A City to See Mainly for Its Beauty

Tuesday, April 18, 2017--Montpellier, France

Montpellier doesn't have much in the way of tourist attractions to cause a person to plan a trip to here.  There is one museum with great reviews, and a trip into the nearby mountains is a highlight, but mostly it's just a city that is beautiful to see.  Therefore, wandering the old narrow streets, coming across the beautiful squares, making a turn because of a glimpse of an interesting structure, etc., are the main reasons to stop here.

In fact, Montpellier wasn't even on the first itinerary for this trip.  It was added when I realized I had more time to fill before arriving in Bilbao and needed to either stay a longer time at places I planned to stop and/or needed to add an extra stop.  I did both.

Today, I marked the most interesting places to see in the city on a map and headed to them--the Carre Sainte-Anne (a former church filled right now with a very weird art exhibit by Jonathan Meese--see video almost halfway down the page of the link), the Place Royale du Peyrou (with its Arc de Triomphe, its mounted statue of Louis XIV, its monumental-style water tower,  and the Saint-Clement aqueduct), the Botanical Gardens (which are suffering some from the lack of recent rainfall), the fortress-like outside of the Cathedral Saint-Pierre (which supposedly has a much less impressive inside that can be seen only if one shows up there right at 15:00 each day), the Eglise et Quartier Saint-Roch (which is a church where some stop on pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela, but isn't at the present since the church is completely closed for interior restoration), and the Place de la Comedie (which is the main square of the city and includes the Comedie Opera House and the statue/fountain Les 3 Graces).  But far more intriguing along the way were the narrow streets with their small shops, the glimpses down others, the cleanliness and beauty of the neighborhoods, etc.

It is springtime here in southern France.  Fluffs of dandelions are flying in the air constantly.  And after visiting the Botanical Gardens, I developed a stuffy nose, teary eyes, and a tickley throat bad enough for me to cough over and over again.  I had to head back to my apartment to try to clear it all up.

While at the apartment, I finished reading my current book I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson.  It's a young adult novel that has gotten good reviews.  What I especially liked is it shows how the two main characters' minds think.  They are artistically inclined, and their thoughts are nothing like mine would have been at that age.  It helped me see how people can vary in the way they react and reason.  And it had me laughing aloud several times throughout it.  I gave the book about 3 1/2 stars out of 5.