Moving to Montpellier

Winnie spent the first few days on the futon, which was her safe place.

Two months ago we adopted our dog Winnie from the SPA Montpellier. We started volunteering at the refuge beginning of August and after spending four of five Sunday afternoons walking some of the 200 dogs in the shelter, we decided to rescue one of the poor little things.

How did we choose Winnie out of the 200 dogs that need a new home, you may ask? I took notice of Winnie because she was a scared little creature. Usually, dogs come to the front of the cage, bark and jump up and down to get noticed. Winnie was hiding in the back of the cage most of the time and only showed her cute face occasionally for a few seconds before disappearing again. When it was time for a little walk, she would tremble and freeze at the sight of the volunteers entering the cage.

Winnie warming up after having a shower. She doesn't like the hairdryer yet, so we can't dry her properly.

When I suggested to Ian to adopt this scared little dog, he was all up for it and after we had finally received our belongings from Canada (after 5 months of waiting), we brought Winnie into our life.

Winnie is about three years old. She has been obviously mistreated as can be seen by the cut-off ear. The theory is that she’s been raised as a hunting dog, never socialised properly as a puppy and when she turned out not to be a good hunting dog, her ear with the identifying tattoo was cut off before abandoning her in a village near Montpellier. After roaming around in the village for a few days, a kind woman picked her up and took her the SPA where she would spend the next three months hiding in a corner.

But hey, let’s forget those dark days, much brighter days have come now. Winnie has made huge progress in the last eight weeks. We’ve gone from a dog that flinched at every noise and had her tail down between her legs to a playful and belly-rub-demanding princess. Winnie loves playing with other dogs and is really good at dealing even with the bully at the local dog park. She’s quite cheeky and demanding and loves rough play.

Winnie and me having a nap on the bean bag.

She also loves cuddles and sleeps in our bed, which we find very sweet. She sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night, rolling onto her back and demanding belly rubs (at that time, the demands are usually denied!). Winnie knows how to sit, down, touch, bedtime, off the bed and in the crate. She’s never been trained before which we noticed by the fact that she just didn’t know how to sit. We had to put her into a sit position to show her what we meant – it was completely unnatural for her at first, but by now she does it frequently even without the command.

Winnie is having her first bath/shower. Ian sat in the bathtub with her in order to calm her down. Once we had applied the shampoo, which she likes licking, she was happy.

The recall is a thing we need to train some more. On our morning walks in nearby Park Meric, we have her off leash so that she can play around with the other dogs. She has days, when she comes quite reliably when being called but there are days where you just make a fool of yourself trying to get her to come to you. We haven’t figured out yet, why we see such big differences from day to day. Hopefully, we’ll get the handle on that soon because the better the recall the more things we can do with her.

We still need to do a lot of work on the things that scare her, like people, trams or anything new. Recently, we’ve encountered lots of people with umbrellas, and that gave her reason to do some of her beagle howling. One very cute thing of the last few days was a close-up encounter with a cat. Winnie usually howls at cats, so they run away. The other day, I calmed her down while being in the dog park and at the same time, I managed to get a cat to come close to us from the other side of the fence. I petted the cat and she was very sweet and trusting. She then put her nose against Winnies nose, who was standing there, trembling and perplexed, not knowing what was going on. I think she would really like to play with that little cat or any other cat for that matter.

By now, we’re in the middle of the Mediterranean summer, which is characterised by singing cicadas and maximum night temperatures that are often higher than the maximum day temperatures in the last place we called home (Victoria, BC). Ian has some mornings when he gets up before 6am in order to get to work before it gets too warm. I, on the other hand, don’t mind the heat that much, which fits my lying-in-bed until 7.30 or 8am tendency perfectly.

In June, we escaped the summer heat by going to the French Alps for a week. I had invited my parents for a week of holiday in Annecy, a lovely medieval town at the most gorgeously-coloured lake you can imagine.

Château de Duingt, Lac d'Annecy

We rented an appartment directly on the lake and I enjoyed swimming in the turquoise-blue water. The week was filled with little hikes in the nearby hills and mountains, a visit to the Gorge du Fier and the obligatory visit to Annecy. Photos of our first holiday in France can be found here.

