Fly-by tour of Montpellier, Avignon, and Marseille

another "pics to come later" episode..., sorry...

After leaving Siurana, Katie had a couple of days to absorb as much French culture as possible while still making it to the airport on time. I had a few days to kill before meeting Matthieu and Gary. We started our French experience by arriving in Montpelier at 11:00pm, and finding a lot of hotels with “Complet” hanging in their windown. The city was beautiful, felt pretty safe and was still alive and exciting, with people kicking a ball around in the city square. Eventually, we walked into a hotel displaying a complet sign and the nice man phoned around until he found us a somewhat small and expensive hotel room, about half an hour's walk away but we were happy to eventually have a roof over our heads. We figured that we had the next day to do a little exploring before heading for Lyon, but then we missed the last train to Lyon, and there were no vacancies at all in Montpelier that night, so we went to nearby Avignon where we arrived in the rain, spent the night in a big, but fairly grotty IBIS hotel room, and paid through the nose for the privilege. The next morning saw us working out how we were to get on to our next destinations, and left us about one hour for exploring..., really not enough time to do anything.

Last night, I had a comfortable bed in a friendly hostel in Marseille, and now I'm on a coach to Moustier, a small village in Verdon The driver's playing Bob Marley and we're speeding along the motorway through the fog.

Montpelier seemed like a pretty cool town, with nice friendly people and at least one really good bakery (we must have spent at leat 15 euro there, and extended our waist lines no end. I can see why Amy would live there. Avignon was cool, but the only area we saw was inhabited by what appeared to be over-monied teenagers/uni students.(but the wall looked cool! Marseille is a big city, and I only saw a very small part of it. no one in the train station seemed to spenk English when i arrived, and the information centre is a 20minute walk (or 40 minute metro ride if you include waiting for the train to arrive), from the station, down by the port, where lots of people have rather a lot of money tied up next to the wharves.

Now I'm going to be jammin, and trying to snooze a little before I reach my destination.