Montpellier - just for the night

A quiet spot
see all photos »

Montpellier (that evening)

Dodgy start to our fleeting visit.  A word of warning for anyone visiting the city - don't get off the tram anywhere near the train station at night.  It's a pretty scary sort of place and we actually thought of cutting our already brief visit even shorter by getting straight back onto the tram.  We were glad we didn't however as the city is really cool.

It's a city that has a very young feel to it, a large uni and about 18000 new inhabitants a year, combined with an amazing bar/restaurant scene give it a definite buzz.  The city was built in the 1700s with loads of wide open, tree lined boulevards, huge squares packed with diners and it has a really laid back almost tropical feel to it.

The rocket church
see all photos »

We wandered around the town for a bit, visited the Arc de Triumph, an amazing cross, St Peters Cathedral noted for its rockets in place of towers and the Place de la Comedie with its rather bizarrely decorated fountain.

Had a fantastic dinner outside at a great little place and decided to make our way back to our accommodation (20 mins on the tram then a bit of a walk) before it got too late.

Generally it's kind of cool to meet people from our end of the world in far flung places but tonight when we walked into the supermarket to get some water we were embarrassed for Aussies world wide.  A group of 5 relatively large and very loud Aussie girls were standing around the wine section deciding which bottle they were going to select.  The conversation included remarks like 'don't get that pays wine again, that was really crap (pays being the word for country that is on each and every bottle of French wine)' and 'here's a bottle of syrah (pronounced something like siiiiiiiiiiyyyyyyyraaaaaaa) that's really cheap'.  They then proceeded to the checkout where they only wanted to be served at an English speaking checkout and got mad when the checkout girl refused to speak to them in English - nice.