Some random things

Last week, we decided to sign up for the Modulauto scheme here in Montpellier. This is a car-sharing scheme for which we pay EUR17 per month in order to be able to rent a car from several locations spread all over the town, the closest one being 5mins walk from where we live, for as short as an hour to a week if we like. Most commonly the cars are used for several hours to a day or two. You pay by the hour (from EUR 2,50) and by km (EUR 0,37/km), but don’t have to pay extra for fuel. This is a very handy setup for us, as we currently areno’t planning to buy a car.

La Grotte de Clamouse

On 9 July, we undertook our first Modulauto trip with two girls from Lebanon (a friend of mine and her friend). Since it was another blisteringly hot day, we sought the coolness of one of the many caves here in southern France. We visited La Grotte de Clamouse (16degC – aahhh!), which was very pretty, though Ian, as a former speleologist, didn’t like the poetry part of the guided tour where they displayed a light show accompanied by music in the cave. That’s not the spirit of a pothole!

Pont du Diable et les gorges de l'Hérault

After the cave, we went to Le Pont du Diable, to stay cool while swimming in the Gorge de l’Hérault! It was super lovely to swim along this beautiful gorge. It took us about half an hour before we reached a point with some rapids. We saw two boys coming down the rapids, obviously having fun playing around. After a first failed attempt by Ian trying to make his way up against the strong current, I climbed onto the sunny rocks to watch him giving it another go. By clinging onto the slippery rocks, he managed to make his way all the way up above the rapids. Five minutes later, he came swooshing down. For sure, he didn’t have a PFD, a helmet or shoes like in his good old kayaking days, equipment that is very useful when swimming down a river.

So, his little adventure caused him a bit of pain in the end. He hit a rock hard with one of his toes and dislocated it….ouch! When he rejoined me, he showed me his left foot with his second smallest toe pointing in an awkward direction…ouch again! “Do you think this is normal?”, asked Ian. “Nope, don’t think so!” While swimming back, Ian could feel his toe flopping around. When we got back to the beach, Ian managed to pull his toe back into place, while I just cringed while watching him. Don’t think I could have done it if it had happened to me, but then I’m the more sensible one.

Balcony in Saint Guilhem-le-Désert

After our swimming adventure, we visited Saint Guilhem-le-Désert, one of the ‘most beautiful villages’ in France and a place through which the famous St. Jacob’s way leads. Lara, Taghrid and me went for a stroll through the village, while Ian rested his hurty foot. It was a nice finish to a lovely day (besides the toe accident) and we’re hoping to have more of those from now on with our newly found mobility option.

We spend a lot of time talking about languages here, mostly French (d’oh). There’s a lot to learn, we’ve both started classes, and both foreigners and natives here are happy to talk about interesting expressions, to recommend things to read, and so on.

As well as all this Gallicism, a little trip to Sète a couple of weekends ago provided an amusing opportunity to teach Rita a new expression in English. Sète is kind of an interesting place, though from what people have told me since, I don’t think we saw the most interesting parts (my comments that it mostly looked like some canals with a car park alongside were met with raised eyebrows…). We did spend a bit of time wandering around near the seaside though, and this was where it happened.

Rita had been talking about getting some rope for a while, for doing pull-ups. For this, you need pretty thick rope, and she’d been trying to figure out where she might find some (she’d even been learning French words for ropey things!). Anyway, Sète is a nautical sort of place, and Rita had high hopes of finding herself a high class chandlers’ where she could choose from 25 different kinds of cordage.

Instead, she found a man selling hammocks, plastic star fish and old fishing nets. We interrupted him in his lunch of a big dish of baked ravioli, a bottle of wine (sadly depleted by the time we arrived) and three tins of sardines (!). Rita managed to express to him that she was interested in buying some rope, and he motioned her into his storage space, where he had lots of stuff hanging up. All too thin, sadly, which Rita communicated using the time-honoured method of waving her arms and making a funny face. We went back outside, and Rita’s eyes lit onto a coil of what I really can only call “old rope”. She indicated to Mr. Ravioli that she’d be happy to buy some of this.

