France 2015: The Hutes in Montpellier

On Thursday, I took the navette out to the airport to meet Ralph and Pat, who had flown in for a two-week stay with us. (After they're finished here, they head back to Paris for a romantic week in the City of Light before flying home.)

They arrived smiling

We took a cab back to town. Ralph had offered to grab a taxi without my help, but I wasn't at all confident a cabbie could find this place, even though so it's close to the centre. I was right to be concerned. Our guy had no idea where the street was, and didn't even seem to know Place Laissac, the square by the nearby farmer's market (and the name of the market and the attached parking garage, which is sign-posted all over town). He looked it up on his smartphone and found his way, but I still had to direct him to make the last tricky turn. "Is that possible?" he asked when I told him where he had to go. Even if he'd known to make the turn, he couldn't have got down the pedestrian street to our place because it's blocked by bollards. You need a resident's smart card to lower the bollards (which I had with me.) If they'd come on their own, they never would have made it.

The Hutes (for the uninitiated: Pat Hoad + Ralph Lutes = Hutes) seemed in pretty good shape, given that they reported getting hardly any sleep on the plane. After they'd refreshed themselves for a couple of hours, we dragged them out for a first short walk around the historic centre: through Place de la Comédie, up the Esplanade, through the grounds of the Nelson Mandela International Relations centre and, by a winding route, through the Ecusson back to the apartment. We gave them a light dinner, and kept them up until 10:30. They slept - solidly, apparently - until past 9:30 the next morning. Well done Hutes!

Place de la Comédie

After a late-ish start on Friday, we got them out for a longer walk, down to Antigone, and onto the bike path that leads to the sea - the Allée de la Méditerranée. This was part of the route Karen and I took the other day, to Port Marianne. This time, we went off the path and walked into Port Marianne to get a better look at some of the newer buildings, including a bizarre-looking sports and recreation centre, Le Nuage, that looks like it's clad in saran wrap, and an apartment block with lace-like facing, still under construction.

Antigone

Port Marianne

We stopped at one point for a libation at a pretty little restaurant on the artificial lake, and sat outside, which impressed the Hutes, who have just come from minus a million degrees in Ontario. The place seemed kind of desolate to me on this coolish, cloudy day: not many people around, too much open space.

We walked back into the centre by a slightly different route that took us past the impressive black building on the river that I had photographed from the Port Marianne side earlier. Turns out it's the new city hall. Who knew? And to show just how observant Karen and I are, it turns out it's not entirely black either. Some of the facing, as we discovered when the sun shone on it, is actually a striking iridescent purple-y blue.

Le Nuage, Port Marianne

Saturday was our first bike ride. The Hutes are renting from the city-run VeloMagg service. The rate is €0.50 per hour, which is a lot cheaper than renting from a private bike rental place. It's not quite as good a deal as the Valencia service, though, which had a €10-per-week-unlimited-rentals option. The bikes, like the ones in Valencia, are kind of heavy and clunky-looking, but generally work pretty well.

It took Ralph a few tries to get the automated bike station to work. You put in your credit card, give it your birth date and a mobile number, and it spits out a slip with an ID code (and sends it to the mobile number as well). The ID code is good for seven days. To rent a bike, you punch it in to the control panel on the bike, and the system automatically debits your account when you return the bike.

We rode through Antigone and out again along the Allée de la Méditerranée, this time as far as Lattes, which is probably about half the distance to the sea. Port Ariane, a riverside boating community off the Lez River, with canals, an artificial lake and pretty pastel-painted apartment blocks, looks very attractive. (Gail and Jim, you'd love it.)

Port Ariane

At Lattes, we tried to find another path that supposedly circles back into the city by a different route. The city-provided bike map shows it intersecting with the Allée at Lattes. The map lies. We could not find the right path. We ended up riding on an unmarked gravel track on a berm across farmland. At one point, I could see ahead of us a pony-tailed dude sitting cross-legged on some kind of concrete structure in the middle of a vineyard. I thought he was meditating. When we got up to him, I could see he was actually talking on his blasted cell phone. Bzzzt! We didn't know for sure where this path would lead us, but as we surmised (hoped), it intersected with the Allée, at the new bridge being built over the Lez for the A9 extension.

After a very late lunch, Pat and I sallied out briefly in search of oats at a health food store not too far from the apartment. Oats here, unlike at home, are not a staple, they're a specialty item. Some super markets have Quaker quick oats, but for the real thing, you have to go to a health food store. (We have a very good one right across the street, but they had run out). We stopped on the way at a toy store I'd recently spotted on the next street over, another very attractive shop with lovely stuff. The French obviously enjoy indulging their kids. (The new health food store did have our oats, but we paid through the nose for them.)

