It was a big wrench leaving Ospedaletti and returning to France again. Something magical there had grabbed both of us and, as we got into our car to drive away, our final memory of our Italian tryst was the beautiful sound of waves crashing against the rocks twenty feet away. So, long before we arrived at our next destination, we were quite convinced that we had to spend more time in La Bella Italia and had already started planning our next trip to Europe!
Alas that was not to be for a while – hopefully in the last quarter of 2018 – and we had to focus our minds on living for three weeks in a stranger’s home, and looking after their beloved cat. Montpellier is a five-hour drive and we arrived there in the early evening darkness, eventually finding a parking space a short walk from the apartment building. We soon discovered that on-street parking is a major problem for Montpellier residents, and the locals were extremely adept at squeezing into the tightest of spaces, using a little gentle bumper contact to assist them as necessary, a technique we approached warily in our lease car!
We dined well that evening at Bistro Alco, with Kevin our host, while his wife Sheila stayed home finishing off some on-line business before their departure the following morning. Our charge, a black house-cat named Mr.D’Arcy, was not overly excited by our arrival and immediately hid under the bed, quite obviously well aware that his “parents” were departing imminently; animals have an uncanny understanding of the meaning of a pile of suitcases by the front door!
The second floor apartment on rue de Barcelone was only a ten-minute walk from Place de la Comédie and yet, surprisingly quiet, which was a relief for my city-living phobia. With about a third of the city’s population being university students, there was always lots of life centred around the many cafes and bars in the old town. The University of Montpellier, officially established in 1289, is one of the oldest in the world and has been a centre of medical excellence from an even earlier date. The city is, of course, very much more than just a university town, but the atmosphere of studious, intellectual, youthful activity pervades many aspects of the life there and made for an agreeable ambience for this worldly pair of travellers. Which was just as well, as with the problem of parking, we were loath to lose our spot any more than necessary and spent much of our stay on Shanks’ pony, exercising my deteriorating knees to the max, but at the same time getting a good feel of the city-dwelling life. Actually this was quite a good experience, residing as we were in a city with so much to see and appreciate.
So it was back to a life of wandering the streets, seeking culture wherever we could, window shopping mindful of the approach of Christmas, and of course, enjoying French café culture yet again. But having said that, our first attempt to partake of same was a failure. On our second or third day, having finally made friends with Mr D’Arcy, we walked up to Place de la Comedie, thinking we would enjoy a brief late morning coffee and watch the world go by awhile, before taking an afternoon drive to the seaside. But our choice of venue was marred by a waiter who seemed to have no idea of time whatsoever, and after waiting more than fifteen minutes for our order to arrive, our patience frayed and, remembering our midday date with the parking meter, we upped sticks and hot-footed it back to rescue our car from imminent clamping or, worse still, being towed.
The nearest seaside in Montpellier entails a fifteen minute drive to Palavas-les-Flots. However we decided to go a few minutes further to the fishing village of Le Grau-du-Roi, the driver not wishing to stop at La Grande Motte, a purpose-built resort from the sixties, full of concrete apartment buildings, the only redeeming feature of which was the avant-garde architecture.
Le Grau-du-Roi was much more traditional, and hence more to our liking. We walked along the seafront, neatly paved with modern mosaics, braving the brisk wintry breeze raising white caps on the bay, until we came to a touching statue of a mother and her child peering into the distance, searching the horizon for their husband/father’s fishing boat; it was yet another reminder of this coast’s strong traditions with seafaring.
A canal passes right through the centre of the village, its banks lined with fishing boats, old and new and various pleasure craft and tour boats; tours into the étangs (lagoons) of the nearby Camargue are popular tourist activities, though not such an attractive proposition in early winter. We stopped awhile at one of the cafes lining the quay on the right bank (that’s the bank on your right as you float downstream!), before a late afternoon drive through La Petite Camargue, where we were happy to see some of the famous pink flamingoes.