Now, I wouldn’t care to cast any kind of aspersions on the small businessmen of southern France, but there was a definite piratical gleam in this chap’s eye as he recognised the potential for commercial outrage! “How much do you want?” he asked. “Oh, just a metre” Rita said. “15 euros!” he said, presumably figuring he’d get bartered down to about five, enough for a couple of bottles of wine. “OK!” says Rita brightly, as I hang my head off to one side.

Five minutes later, following some frightening use of a big butcher knife to cut off a short length of rope, and Rita is proudly walking off with her prize, while Mr. Ravioli is happily contemplating how many sardines he can buy with 15 euros.

So, I was forced to ask Rita if she was at all familiar with the aforementioned phrase. Much jollity (on my part) and linguistic enlightenment (on Rita’s part) ensued.

And now the rope is out on our balcony, because it smells of fish.

Phones

Oh dear, time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana! Can’t believe that our last blog entry was a month ago! I guess our excuse for that is easy to summarise: SMART PHONES! We didn’t have any until now and as soon as we had opened our bank account – well, to be precise – a week after we opened our bank account when we picked up our bank cards, we got ourselves some ‘techy’ toys. Ian got a Google Nexus I and I got myself an HTC Incredible S, both Android phones.

See, this is what I'm talking about ...

Once we got them, we ran through the usual hurdles of actually getting them to work. On the first day after buying them, we went to the shop where we got them from and asked why the 3G network wasn’t working. They told us that we had to wait for 48 hours before it was activated. We didn’t understand why it took 48 hours to activate it, but hey, it’s a new country with new customs and we accepted it. 48 hours later, our 3G networks were still not working, so we walked back to the shop and asked again. Now they told us that the network we had signed up with, Bouygues, had technical problems and that their 3G network was down all over France! They didn’t know when it would be back up again, but they said our phones would start working automatically. More waiting…

Four days after buying the phones, I lost patience and asked one of the PhD students in my lab to please call Bouygues for me to get it sorted out. A gazillion options later on an automated phone system, he reached a person and within 2 minutes, the correct box on my account was ticked and my 3G network was activated. A minute later, it started working! Ha, so much for not having to do anything to activate the account. The same day, Ian called Bouygues as well and reached a woman who was pretty useless for a Help Desk person but after a few desperate minutes of trying to find the parameter setting she tried to describe, he managed to get it activated too! Uff… that was hard work for him.

Apartment

Once we had working phones, we could start looking for a place to live. The first landlady Ian called to ask about viewing her apartment left him lying on the bed with a spinning head. The lady talked and talked and talked… I was sitting there, listening in, trying to figure out what there is to talk about when you just want to go to somebody’s place to look at it. Well, it turns out that that lady is just a very talkative lady, which she recognises herself. It also turns out that she’s now our landlady as we decided to rent her place. It was only the third apartment that we had looked at, the first was squalid, the second quite fancy, but a bit small and the third is ours now. It’s not the prettiest of flats, built in the 70s and not having been renovated since then, but it’s spacious, has some furniture and white goods in it and has two balconies, one north-facing small one and one south-facing big one. We’ll post some pics once we’ve made it a bit homely.

Rita at her new, old-style desk.

One big advantage of renting this place was that the landlady didn’t require use to provide a guarantor, like lots of other places do. A guarantor is a person who is resident in France and will provide you with his last three monthly payslips and his last two income tax declarations. And they should earn at least three times the rent. Well, you can imagine that that’s not an easy thing to ask someone to do for you if you haven’t known anybody longer than for four weeks. We’ve heard of PhD students and post-docs asking their bosses to be their guarantor, which seems rather inappropriate. Maybe people here in France, where academic salaries are much lower than in other countries we’ve lived in, don’t mind that much. Maybe it’s only people who earn lots of money who don’t want to show how much they earn? Don’t know…

Coffee time at a lovely café in the center of Montpellier.

