Carcassonne was amazing, to sum it all up. We got there, couldn't find the hotel I'd researched, so we found a park and utilized France's convenient thing called free wifi. Alright, it's not as easy as it sounds. There's a cell phone company in France called SFR. SFR has free wifi in a lot of different places, the only thing about it is that you have to make an SFR log-in. I believe in order to make an SFR log-in you have to have a French bank account. However, other students before us who have gone through the trouble of doing this have passed on their log-ins to all the rest of us so that we can use this free wifi if we need to. (This is especially useful to those in the dorms, they don't have internet at all there.) We sat down in a park and Jennifer used SFR free wifi on her iPad to find the hotel we wanted to stay in.
We dropped our things off at the hotel (wasn't the best hotel in the world but oh well) and the guy at the front desk gave us a map and showed us how to get up to the fortress and castle from where we were. That was where we immediately headed. It wasn't too long of a walk. We got there and before we even got into the little city inside the fortress, we found the outer fortress wall. There's the nice big gap between the inner fortress wall that encloses the city, and the lower outer fortress wall. Both the inner wall and outer wall have walkways along the top and holes for gunners/archers (I'm not sure which it was at the time). We found some old stone steps and climbed up to walk along the outer fortress wall.
I guess the thing I really liked about the fortress at Carcassonne is that it wasn't staged. All the other places we'd visited had been staged to show you certain different aspects of how the people in the castle lived. This place was left raw, as it was. There were no signs all over the place saying "THIS IS THIS." There were no safety ropes keeping you from touching things that were hundreds of years old. Some places where there were enormous holes in the ground had metal doors keeping you out but they looked like they'd already been part of the castle anyways, all the had to do was add a modern lock. The view from those higher walkways was amazing. (I need to find a new adjective...)
After we finally got our heads out of the clouds, we went into the actual city. This place was also very neat. There were tons of little souvenir-type shops, and they had such cool things. I had to stop and go in every single one of them. I'm a little upset, I appear to have lost my really cool picture of the candy shop. I have to admit, I did buy a few souvenirs...
After we got done shopping we explored the area between the outer and inner wall again, and then we headed back down to the actual town... We found a pretty little bridge over the river and sat there as the sun set, just because it was pretty. We went back to our hotel, dropped off our purchases, and then went out to find food. (We actually managed to find another kebab place, those kebabs were better than any others we'd had but I wasn't hungry enough to eat it all. It was very sad.) After we ate, it was dark enough to walk back to the bridges and take pictures of the fortress and castle and footbridge in lights. My pictures didn't turn out the best but it was still a very pretty sight to see. (Also, Jennifer thought I was insane because I was in a good mood and running everywhere we went. She just wanted to walk. Poor Jennifer.)
Our hotel was not the best, but it got the job done and that's all we could ask for, for 45 euros. The room was clean, the toilet was down the hall and we shared it with the other people who had cheap rooms. We had a shower in our room though. Two twin beds, Jennifer's was horribly hard. I guess I made a lucky pick. She didn't really get much sleep. In the morning we went to the Monoprix there -- we don't have one in Pau and Jennifer had never been. We bought waffles and went back to that pretty little bridge and sat with our feet over the water trying to decide what to do. In the end we decided to go home early. We went to the train station and caught a train 6 hours before our scheduled return train.
All in all, it was very nice. I loved Carcassonne. I'm glad we went, even if Jennifer thought it was a little on the expensive side.
I have pictures from Carcassonne already posted, please check the sidebar.
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