Welcome to Quillan!

Yesterday we drove six hours from the Loire Valley to the small town of Quillan in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of southern France. Yes, we’ve made it to our new hideout in the Pyrenees and so far it’s been a, well, livelier sort of culture we’ve encountered.

Our second rental in the Loire Valley was beautiful, with the sort of French countryside charm one can easily melt into. We explored the chateaux in Loches (which Brian decided was “not all that impressive… I’ll stick with my modern apartment”), ate a great deal more wonderful food, watched a cow give birth, saw some spectacular stars at night, had wide-ranging conversations with our lovely downstairs neighbors from England, took longer walks then Brian has ever taken in his life (more than a mile!), discovered how to make a delicious French aperitif for ourselves (blackberry liquor plus sauvignon = delicious!), had many encounters with strange insects, finally began to bicker less while driving, and at last learned that “gazole” is the same as “diesel” in French (which is incredibly helpful considering how many places have gazole written instead of diesel). It was a lovely week and by the end we expressed our near boredom at the ease with which we had learned to navigate the French lifestyle (in under twenty French expressions at that! Our favorite, of course, being “une table pour deux, s’il vous plait”).

Which brings us to our new location for the week: Quillan in the Pyrenees. One of my favorite bands did a song that mentioned the Pyrenees and a man who hide out there, and I remember wondering “where is that strange place?” It wasn’t until a few days ago that I really connected the two ideas into one and got extra excited to visit this region. I imagined the mountains would loom up upon the horizon like mammoth versions of the chateaus and dungeons we’d seen already, but the country turned from flat to hilly halfway through our drive and when our GPS took us off the giant highway we'd followed for much of the drive and onto a long and windy tiny country road I barely noticed the mountains gathering up around us. After following the wild road through one little town after another, we finally arrived in tiny Quillan, with the Aude River running through its town center and large mountains surrounding the valley.

Brian and I both immediately agreed this town has a decidedly different feel from the northern areas of France we’d experienced thus far, though we weren’t quite sure just yet how to express that difference. We parked in the small little courtyard we had been instructed to and walked to the Café de Flueve, where the owner Mike took us to our rental for the week. The owner hooked us up with a two bedroom on the first floor after we told her we needed internet (even though we’d paid for a small studio on the fourth) so we excitedly unpacked in the largest apartment we’ve stayed in yet.

We were eager to explore Quillan (our location is perfect, right in the center of the town within walking distance of the river, restaurants, supermarkets, banks, etc.) and quickly made our way out the door. As we walked by the church we were again struck with the different feel of the town, which we pondered. Is it the architecture? Well, yes, it’s different, certainly with a slight Spanish influence this close to the border. Is it the number of young people nearer our age running around, blasting their awful pop music, and smoking cigarettes on nearly every street? Yes, there’s a fair bit more of that than any previous place we’ve stayed. Then, we rounded a corner to see a woman running to her car yelling loudly and two men clearly engaged in a serious altercation, face-to-face and sounding angrier every second. The seedier looking individual of the two proceeded to turn over his open beer bottle, pour out the remainder of the contents, turn it around in his hand so that the neck was held firmly in his fist, and threaten to hit the other guy in the face with it. The feeling was tense and poor Brian and I, out on our lovely little stroll, were not prepared for such a shocking and near-violent encounter. We of course were unable to understand what the two were fighting about and our path quickly deviated from the area of conflict, but I couldn’t help but think, "Hmmm, well that’s perhaps a part of the different feel." Quillan is a bit less disney-fairytale-like than the Loire Valley, and a bit more, well, there is no better word I can think of than “earthy”. Tonight after we left dinner, a young woman who’d been kicked out of the restaurant we were eating at proceeded to swear at Brian and I quite passionately in French before spitting upon the ground in our direction. We were both bemused by this unexpected and unintelligible tongue-lashing, and I thought that this was rather how I imagined the Pyrenees before I knew anything about it, like a hideout for colorful characters and self-ostracized social outcasts, which the outside world had yet to turn into a tourist haven (though apparently that’s what Quillan intends for its economic future).

Yet don’t think that wild bottle-brandishing men and crazily-cursing women has stopped us from appreciating Quillan. Non! It’s beautiful here and we spent most of today on the awesome rooftop terrace that we are lucky enough to have access to. There are a delightful number of cafes, boulangeries, and restaurants (and an uncanny number of bars) to be found within five minutes of our apartment (like everywhere in France). We have internet, food, coffee, and sunshine (finally!). What more do we need?!