Doctor’s visit

When we signed our contracts at CNRS, the national research organisation, we were told that we had to visit 2 (!) doctors who will attest that ‘we’re fit to work’. We were very perplexed about that, but thought, oh well, maybe they’re just really good about health care here in France and they’ll actually do some proper tests and things to see you have any health issues. The first doctor we had to see was just a general practitioner and Ian chose one that was close to our flat. Well, that turned out to be a complete farce. The doctor was way past retirement age! His office must have looked like the same 50 years ago, with patients’ cards sticking out of open filing cabinets and lots of stuff piled up on his desk. He asked us how old we were and if we had kids, measured our blood pressure, pulse and listened to our heart and lungs – and that was it! Nothing else. That was the ‘attestation’ that we were fit to work! Well, you can imagine what we thought of that!

The hilarious thing about seeing that doctor though was that when he used his stamp to fill out the necessary paper work he pressed down so hard and abruptly that the big glass lamp that was standing on his desk started shaking. He repeated the stamping action four times and everytime Ian and me just looked at that lamp and wondered if it was going to fall over or not.

In the meantime, Ian has visited the second doctor, directly at CNRS. There they asked many more questions, mainly related to lab and field work, and repeated the same checks as doctor number one did. Which made the visit to number one even more useless, if that’s even possible. The only useful thing Ian wanted to get out of either doctor was a medical certificate that almost any sports club requires before you can sign up with them. When Ian asked doctor number 1 about that certificate, the doctor just said, ‘Non’. Nothing else, just ‘non’. He didn’t explain where to go to to get it or what one had to do. The second doctor would have given Ian a certificate that would have allowed him to use the changing facilities at his work place! Yes, you read correctly. If you want to go running in the park close to Ian’s work and you want to get changed and use the showers in the changing facilities, you need a medical certificate! Can’t believe that? We couldn’t either, but it is that way.

First trip into the country side

Weir in Laroque. We sat in one of the cafés to the right and watched canoeists go swimming.

Okay enough ranting for now, we undertook our first trip into the country side around Montpellier last Sunday, 17 April. We took the bus from Montpellier to Laroque, which took about an hour and led us through lots of little villages. For €1.50 per person, that bus is a pretty good deal. Before starting our hike we had coffee and a croissant while watching some people involuntarily swimming in the river Hérault, when trying to canoe down the weir seen in the photo. Since they didn’t seem to be too bothered by the water temperature, I assumed that it wasn’t too cold. We’d like to come back to Laroque to do some gentle kayaking/canoeing too, hopefully with less embarrassing moments in front of the coffee-sipping crowd. The cafes and restaurants were conviently located just above the weir.

Thistle-like flower in the thyme shrub.

Our hike led us through beautiful, shady oak forests. There were tons of colourful butterflies out and about and some pretty wildflowers too. We had lunch in a ‘meadow’ covered by thyme, which tasted great in the avocado and tofu sandwich. Towards the end of the hike, we walked along cliffs high above the river Hérault. After walking down the steep path along the cliffs we passed the entrance to one of the big and beautiful caves in this region. We didn’t go inside, since it’s a bit of a tourist trap, but we’ll probably come back when we’ve got some friends or family visiting.

We made our way down to the village nearby, St. Bauzille de Putois, to chill our feet in the river before cooling our bellies with Leffe and Pastis. Before getting on the bus back, there was a short moment of ‘Oh sh&%’ going on. We were not the only people wanting to take the bus back to Montpellier. With us, about 15 to 20 other people were waiting at the bus stop. When the bus arrived 20mins late it was packed already. I think, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have worried at that moment, but a week earlier, we tried to take the bus to the beach, and there were so many people that the bus just shut its door at some point and left 20 or 30 of us standing at the bus stop. So we didn’t make it to the beach that day. So, clearly, I was wondering if that would happen again. But the opportunity arose to sneak up to the front and since Ian and me had been the first ones at the bus stop, I didn’t feel guilty for getting on the bus first and grabbing some of the few seats left. Everybody was allowed to get on though, even though some people had to stand. So our second experience with taking public transport ended up a bit better than our first one and we’ll definitely give it a go again – especially since we’re currently not planning to get a car.