Another day we drove to Sète, an interesting town built upon and around a hill, Mont St Clair, that was a separate island until the mid-seventeenth century when Louis XIV decreed that the town and port be built to provide an outlet to the sea for the Canal du Midi. This work included reclaiming land between the north-east corner of the island and the mainland, building canals and bridges, and constructing a long isthmus connecting the southwest corner to the land and effectively creating the sea-water lagoon, Étang deThau. The reclaimed land is where most of the town’s industry is found, and the isthmus has nature reserves and vineyards planted in the sand, the wines from which are said to have a distinct flavour of the sea. We spent an hour or more wandering the paths of the small wooded park that covers the peak of the hill, and enjoying the views. Eventually we drove back down into the port area, and looked around the shops before having our usual afternoon coffee break at a café on Quai de la Résistance, overlooking the fishing boats moored either side of the main Royal Canal.
One more trip to the seaside found us making a return visit to the Camargue, on a glorious, sunny, windless autumn day, stopping first to befriend, and feed with fresh green grass from our side of the fence, one of the handsome white horses for which the Camargue is so famous, before arriving at the quiet little low-key tourist village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, where we hoped to find a place to eat a late lunch. In this we were totally thwarted, as everything closes down at 3pm sharp, so we contented ourselves with admiring the impressive old church that had been built to be as much a place of refuge as a house of religion.
From there we drove back through the Petite Camargue in the late afternoon sunshine, towards the splendid, small, medieval walled town of Aigues-Mortes, hoping, in vain sadly, to see some of the powerful Camarguaise black bulls, bred for the corridas in both France and Spain. This drive included taking the ferry across Le Petit Rhone, on a most unusual ferry that is guided by a cable strung across the river upstream from the boat; a simple effective idea as long as the river is always flowing seawards. It wasn’t clear how they handled an incoming tide!
It was getting dark when we arrived at Aigues-Mortes and we restricted our stay to a walk along the main street, Grande Rue Jean-Jaurès, stopping for a much-needed coffee at Café Express on Place St-Louis, and then succumbing to the temptations at La Cure Gourmande, famous for its sugar cookies, a tasty end to an enjoyable day away from the big city.
With Nîmes being slightly less than an hour’s drive from Montpellier, we arranged to meet my step-sister Selina for lunch one day, and unfortunately, chose a very damp rainy day, prompting us to drive straight to Parking de l’Arènes in the centre of town. We did a bit of shopping before the appointed hour, successfully finding Berenice Nîmes, a milliner we had patronised a couple of years earlier and, naturally, we failed to come away empty-handed . . . either of us this time! We had a good lunch at Ciel de Nîmes, personally waited on by the proprietor, one of Selina’s neighbours; the restaurant is located on the rooftop of the fine new library on one side of Place de la Maison Carré, its ultra-modern architecture being an interesting juxtaposition with the wonderfully preserved Roman temple which gives the square its name. On the drive back to Montpellier we stopped off at Sommières, a medieval fortified village, that I had believed could be a good place to live. This time the grey weather made the place seem a little less desirable, and we contented ourselves watching a huge flock of starlings doing their dramatic flying sculptures, catching sight of a couple of rare coypus along the riverbank, and admiring the graceful passage of a small group of swans which included a black one, another comparative rarity.
We returned to Sommières for a second look a few days later, seeing the town under clear blue skies and bright sunshine. As we were crossing the pedestrian causeway across the river, Le Vidourle, a hot-air balloon arrived, seemingly low on gas as it skimmed the treetops seeking a safe place to land. Nice day as it was, the town still seemed rather gloomy, and somewhat limited in what it offered, so we crossed it off our list of nest sites!
Apart from these few sorties to the countryside, we easily filled our time in Montpellier, strolling around that lively, elegant city. Celine’s niece, Martinka, joined us for one weekend and we enjoyed her young company as we discovered more and more new places.
Antigone is a new neighbourhood built in the early 1980’s, mostly comprising low-income housing (proving that where there’s a socially conscious will, even the less well off in society can live in attractive surroundings) plus public facilities and local shops. Designed by the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill, it is an extraordinary collection of “grand neo-classical structures, enlarging classical motifs such as pediments, entablatures and pilasters to a gigantic scale” [Wikipaedia], and yet complimenting the aging grandeur of much of the town centre.
It is definitely worth taking a couple of hours to stroll around, ending up at the Polygone shopping centre.
Another morning we chose to join a guided tour around the Faculty of Medicin. As we were the only non-Francophones in the group, the French-speaking guide kindly assured us that he would be happy to describe in English anything that we didn’t understand; but when we tried him out on that a couple of times, his English was far more difficult to understand than his French and we reckoned we would do better to rely on our own translations.
