Montpellier

After I visited Sanary-sur-Mer at Alice’s suggestion on Thursday, we embarked for the deuxième fois together, this time to Montpellier in south-central France.

The train ride to Marseille was uneventful, except the part where we accidentally sat down in first class, realized our mistake about thirty seconds later, and then couldn’t find seats together in seconde, except across the aisles.

Once in the Gare Marseille Saint-Charles, where we had about a demi-heure to kill before our train to Montpellier, we took a promenade through the main galerie, admiring the trees growing out of the floor.

Taken April 20, 2009, my first time in this gare.

After much inspection and deliberation we determined they were fake, but before you say, “Well, duh,” you should go to Marseille and look at them for yourself.

When we arrived in Montpellier, we immediately found the Place de la Comédie, a biodiversity fair crawling with little kids, a sympa park, and a free phototography exposition.

The jardin next to the bio fair.

In the Place de la Comédie, fresh off the train!

And then, here’s when it got good.

Alice Wang and I were to go meet our CouchSurfing host at his place of employment, which, from Facebook, we’d gleaned was of a genre that’s…well, let’s just say interdit for children. But still, we weren’t sure if it was a joke or not. After all, who would advertise that on Facebook?

On the way to his shop, called VENUS BOUTIQUE (an innocuous enough name, non?), I was getting more and more EXCITÉE. AND YES, I DO MEAN EXCITÉE. Because when we got to the address and saw what was in the front window display, there was no absolutely NO DOUBT IN OUR MINDS that YES, IT WAS THAT KIND OF STORE.

Mais bon. We had to take it in stride, didn’t we? We went in.

The shop was mercifully empty, and Alice Wang and I expertly kept our composure when introducing ourselves to him behind the counter. He was perfectly sympa, giving us tips on the best places to see in Montpellier, and after dropping off our stuff in a back room until he finished work, Alice Wang and I were on our way.

A perfectly nice aprem transpired after that. Highlights included: a visit to the overwhelmingly large beaux-arts museum; getting lost amongst travel guidebooks in the Librairie Sauraumps; eating a large gaufre we watched come to life from a heaping, fatty doughball; the Greco-Roman neighborhood, complete with replicas of Greek sculptures and a grassy knoll that reminded me of Berkeley; a rooftop view of the city; the Arc de Triomphe and an aqueduct left over from times of yore.

Some photos.

Arc de Triomphe.

The bibliophile.

The evening light was oh-so-photogenic.

Acqueduct.

The Greco-Roman quartier. Does it remind anyone else of Memorial Glade?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Alice says: And I've got proof of the gaufres.

Montpellier

I ate King Cake

Once again I must take time to rave about CouchSurfing. I just attended a monthly meeting of the Toulon CS community, by which I mean I attended a monthly party-gathering. We had galette des rois, and here I will try to explain the tradition without being completely clear on it myself.

Traditionally, you celebrate either on the 6th of January or the first Sunday of the month, I have heard both. But I think in practice you have galette des rois anytime friends are gathered after New Year's and you end up having lots of cake. The teachers already had one in the lounge the other day, and the cantine served it again the next. The cake is more of a pastry, round and flat, filled with frangipane--almond paste goodness. Baked inside is a fève, a type of bean but now often a carved statuette. If you get the slice with the fève, you are crowned the king or queen. And to make sure no one cheats, the youngest child hides under the table and says who each slice goes to, without looking, so it's assez randomly distributed.


As the 22-year-old, I was the youngest in the group, and I had the privilege of crawling under the table to name all these people I had just met. Fun! But it was a great group. I think there is something wonderful about a group of CouchSurfers, because you all value meeting people, experiencing different cultures, and openness in general. The host was a grandmother who grew up in Algeria before the French had to leave, and is packing up in a few days to spend and indefinite amount of time in Morocco. We spent a portion of the evening learning some French sign language from one of the CSers, and it was fun hearing him explain the origin of each sign. It got us talking about gestures in spoken language, regional accents in sign language, and signs that are totally normal in one country that are swear words in others, all really interesting stuff. There were also two surfers who were passing by, one from Australia and the other from New York. They were trying to hitchhike from Barcelona to Venice!


I had such a great time, and I really felt like this is what I want to be doing with my time, discovering the culture, and meeting all sorts of different people.

Lyon: La Fête des Lumières + CouchSurfing

Lyon

This weekend I went to Lyon for the Festival of Lights. Artists do gigantic installation lighting up the entire city and millions of people come from all over the world to attend. It was pretty cool, but the real story here is that I CouchSurfed for the first time.

When I originally heard about CouchSurfing, the reaction I had was similar to the one my mom is probably having now as she reads this. What? Stay in some random stranger's house? I'll be murdered, or worse.

Of course you have to be smart about it; you need to look over people's profiles carefully and if anything seems off at all run away. But there's a good system in place for checking for creepers (it's all reputation-based; hello gigantic Game Theory experiment!) and for the most part the people are good people, who just want to share their stories. And as either a host or a surfer, you get to meet such interesting and different people!

For instance, my host Corinne had another surfer from Estonia of all places, Dmitri, who was studying in Grenoble on an Erasmus grant. Dmitri knew an Australian named Rowan also studying in Grenoble, who came to Lyon with his Italian girlfriend Antoinetta, whom he met while visiting a friend in Paris who was hosting her at the time. We also added to our group another Italian named Alexander, who was surfing with Corinne's friend. Later when I was touring the lights with my friends from Toulon, Dmitri came too so he met my friends Greg and Vanessa. I mean, I was just blown away thinking about how CouchSurfing brings people together, from literally all over the world.

And honestly I felt safer than I do at hostels. It felt like staying with a friend. Corinne took me in last-minute even though she already had a guest, and lives in a really small apartment. She picked me up from the metro station, had bought another mattress so she could host me, and took us all around Lyon. She even rented a bike for me and fed us breakfast! Without her, the native Lyonnaise, we never would have found all the passageways and staircases typical of Vieux Lyon, or gotten the same history. And she was happy to do it! She told me that she prefers hosting when she can give a tour, as opposed to being just a place to crash.

In return, I cooked her a dinner, but she wouldn't even let me wash the dishes, and I definitely don't think I did enough to thank her. The only choice then, is to pay it forward!