Herault Gorge.

Les arbres, ils sont mort...

So, we’re making some kind of progress. We have a bank account! We took all the necessary papers along, and the woman at the bank spent what felt like an hour typing our entire life histories into her computer, then she said “Oh, I’ll set this stuff printing and I’ll be back in a minute”, then she took off for a three-course breakfast, a manicure, pedicure and feng-shui consulation, and she still got back before the documents finished printing. We stared at her printer, first laughing nervously as the paper poured out, then just staring in disbelief. Now we know. Now we know where all those Amazonian forests went. Now we know who to blame.

We ended up with what must have been close to 50 pages of stuff, for one simple account opening. After a flurry of signature signing, and a quick talk about when things would arrive and start working (everything in the mail except for the cheque book, which we have to collect in person), we walked out into the sunlight, rather dazed and amazed that we had actually succeeded in completing a simple administrative task in France.

So that’s progress! We’ve been making progress at work too — documents have been handed to the appropriate authorities, computer accounts have been created, even the first tiny green shoots of some actual science have started to sprout!

And along the way, some good food has been eaten, and a certain amount of wine has been drunk.

We have, unfortunately, fallen off the vegan wagon a bit. For me (Ian), the cafeteria at work is an important social nexus, but lacks vegan options. There is a daily vegetarian dish, and this is sometimes OK, but more often involves dairy or eggs. I’ve just decided to roll with that for the moment. Worse is the cheese. Oh lordy. The cheese. There are two cheese stalls in the market where we do our shopping, but there is also a dedicated cheese shop just round the corner from our house, and the rather sweet ladies who work there are like the worst kind of crack dealers. “Just a little sample?” OK, then… And then it’s all over. Today, we ate some extra-vielle Mimolette (the most orange of orangey cheeses the world has every seen, tasting like a slightly less salty Parmesan), a couple of little goat cheeses (one very mild one called a Bouton de culotte and another with hallucinogenic mould on the outside called a Crottin de Chavignol), a Saint Marcellin (very very smelly, very very runny, very very good, apparently first mentioned in history as a result of the young Louis XI being chased by a bear) and today’s cheese shop recommendation, a Soureliette brebis, a creamy semi-hard cheese that somehow manages to taste of spring flowers.

Anyway, suffice it to say that if Satan had had a French cheese shop handy when he was tempting Jesus in the wilderness, we’d all be Zoroastrians now.

Line 2 tram: orange flowers!

As for us and veganism, I know that about half of our friends will be saying “Huh, so what? Are you crazy? You’re in France! Eat! Drink! Be merry! Then eat some more!” and the other half will be saying “Oh noes!”. We’ll definitely have to reassess this in a couple of months. Maybe this is just some sort of French vegan rumspringa (!). We’ll see.

Oh, and there’s wine too. I spent a pleasant little while at the local marchand des vins this morning, talking about climate change, the effects of water stress on vines, the difficult soil textures and climatic conditions of the region as pertaining to viticulture, and other such important matters with Guilhem Dardé, the proprietor of the Mas des Chimères, a vineyard northwest of Montpellier, coincidentally very close to the experimental station run by the group in which I now work. There might have been some small dégustation going on during the conversation, and some bottles may have made their way out of the shop when our conversation had run its natural course. Who can say?

This is one of the greatest things about France. There is this very real connection to the land and the things produced from it, in a very personal sense, that’s lacking in a lot of places. For sure, there are big impersonal supermarkets that you find everywhere else, but small producers are still valued, and people take the time and the effort to seek them out. And it’s a lot of fun — these people are immensely knowledgeable and have a real passion for their craft, and you learn a lot talking to them. (The same goes for restaurants. The average number of tables in a restaurant in Montpellier seems to be about ten. Which, since there are so many hungry French people looking for a meal when dinner time rolls around, means that there are a lot of restaurants…)

What else have we seen? Oh yes. The Poohoover. Montpellier has much less dog shit than Vienna (Dog Shit Capital Of Europe, 1762-2011), but it has quite a bit. The solution? A chap on a motor bike with a specialised vacuum cleaner attachment for sucking up the leavings of the city’s canine population, thus ensuring the sanctity of the pavements and streets of our fair ville for everyone. Very practical. (And I made up the word Poohoover all on my own. I am very proud of myself right now. I might see if the city authorities want to license the idea from me.)