The main building is very impressive with a lot of history and the portrait gallery of past professors includes such worthies as Francois Rabelais. However, it was Le Musée d’Anatomie that was perhaps the most memorable part of the tour. Glass cabinets lining the walls of the long hall, displayed an extraordinary collection of bits of bodies that have been preserved as exhibits for the students to study, dating back to the days when surgery was still very much the domain of those known affectionately as “sawbones”.
And nothing was left to the imagination. Veneral disease was rife among students in the nineteenth century and all those stricken were required to make a very realistic scale model of their affected parts for the educational benefit of their colleagues; thus one fairly large case contained well over sixty scarily detailed models of genitalia in various stages of the diseases, which must surely have frightened many a young man away from the joys of casual sexual encounters! However, the display that particularly interested me was a case of dissected knee joints, making me realise just what I was letting myself in for, having committed to bilateral knee replacement surgery upon our return to California.
Two other places well worthy of a visit in this historic city of learning and culture are the beautiful elegant Opera House and La Musee Farbre. The latter includes in its treasures, a fine collection of Dutch and Flemish masterpieces, as well as various French works of art. The museum was practically deserted apart from us and several security guards who seemed to pop up around every corner. We chatted to one, an Englishman in his sixties who seemed to have a somewhat obscure past; he told us that he liked the work there as there was so little violence in art galleries . . . compared to???! Attached to the museum is L’Hôtel de Cabrières-Sabatier d’Espeyran, a lavish nineteenth century mansion, that gives the visitor a good taste of what life was like for the upper classes in those days.
Preparations for the holiday season were well under way by the end of our stay. The Jardin du Champs de Mars was filled with the little huts that are so much a part of Christmas markets everywhere, “Les Hivernales” as they called it in Montpellier, and we spent a couple of evenings supping gluhwein and consuming hot sausages as we perused the many stalls displaying the usual collection of seasonal offerings. A twenty-foot high, brightly illuminated globe, and giant inflated clowns wandering around, added to the festive atmosphere for the delightfully cosmopolitan crowd of revellers of all ages and from all walks of life, that crowded the square. The city also had its own take on the Festival of Lights, Coeur de Ville en Lumières. A dozen or more of the more significant public buildings were used as the backdrop for a series of excellent audio-video presentations that combined musical scores, both modern rock and classical, with graphics that ingeniously used the architectural details, to tell different stories, some historical and some pure fantasy. Each presentation lasted five minutes or more and they were phased so that we had time to stroll from one to the other; it was very impressive.
And, it seemed, no sooner had we arrived than it was time to move on again. Kevin and Sheila were on their way home and we started our own preparations to hit the road again.
Mr.Darcy had been a very easy feline to sit for; he seemed content in his life as a housebound cat, was clean and tidy, and showed no inclination to follow us out into the great outdoors. As long as we fed him regularly and emptied his litter box, his only slight sign of frustration was a tendency to hump his stuffed animals, which was probably more his daily equivalent of an early morning stretch for us mere humans. And I have to say that, with its large balcony and views over the nearby rooftops towards the rising sun, their compact apartment was actually a very easy place to live. Being so close to such a vibrant city centre, I came to understand what attracts people to live like that. However, it didn’t dissuade me from my need to once more feel the freedom of living life in a smaller community with views of sea or countryside, and I looked forward to our next destination, Calella de Palafrugell in the Costa Brava of Spain . . .
PS Writing this over a year later, I am very conscious that the photos do not always do justice to the subject matter. I have told my Facebook friends earlier about my frustrations at having had a catastrophe with our HDD holding our enormous collection of travel pictures. Luckily we recovered perhaps 80% of the files, but the random way the damage affected them has left me without some of our best images. So, my apologies!
Several small boutiques in an area close to the Opera, such as La Boutique Ineska, were displaying some simply beautiful diaphanous silk dresses which looked wonderful when modeled by my long-limbed bride; in another gallery we visited, we were able to see the process of silk screen printing that produced the wonderful patterns of those garments; and in a small shop on rue de Boeuf, Brochier Soieries 1890, La Boutique, we received, from the very accommodating proprietor, a fascinating demonstration of a small version of the Jacquard machine, invented in 1801, that automated the weaving of the gorgeous patterns in silk that we associate with furnishing fabrics and the richer materials used in the aristocratic gowns and cloaks of old.