Near apartment

Late in the afternoon, we all went out again and walked through the Ecusson in search of the really cool toy store in the centre that Karen and Caitlin and I had gone into - and that Karen and Shelley and I had so much trouble finding again. Pat is on the look-out for things to take back for her grandchildren. With Shelley, we never found it. This time, we did. The attic, we discovered on this visit, has a museum with antique toys. It's altogether a very cool place.

Antique marionette

On Sunday morning, we got out relatively early and walked down to the market on Avenue Samuel de Champlain by Antigone. It was pretty much as we experienced it with Shelley the week before: very crowded, lovely produce and artisanal foods, but very expensive. We did buy some garlic and some Lunel apples (a new-to-us variety, apparently French - almost, but not quite, as nice as Pink Ladies, much less expensive).

In the afternoon, we wandered around the historic centre some more, and up to Place Royale de Peyrou. Our idea was to end up at the Fabre Museum. Like some other museums and galleries around here, it's free entry every first Monday of the month.

Place Royale de Peyrou

When we got to the museum, Karen and I went directly to the fourth floor where the late 19th through 21st century stuff is housed. (Karen was determined she wasn't going to look at any more religious art, she said.) I mostly re-looked at stuff I'd seen when we were here with Caitlin, but I did discover a new, quite extensive, suite of rooms showing work by Pierre Soulages, a mid-20th century abstract expressionist. Soulages is known as "the painter of black" because a lot of his work features only black, usually trowelled-on expanses of it. I didn't hate it, and it's beautifully presented at the Fabre, but it didn't do a lot for me.

Musée Fabre, Pierre Soulages

I also found a new exhibit, opened this day, of much more modest representational works by Henri de Maistre, a Languedocian artist of the mid-20th century, known mainly for his sacred art. These were secular works donated to the museum by his family. He had lived here in the late 1930s and early 1940s. I liked them because they were mainly streetscapes done around Montpellier, most quite charming, including one of the cathedral taken from from a park where I had taken a picture the week before.

Musée Fabre, Henri de Maistre

My latest shot of the cathedral - same vantage point

Monday, forecast to be a lovely day (high teens, mostly sunny), we decided to make our first big bike trip down to the sea. We set out before noon, and the riding was fairly easy to Palavas-les-Flots, the nearest seaside town, about 12 km away. Along the way, we stopped a few times to try and get pictures of the pink flamingos that dotted the lagoon we were passing. Palavas turned out to be a not-terribly-nice beach town - one short rung up from Grand Bend. But it was good to see the sea, even if it had grown overcast and windy by this point.

Palavas-les-Flots

We stopped and had lunch at an outdoor restaurant near the town pier. It served pretty basic food: paninis, grilled meats, a Spanish tortilla (which I had), salads and quite decent frites. The food was generally okay, although Karen complained that her salad was mostly iceberg lettuce and the dressing too much flavoured with Dijon mustard. The prices were quite reasonable for France: €8 for my Tortilla with frites and salad, €1.50 for a glass of wine.

The ride back was into the wind, which took away much of the enjoyment. We were pretty tired by the time we got back to the city. The round trip was 36km, which is nothing to a real cyclist, but felt fairly major to us.

Today, we were at a bit of a loss what to do. It was going to be another beautiful day - sunny, high teens - so we wanted to be outdoors. We looked at a bunch of possibilities, including renting a car and going out of town. In the end, we decided to take a tram out to the outskirts, to a place called Hautes de Massanes that looked like it had some green space to walk in. The tram ride was about 20 or 25 minutes, and took us by lots of university facilities. The town is lousy with universities and colleges. The place we got off was all residential, with what looked like mixed-housing apartment blocks, and middle-middle class semi-detached houses.

Hautes de Massane

The green space was quite impressive for a not-very-affluent part of town, with a pretty little artificial lake, overlooked by a massive apartment complex. There were a few joggers out, but we pretty much had the place to ourselves. We spent an hour or so walking around, then trammed back to the centre the way we'd come.

Grandma goes rock climbing, Hautes de Massanes

After lunch, we walked up to the Jardins des Plantes. We spent a little more time than we had when Caitlin was here. It's a lovely spot, very tranquil - or would be if not for the nearby road construction sounds. We managed to sneak into the green house with the desert plant displays. It was open because there was a guided tour group there. Turns out you can only get in if you book a group tour, which you can do on the Web. The very friendly guide let us stay until the group was leaving and explained, in English, the rules.

Jardins des Plantes

We took the Hutes to the cathedral next, with which I think they were duly impressed. I was more impressed this time myself. The first time I thought it was a pretty generic Gothic cathedral - other than the outside architecture with its conical towers, which is stunning. After we'd looked inside, we walked up to the park from which de Maistre had done his picture back in 1941 - and took some more pictures of our own.