Bonjour Montpellier

We go up in the morning and went out right away eager to see what is Montpelier about.
We have to walk only a few minutes on a few very narrow streets to get to the main plaza in centre de la Ville; la plaza is a very typical European place – a fountain in the middle, old buildings surounding the plaza and lots of coffee shops facing each other.

The only non European place in this place is McDonald’s, yes there is a McDonald’s right smack in the Centre de la Ville. In Vancouver I will never consider to go to McDonald’s, but here I would have like to go because the coffees cups are much bigger than anywhere else. Mark did not agree with me, as he felt very strongly that his first coffee in France should be in a really French place. So we went to the place right beside McDonald’s, and we ordered coffee and toast. Coffee was the size of the “Mickey Mouse” coffee and the toast was white bread------hmmmm, I was Not happy, but there I sat drinking, in one sip, my coffee and barely munching on the white bread and pissed off with the French!

Then we were off to find a place to live for 2 to 3 months. Back home we figured that this should be an easy job, but it is NOT. We went back and forth to many places, for the last few days we been walking and waking and walking and asking and asking and hoping that we will find something that we both like and also monetarily reasonable. We were thinking that we found a place but the place did not have Internet and that is a MUST have on our list.

I am very surprised that here there are very few Internet cafes. I take for granted that in Vancouver we have Internet everywhere, actually France has a lot to catching up to do with us.

There are 2 Internet cafes in downtown area, it is 2 Euros per hour, and you have to deal with the “unique” French keyboard – why the French have to have a different key board????

Besides our frustration in trying to find a place every single French person that we have been in contact with was extremely Nice. Strangers were more than willing to help with directions, advices and so on.

One day we were at the tram station trying to figure out if we should get on the tram to go and see a place, and his homeless guy, looking like a street bum, dirty and unshaven, started talking to us in very articulate and pleasant English giving us all kind of information. He was perfectly bilingual and spoke very nice and soft. I was so impressed I kept looking at him, and wondering how can such a person became a street homeless guy, wondering of his life story.

These last 2 days were stressful, basically we spent both day trying to find a place to live for next couple of months. I think that we found one today, tomorrow we will go over and try to finalize.

We been eating all our meals at home. We figure if we eat at home we can save lots of money or better yet manage not to spend tons of money. Prices for food in the grocery store is almost same as back home, except that we pay in Euros! Wine is cheap and Mark is enjoying trying to find the cheapest wine. This evening he got a bottle for one Euro. He drank almost everything very content that the 1 Euro wine is not too bad; I think that it wasn’t the best either, but hey we are now living in France (lucky us!) so we have to buy the cheapest wine because we can’t afford any better.

As I am sitting here writing my blog, I am wondering if in fact I was so damn smart to quit my job, leave my big, nice comfortable apartment, and the best city in the world to be in France and travel?

Keep my fingers crossed for tomorrow.