Limoges, Bourges

It's funny how dead a French provincial town is on a Sunday. It never ceases to amaze me. We got up, checked out, and walked around town, looking for coffee and some bread to eat in the car, and the streets were all but empty. There was one café where we could have gotten coffee, but we passed it up the first time, and the second time they had no open tables. We found a couple of open patisseries (which seems unusual, but perhaps it's more common now than it used to be) and we bought bread and pastries (pain au chocolat and a tartelette au rhubarbe). We decided to find coffee later – which turned out to be in a rest stop on the way to Limoges. For breakfast in the car we had more pâté with bread, plus cheese (a chèvre), and a little sausage (since we now have a knife). It was very tasty, and left us not very hungry for lunch.

We arrive in Limoges a little before 1pm, and parked on the edge of its very very cute medieval center. It too was dead. The only open restaurants we could find were Morrocan, and cous-cous did not seem like the kind of light lunch we might want. There was one restaurant we saw, but it was a bit fancy and heavy, when all we wanted were something like salads. In the end we stopped in a bar (which serves sandwiches every day but Sunday) and shared a bottle of cider from Brittany. We had come to Limoges to visit the ceramic arts museum, and it closes for lunch, so we had to kill time till two.

The bar closed at two and we headed to the museum, passing a simple brasserie on the way where we could have had a little salad for lunch. Oh well. If we hadn't been in the bar we wouldn't have heard Terence Trent D'Arby and had that little whatever-happened-to-him conversation.

The museum had a little video show about porcelain at the beginning, which was fascinating. It talked about what porcelain is, how it's mixed, and the different ways in which it's thrown or molded into ceramics and then decorated by painting, appliqués, and other techniques. Much of the museum concerns itself with the history of ceramics and shows early Greek and Peruvian pottery, as well as Chinese, Majolica, Delft, etc. But the best part of the museum turns out to be the section (roughly one quarter) devoted to Limoges porcelain, in all its ornate glory. So much has been done with porcelain in Limoges, and the results are really impressive. Things you might not want in your house, because it's not the right style (too ornate, to fancy, for example), you can really appreciate in a museum setting.

We left the museum to drive (in the rain) to Bourges for tonight. On the way we stopped for more coffee and a snack at a rest area. Shopping in the convenience-store section of the shop, we bought some of those paprika-flavored Pringles you can't get in the US, and a pre-packaged duo of salads – one grated carrot, and the other grated celery root. The Pringles were tasty as always, and the salads were remarkably good. (The salads came with a spork! No, I didn't learn how to say "spork" in French.)

We got a rather nice room in Bourges in a hotel called Hotel Christina, and then headed out into the lovely medieval center (similar to Limoges' – lots of half-timbered houses) to find dinner.

We settled on a place called Côtes de Bœuf, which seemed like a nice simple grilled meats place. We started with salads (mine with boiled ham and bleu d'Auvergne, Eric's with lardons and warm crottins de chèvre). Eric's cheese had been grilled on a wood grill and it so impressed me that I changed my order from regular raw steak tartare to "tartare poélé", a house specialty, which is steak tartare grilled very lightly on the outside. It was good but not necessarily better than raw. Mainly it had been made with the sort of cornichon that I don't care for – it tasted too strongly of clove. Eric had a travers de porc caramelisé which was lovely. To drink we had another Bourgueil. We skipped dessert (nothing interesting).

It was pretty early when we left, but we basically just walked around a little more (and looked at the cathedral, which is huge, and where the wind was strong and cold), and then went back to our hotel.

Labels: france, journal

posted by Tony at 11:09 PM