This is how I felt after the first day at work.

So, our first week of work in Montpellier is over. Ian spent the entire week reading science articles as he has no internet connection at work to use with his laptop nor a desktop machine. Actually, that’s not completely correct, his desktop machine is at his desk-to-be, only that that desk is occupied by an exchange student until the end of the month. Until then, Ian is sharing an office with Richard, his second boss and departmental head, who has just left for a two-week trip to Bolivia though. His desk-to-be is in the office with his first boss, Serge. In CEFE, the institute Ian is in, it seems very common that even the most senior researchers have to share offices with students and post-docs.

My situation at UM2 is a bit different. I got a desk immediately in an office shared between PhD students and post-docs (8 people in total), and managed to connect to the wired network on the second day of work. My new computer has arrived and Linux will be installed on it next week. My office hosts various nationalities (Chinese, Italian, Algerian, French and now Austrian) and people are friendly and not too chatty yet – that’s a good thing since I want to get some work done.

On my first day at work, I attended a CoForChange project meeting, which meant listening to talks in French for 7 hours! Uff, my head was spinning afterwards, as my French is very minimal. Even though Ian’s French is much much better, he was tired too from his first day at work, trying to actually have conversations with people and talking about science.

On Tuesday, I had an extravaganza of form-filling. There was a form to be registered with the department, one to sign that I will adhere to the institutional regulations, one to get an access card to the building, one to get a card for the canteen, one to get access to the campus by car and one to get access to the bike shed. When Charly, my supervisor, and me went to the secretaries’ office, both of the secretaries jumped up immediately and frantically pulled out the various forms, leafIets and lists. It was all rather chaotic, but after about half an hour, things settled down, papers were copied, put in envelopes and sent off. It seems like some things have had an effect as the other day a lady from the central administration called me to let me know that I can come and pick up the building access card next Tuesday. Fortunately the lady spoke English, which led to noticeable laughter in her office when she couldn’t find the English word for ‘un et demi’.

UM2 campus with olive trees.

The campus is very green with lots of rather shabby looking buildings (more photos can soon be found here). Nevertheless, the French seem to think the campus should be protected from the public as the entire campus is fenced it, with very infrequent possibilities to enter or exit it. Or maybe it is to keep the students in? I don’t know, but they seem to like their fences as much as their forms.

In one of our last reports we complained about the rainy weather here. Just to give you an idea that we weren’t complaining for nothing there was some serious flooding happening in regions close by and the research station from which Ian is going to use some data got a quarter of its annual precipitation in 4 days! (225mm out of 900mm). But hey, the bad weather has moved on now – apparently it has migrated to Austria now as my Mom complained about 3 days of consecutive rainfall this morning). Whereas here, we’ve finally got the amount of photons we expect to see regularly.

Ian basking in the sun in our favourite café.

Though one wouldn’t know that it was a sunny and mild day based on how Montpellièriens dress. Ian was certainly the only man wearing shorts today. We saw a couple of women wearing skirts without tights though – I guess the French women are tougher than the French men. One way you realise that locals still think is winter is the number men who wear foulards (scarfs). For us, today could have been a cool summer day in Victoria.

In one way, Montpellier is very similar to what Vienna used to be like, namely the number of dog poos on the pavements and streets. One has to constantly watch out in order to avoid those. When I studied in Vienna, I was used to that, but in Bristol and Victoria – and now even in Vienna! – dog owners have to take care of their beloved deposits. Montpellier is far away from that.

Super moon on 19 March 2011.

Tonight was the night of the super moon, which I found amazing, btw, but even that one didn’t help us when walking home from Café Latitude, our favourite café in town, when none of the streetlights were working. Luckily, we managed to escape the squidgy, smelly piles of poo.

