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Published: October 8th 2006
Having had our little episode of panic in Toulouse, we had immediately booked a place to stay in Montpellier on Priceline. We got a relatively good deal and all seemed in order until we got there and couldn’t find the place on the town map in the train station. That’s because it’s WAY out of the tourist section of town in an industrial / business park area with nothing but an unfinished commercial complex around with three restaurants, an ice skating rink, a multi plex and a planetarium (?). Our one saving grace was that this complex, though unfinished, was already the terminal stop for the Montpellier tram. We spent two nights in Montpellier. We arrived on Saturday and visited the commercial complex, but didn’t go into town. Here’s the funny thing. All we’d been reading and hearing told us that Montpellier was this bastion of planning know-how and such a wonderful pedestrian center with trams and walkstreets all over the place. So naturally we chose to spend some time there to check things out.
First thing we saw we nicknamed Le Bloc L’orange because it was, in fact, an unfinished French replica of the Block at Orange (or the
The French - They're just like us...
They park in ginormous parking lots... just like us.grove, or century city etc - but those didn’t translate nearly as well). Complete with seas of parking and a mickyD’s with a “Mc Drive”, big box retail anchors at the other end of the parking area (which, presumably will someday be connected with a sea of shops and boutiques - at the moment under construction) and plenty of teenagers everywhere. Needless to say we were cracking up. Add to that we were staying in the middle of a completely car oriented officepark area with all buildings set way way off the street and huge parking areas behind oleanders to separate anything remotely usable from the sidewalks. Sure the city center was this walkstreet heavy old-urbanist little village (the likes of which third street promenade is a good imitation), but get out of that by a few kilometers, and everyone’s stuck in their Renaults and Peugots… just like us. It made us glad that we booked such a remote hotel or we would have also been fooled into thinking they’d really gotten things right. And really all you have to do is get on their famous tram (which has but one line) and ride it to the end. You get
The French - They're just like us (2) ...
They shop in kitchy commercial complexes ...just like us... to the Odysseum - or as we liked to say, Le Bloc L’Orange.
Anywho the day we set out for Paris, we also stopped into the local cinema to see the Version Originale of Little Miss Sunshine, which we found hilarious. The train to Paris took about 3 hours (high speed was nice because it was shorter but harder on the motion sickness prone, which suddenly I seem to be these days.)
In Paris we saw the Musee D’Orsay and the Arc du Triomphe (forgive my spelling) the only things we’d not yet seen in Paris that we had meant to. We left on October 4th at noon heading for the Far East via the Middle East.
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