Eurotrip Day 9 – Montpellier

The lovely Vero

I must admit that it was pretty sweet to have Uncle Gerry and Aunt Shoko’s apartment.  It’s nice to come home and wake up to an apartment where there is no rush to do anything at all.  I uploaded some photos to Flickr (in fear that we would lose our memory cards) and updated the blog a bit.

Falling out of the tour train!

We then headed out to grab something from the bakery around the corner.  It was a beautiful day (when WASN’T it a beautiful day on our trip?) but unfortunately the bakery was closed on the Monday!  No good!  I also had not brought the map with me so we wandered around for a bit until we realized that it was senseless to keep wandering around simply hoping to find something to eat!  We headed back to the apartment with an empty stomach and quickly packed a day bag to head out to Montpellier and grab a bite to eat.

Vero was wondering how to smuggle this back into Canada

Using Aunt Shoko’s trusty hand drawn map we easily found our way to civilization and stopped in at a bakery where I believe I had nabbed an excellent sandwich and Vero grabbed some croissants to combine with her Nutella to form a delicious concoction (only delicious to Vero and all of Europe!).  When we arrived at the train station, we had missed the train to Montpellier by ten minutes so we had to wait 50 minutes for another train.  We munched on some food and enjoyed the beautiful, yet a little cold, morning.  We also found a train station and mailed out a batch of postcards announcing that we are engaged to be married!  We were excited by the prospect that some of our friends and family would be finding out about the big news via postcard instead of a boring old phone call!  I must admit that we contemplated sending the ones for our parents first, but it took us five days to find a post office that we figured that they would probably get there all at the same time.

Pour Benoit

Arriving in Montpellier around 1PM, we followed the map into the city center.  Montpellier is where Uncle Gerry was living before he moved to Nimes.  Not sure what his motivations for moving were…actually, I believe it may have been the fact that Aunt Shoko got into the University in Nimes now that I think of it.

This must have made a great slip and slide at the time

It was a very nice town but I didn’t see anything particularly special about it.  Was I becoming a snob after touring around Europe for a week?!  Don’t get me wrong, I think it would have been a great place to live.  As a tourist, we felt that we got to see everything we wished to see in an afternoon.

We couldn’t figure out if this was a sundial

We arrived in the city center and toured around the tourist booth for a bit and didn’t find anything interesting going on during the day.

I was quite impressed with the attention to detail!

We decided to take a little train around the town to take in the sights.  It spent a good 45 minutes going through all the side streets and pointing out tourist attractions.  I personally enjoyed doing this as it gave us a taste of the history of Montpellier as well as give us some ideas of what else to look at for the remainder of the day.

Namely a comic book store!  It was interesting to see that France likes to read their comic books in the hardcover band-dessines format (think Tintin) and not the floppy issues that North Americans are used to.  I didn’t see anything that interested me so we went on our merry way over to the Roman aquaduct and enjoyed the sites of Montpellier.

No walking with kids allowed?

With nothing much else to do we decided to take in a film!  We had saw a poster for a french film called “La Guerre des Boutons’ which I have since found out is adapted from a novel from the early 1900s.  It revolves around kids from one village in war with another village.  Seeing that the story takes place in the distant past, it was a tragedy if you ended up being caught by a rival gang and they snipped off the buttons from your shirt!  You would probably get beat by your mother for this as money was tight and they could hardly afford thread, let alone buttons!  We thought the film was quite excellent and I encourage anyone to watch it!  An interesting note is that there was a film trailer for ‘La Nouvelle Guerre des Boutons’ so we assumed that perhaps the one we saw was old and that the sequel was coming out soon enough.  It turns out that BOTH movies were coming out within a week of one another and is based on the EXACT SAME STORY!  The Government of France even helped finance both of them knowing full well they were both in development at the same time.  This is quite odd, however we  are excited to compare the both of them.

Note: The popcorn in Montpellier can either come with salt or sugar!

Salty popcorn of course!

After a nice afternoon/evening with Vero, we headed back to the train station and were hoping to get some Pizza Roma on the way home but it turns out it was closed on Monday as well!  Argh!  Luckily we found a Vietnamese restaurant that we could take out food from.  It was 10PM and we were itching to just relax at home.  With some beer in hand from the grocery store, we had a lovely meal and I stayed up for awhile catching up on news that I had missed for the past week.

All in all, Montpellier did not impress me, however I am sure it is a great place to live!

Some good Asian eats