Enjoying Montpellier

We've spent the past few days enjoying all that Montpellier has to offer in terms of food and entertainment. In the Thursday edition of the "Midi Libre", there was a spread on ten places in Montpellier serving tea. One sounded particularly interesting and was just across the street from where Manon and I had organized to get our haircuts on a 2 for 1 offer. B'cosse turned out to be a lovely place, run by a Scotsman from just outside of Aberdeen and his Belgian partner. Lovely tea, scones and chocolates.

And us enjoying the tea, before haircuts.....

And after

We had time that evening, to catch a movie in the our local...."Charlie's country", vostf, which means original version with French subtitles. As we went in, we kind of laughed wondering if the orignal version was in an aboriginal language. Well, lots of it was, so we were reading the French subtitles to understand. Great movie and great activing.

Friday we spied that a jazz show was on in the evening...9:15pm, so I bought tickets online and our day was planned. Walked downtown to see a showing of "Still Alice", which was tremendous, then walked around to find a place to eat. There are so many, it's kind of hard to make a decision. And we'd had a lovely lunch out, so weren't all that hungry. We ended up in a small pizza/pasta restaurant on the Comèdie, having salad and sharing a pizza. Fortunately we put our order in 2 minutes before the end of happy hour, so had 20% off our carafe of wine.

And then to find the JAM, which was the venue for Richie Beriach. Richie is of the generation of Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett. His new band included a drummer and a young woman, Regina, who played a Roland keyboard and a kind of synthesizer, making all sorts of wonderful sounds. The first set was loud, chaotic and truly wonderful. Not the kind of music that you could chat through. You really had to listen and work to enjoy it. The second set was much quieter, with a Bill Evans encore. Truly an enjoyable night. Here is a shot, using my itouch between the heads of the two gentlemen in front of us.

Saturday, we woke to light showers, but walked to the market anyway as it's always great. Manon was delighted to find that when she would find a vendor she thought was wonderful, the vendor recognized me as a regular. Manon and Les spent the afternoon snoozing (Manon) and watching rugby (Les), while I went off to my book club meeting. We were discussing Shirley Jackson's "We have always lived in a castle". She was the author who wrote the short story "The Lottery" in 1948. We had had to read it in grade 10 or 11 and the story has stayed with me still. She writes well, about ordinary stuff, with a very creepy and sometimes violent undertone. Worth rereading. Since it was still raining, we had a quiet dinner at home.

On Sunday, we went to the brocante/flea market near us. It's huge and has everything used you could possibly want, plus lots of stuff that may have 'fallen off a lorry'. Manon and I bought the burner part of a raclette at one stall, six of the little cheese holders at another and a pan that will serve as a lid, at another. Total  cost 6€. Fun? Priceless! We also picked up some baby sleepers for some babies in Paris. We had also organized to join a group from the British Cultural Association (a group of anglophones and those wanting to speak more English) for brunch and a tour in English of the Fabre museum. Brunch was plentiful and the tour, 90 minutes was great. We visited about 10 paintings all together, the painting and painter put into context with other artists and the happenings of the times. Again, such an enjoyable afternoon.

By this time it was 4:45pm or so and Manon and I found a movie we wanted to attend. "La famille Béllier", was in French, so Les went home and we went to a restaurant for a drink to warm us up before the show. Mint tea for Manon and wine for me. And Manon found 20€ on the floor!!! Only 320€ more to go and she will have recovered all the money she lost ;-)