Leaving France.

Friday, Sept 30 Montpellier, France

I am on the train from Montpellier to Barcelona and have three hours to catch up (at least the writing part, no wifi to upload photos).  I have just discovered that I forgot to install Office on my new computer so I am writing this on Notepad.  Never easy to work with. (update, cut and paste seemed to have worked - yay!)

I abruptly ended just as we were arriving in Palavas-les-Flots on the coast.  Our first order of business, as usual, was to find breakfast.  We petite dejeunered along the canal and watched the fishermen and the retirees, the two groups who seem to make up the population in this town.

After we ate and visited the beach, we wandered around a bit.  When all of a sudden we happened upon a market along the promenade.  My no-buying-stuff streak ended at that market.  I bought some little things for Mom and Chris.  Alisma bought something for her mom.

I gotta say, they know how to do a market in France.  Whole tents of olives and fruit, fresh and dried.  The dried fruit looked so amazing we spent 10 euros there.  We bought some clementines and some more cheese and some nougat.  And I bought some mini-sausages in five flavours which I mostly devoured last night.

Then we found the tent with bags and purses.  And believe it or not, it was Alisma who broke and bought one.  I stayed strong.  But I did buy a couple of necklaces, one for me and one for Missy.  Don't tell her, I may keep both.

Clementines

So much dried fruit.  I couldn't decide so I went for 'mixed'.

Soaps made in Montpellier.  

Hmmm, which bag?

Cured meats and cheeses.  My favorite booth

This guy sold me the mini-sausages.
They were literally the best ever!

After we spent a bunch of our money, we sat on the beach for a while and ate clementines.

French fox terrier for Chris

eating clementines, enjoying the view

This one is for Andrea who warned me that the cars in France
are parked like sardines.  The black car is us.  

Did I mention there were flamingos.

We headed back to Montpellier.  We stopped in Sete, which Alisma said she had read is the Venice of the Mediterranean.  I mentioned that Venice is actually on the Mediterranean but I guess this is different.  Anyway, we managed to find the ugly, kind of scary part of Sete.  We found a bench near the dock (by a tall ship) and ate our cheese and bagette from the market.  This time we had a goat cheese and a sheep cheese.  And another clementine. As we were driving out of Sete, we found the nice part but we had to leave.  We had a 4pm drop off for the car.

More cheese for lunch

Our lunch view

Getting the car back to the drop off at the rail station was pretty stressful.  Again, 4pm is rush hour.  Montpellier is a walled city with no cars in the center of town.  And there were so many windy streets that poor Ettienne just kept re-calibrating.  We needed to fill the gas tank but we couldn't find a gas station anywhere so we decided to just take the car in, it was cheaper that paying for an extra day.  We finally found the train station, drove up a ramp the wrong way (twice), found the parkade, made it inside but in the wrong part, had to do a 10 point turn to do a 30 degree turn off the exit ramp.  But we made it.  Mostly on time. Not being ladies of the world, we did not know you just handed your keys to the parking area attendant.  We left the parkade and went into the station to hand back our keys.  I confessed to the lady at the desk that we only left half a tank of gas.  She made that face people make when you say things that are really stupid and costly.  She said they charge over 2 Euro a liter and a 15 euro refilling fee.  Out in the real world, the price is about 1.40.  The nice lady said it was going to cost over 50 Euro for gas.  The car itself for 3 days as only 99 Euro.  Like I have said before, the French are very nice.  Our lady said we could take the car back out and get gas, she even told us where to find a station.  So, that's what we did, even though we had to go through the whole find and enter the parkade experience again.

One last note about the car.  We realize now that there was no way we could have managed without the navigation system even though sometimes Ettienne and Eugenie disagreed with each other.  We would probably still be spinning around that first round-about, trying to figure out which exit to take.  There are so many round-abouts, I can't even begin to tell you, you wouldn't believe me anyway.  Pretty much every intersection.  Some round-abouts had bridges incorporated into them. Some were so huge they had 6 or more exits.   Some were barely there, just a painted red circle in the middle of the street.  I am a pro at round-abouts now.

(Break for lunch.  We bought some stuff before we boarded.  Alisma is having a pizza and I am having a smoked salmon sandwich with a creamy lemon condiment of some sort).  I think we are getting close to the border.

After we finally dropped off the car, we walked into town.  The train station is just on the edge of the centre.  We started in the Place de Comedie, the main plaza.  I think it is named that for the opera house there.  We wandered through endless narrow streets.  The streets are lined with restaurants and cool little shops.  I knew I couldn't buy much, if anything, but that didn't stop my from going into many of the stores.   Each one had such an enticing window display that I was convinced I needed to go into toy shops, kitchen shops, jewelry shops, ceramic shops, knick knack shops.  I did finally break down and buy a new purse (more like a cotton sack with a zipper) in a hippie stoner shop. After ditching my first one in Paris because it was too bulky, I have been trying to make do with a tiny purse that only held my wallet and camera.  I needed more room for water, not to mention dried fruit and mini sausages.

We also visited some of the historical sights, the aquaduct, the Montpellier version of the Arc de Triumph, a garden or two.  Huge crusified Jesus overlooking the town.

Jesus

The Arc de Triumph (#2)

The building holds the huge cistern at the end of
the aquaduct

Aquaduct from right

Aquaduct from left

I was a bit enraptured by the sky as the sun set

At 7 the shops all closed and the restaurants all started to fill up.  We didn't want dinner and it was starting to get dusk-ish so we jumped on the tram and headed back to our hotel - which was locked.  At 8pm on a Friday! and we hadn't brought out pass code because what hotel closes at 8pm on a Friday.  We only had to wait 10 minutes for another guest to use the door but we were worried for a bit.

This morning we took the tram back into to town, had breakfast, wandered around a bit and now here we are, on the train about an hour out of Barcelona.