Carcassone, Narrow Streets

(2 photos)
La Cité is very much an active (though medieval) town with banks, stores, homes, schools, restaurants and hotels for tourists and residents alike. La Cité, Carcassone's old town, dates from BC days, so it’s hard to imagine the “new” town of Carcassonne, on the other side of the river, was laid out in the year 1260.

One year, after her summer job in Germany was finished, our daughter Linda and her friend Margit traveled with us for two weeks. As we were walking through the gate of floodlit Carcassonne that night, I noticed the next song in the street musician’s songbook was the hymn, “Amazing Grace.” At the end of my solo with flute accompaniment, and with thunderous applause from the tourists who must have come especially for this performance, Linda tipped the flute player an extra ten francs, and reminded me the applause came after — because? — I had stopped singing.

By July 1995 we had visited this fascinating city four times, and this time it was really crowded. As we have found in so many of the well-known tourist sites, crowds of tourists are about to overwhelm the very thing they come to see.

It will soon be said that Carcassonne is so crowded, no one goes there any more.
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Another narrow street. People must stand in doorways to let the truck pass.