college. Most kids simply go to the university that's closest to them. There are a few colleges that specialize (particularly for political science and journalism) but mostly the colleges are considered equal as far as educational standards. It takes three years to earn a bachelor's degree and another two for a master's. There are no dorms or any Greek system. If Anne-Sophie wants to have fun during her college years, she has to do it on her own time.
And all of this, each level of education, is free. College students must buy their own books and pay a yearly fee of €300, but otherwise it's all free. Amazing.
There wasn't much to see while we were driving along, though we did pass by Toulouse and the Cité de l'Espace, which displays an Ariane rocket. Virginie passed around some LU biscuits. She always has little treats for us! One day it was the Mentchikoffs, another day it was little anise candies; there's been chocolate, more biscuits, and other candies. It's a wonder we're not all waddling around like overweight Labradors.
As we are now in the Languedoc region of France, Virginie taught us a little about the langue
d'oïl and the langue d'oc. "Oïl" was how they used to say "yes" in northern France, and "oc" was how they said "yes" in southern France. François I came along and decided that everyone in France should speak the same language, so he chose the langue d'oïl, and the Oc language died out. (There are about half a million Occitane speakers today. Virginie played us a song by a band from Marseille that's all in Occitane about how cool it is to be from southern France. It sounded like Bob Marley on speed.) "Oïl" eventually morphed into "oui," and became the French that we know (or don't!) today.
Virginie also explained how so many English words came from German and French, particularly animal/food words. For example, Schwein is German for swine, and porc is French for pork. Kuh is German for cow, and boeuf is French for beef. The reason we don't say that we eat swine or cow is because the French court thought it more genteel to not refer to the actual animal.
At this point we were south enough that we started seeing signs for Barcelona -- it was only 391 kilometers away!
We got to the
Canal du Midi around 11:30. This canal was constructed in the 17th century and extends 150 miles from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and was once an important trade route. It took 14 years to build, used over 10,000 workers (including women), and has been protected by UNESCO since 1996. The canal is also lined by 45,000 plane trees, which look pretty but which also reinforce the banks. Unfortunately, the plane trees have a disease that was brought over by the Americans in World War II.
Anyway, we brought our picnic lunches and ate on a barge while we cruised a small portion of the canal. It was warm but super windy, and lunch turned into a test of man vs. nature. Nature nearly won, but we managed to keep all but one napkin from going overboard. Our barge pilot looked like Jack Albertson. We went through a set of locks, and the lockhouse had a dog and a feisty kitten outside. I wanted to get a photo, but I was too busy trying to hold down my lunch!
The barge trip lasted around an hour, and then we were back in the bus heading to Carcassonne. I've wanted to
visit Carcassonne since I read "Labyrinth" back in the mid 2000s. The Languedoc region, in the 10th to 13th centuries, was highly cultural, open-minded, and independent; it was not part of France. This atmosphere attracted the Cathars from eastern Europe. Cathars called themselves the Friends of God; they are also referred to as Albigensians. Cathars were Christians but had several beliefs that were opposite to the Church's teachings (the Church being the Catholic Church): there was no priesthood, no special buildings for prayer, no tithing, and the only sacrament was baptism. They were also vegetarians (because they believed in reincarnation), had no problem with equality between the sexes, and thought that suicide and euthanasia were okay. All of this is obviously miles away from Christian teachings, and people started leaving the Church to follow the Cathar philosophy because they were tired of the priests not practicing what they preached.
Pope Innocent III was
not happy. He was losing tithes! So in 1209 in southern France, Philip Augustus began the Albigensian Crusade to exterminate all the Cathars. The crusade lasted until 1270 and was variously commanded by Louis VIII and Louis IX. The crusade was ultimately successful, in that it exterminated hundreds of thousands of Cathars. One of the first Cathar cities that was taken was Carcassonne, and it became part of France.
The legend of how Carcassonne got its name goes like this: Charlemagne's army was at the gates of the city facing the Saracens. The siege lasted five years. Early in the sixth year, food and water were running out. Lady Carcas of the city took an inventory of all reserves remaining. The villagers brought her a pig and a sack of wheat. She then had the idea to feed the pig with the sack of wheat and then throw it from the highest tower of the city outside the ramparts. Charlemagne and his men, believing that the city was full of food even to the point of wasting pigs fed with wheat, raised the siege. Seeing Charlemagne's army leave the plain in front of the city, Lady Carcas, elated by the success of her stratagem, decided to ring all the bells of the city. One of the men of Charlemagne then exclaimed: "Carcas sonne!" (which means “Carcas rings”😉. Hence the name of the city. Unfortunately, Lady Carcas appears to be fictional, and this legend was written down sometime in the 16th century.
We are staying at Hotel Montmorency at the foot of the old city. A quick walk up a hill took us to the fortress, which is huge and intact. Crossing the drawbridge took us into the inner walls and smack dab into the middle of a few thousand tourists. Virginie walked us along the lists to a different entrance, and things were much quieter there. We had free time to explore, so Joyce, Carrie and I decided to go see the castle at the innermost part of the old city. It's been kept very well, and there were decent explanations. However, right about the time we entered, it started raining, and it was so humid. I had to sit down a couple of times. We were able to walk some of the ramparts, and it was a good time. Joyce went off to shop, so Carrie and I checked out the basilica (next to what used to be the Bishop's Palace but is now a $1,000-per-night hotel). Lovely stained glass and several little chapels all with candles blazing. We were nearly done walking around when five men got up in front of the altar and began to sing. It was beautiful. They were in the middle of the transept, so the sound rose up into the dome above them and rang through the church. They were Russian, apparently. One of them had quite a good falsetto.
We went back to the hotel and rested a bit, and then met the group to walk to dinner an hour later. We ate inside the fortress at La Cotte de Maille, where we were given cassoulet. It was very hot and very hearty. It was also tasty, though I really didn't touch the meat cooked inside. Dessert was caramel profiteroles (yay!), and we also had absinthe. Making the absinthe is quite the show. The chef put a glass with some ice cubes in it on our table. On top of the glass was an implement that looked like a tea strainer only completely flat, and on top of that was a sugar cube. The absinthe was slowly poured over the sugar cube until the glass was one-third full. Then the sugar cube was lit on fire, which gave a lovely blue flame. Meanwhile, the liquid in the glass was turning green. (Nineteenth-century drinkers of absinthe used to refer to the green fairy that would appear once they had drunk enough.) Once the sugar burned out, we were able to try the drink. It tastes a lot like the pastis from yesterday (i.e., like licorice) but much nicer. Possibly because it's 55% alcohol!
I also bought a Kinder egg today (Hi, Yvonne!) and I haven't opened it yet. Let's see what I got inside. It's a ... sheep with a pinwheel! You've gotta love those fun-loving Germans!
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Aunt Marianne
non-member comment
So interesting. Thanks for sharing with us. I saw Carlanna and Jeremy today and was telling her about your trip and so forwarded this day's events on to her.