Montpellier is also far away from doing anything about recycling. We’ve been told that there is no recycling whatsoever in Montpellier. The reason being that they’ve got a large incinerator plant that produces energy (and heat?) and it needs to be fed. So they want rubbish to burn. Coming from Victoria, where they’ve gone as far as recycling different kinds of plastic separately, it’s heart breaking to throw tins and bottles together with paper and organic waste into the same bin. My green heart is bleeding …

No more hungry Ian and Ritas on a Sunday!

As you may remember, last Sunday we were completely unprepared for the lack of food shopping opportunities and we just about managed to find a small grocery store and a bakery that were open. Tomorrow, we should avoid meeting the same destiny.

The French like their bureaucracy. Ah, no. You misunderstand me. The French really like their bureaucracy. In the way that Barry White loves each and everyone one of you ladies out there in Loverland, the French are shamelessly and dizzily in love with all official documents.

But they’re kind of fickle. No relationship with any official document has much chance of lasting beyond about three months. After that, the poor outmoded, once deeply beloved, piece of official paper is given the flick.

The No. 1 most important piece of documentation to provide here is, after the usual pièce d’identité (a passport does the trick there: it has stamps! and electronic bits! and a photo! perfect!) is the dreaded justificatif de domicile. This is absolutely essential for all manner of daily administrative tasks. It’s a proof that you live where you say you live. Something official. But it needs to be one of a rather small set of official things. A bill from Electricité de France or Gaz de France or France Télécom. (Some prefectures will, rather daringly, accept mobile phone bills, but this is considered a bit déclassé in most places). A tax bill (can’t get more official than that). A receipt for home insurance (that’s a pretty random one). Or title deeds to your house or a rental contract.

So, what do you do if you’ve just arrived in France and are staying in short-term accommodation so you can look for somewhere more permanent? And you want to do something outrageous, like open a French bank account so that you can get paid? Well, you can get yourself an attestation d’hébergement, which is a letter from the landlord for your accommodation promising that you really are staying where you say you are. This has to be accompanied by a photocopy of une pièce d’identité of your landlord, and a valid justificatif de domicile for the landlord (less than 3 months old, of course!). And the form the bank supplies requires everyone involved to provide their date and place of birth, and for the landlord to promise that he will inform the bank of the new address of his tenants if they move.

And the purpose of all this shenaniganising? Not entirely sure, to be honest. Perhaps it’s to keep the French fresh for a revolution or two. Still, things could be worse. At least you don’t need a justificatif de domicile to buy a public transport pass in Montpellier, like it seems you do in Lyons! You do need one to get a library card though. (You think I’m kidding, don’t you? Uh-uh.)

And in case you think it’s just us silly foreigners who have trouble with this, I spent a little bit of time reading some French forums to try to understand how it all works, and they’re just as confused as we are! What’s actually acceptable as a justificatif seems to be an impenetrable mystery to many people: it varies by purpose, by département, perhaps by phase of the moon. Rita is from Austria, and they have their bureaucracy, but even she shakes her head about some of this stuff. I’m sure we’ll get there in the end, but it does make you wonder…

(And in case you’re curious, the wonderful word paperasserie is French for “red tape”. And it contains the word “ass”. What could be more perfect?)

So, where are we again? In the Mediterranean? One wouldn’t have thought so today, with all the rain and wind we were getting and apparently we’ll have to brace ourselves for more for the next 4 days. Fortunately, our main plan for today was to get to know some parts of the city by tram, so it didn’t really matter too much.

Ian and Rita in the rain on Place de la Comedie

We first got monthly tickets for the public transport (EUR 43,-) and then jumped on tram No. 2, which is Rita’s favourite already since it’s orange and is covered in colourful flowers. Since Rita was holding a map in her hands while sitting on the tram, a lady immediately identified us as being tourists. Surprisingly, she started talking English with us and wanted to inform us that the weather was exceptionally bad today — phew! You wouldn’t hear that in Victoria on a rainy day.

Tram No. 2 leads to the suburbs in the northeast of Montpellier and runs through an area that looked like it would be a decent area to live in as it has family-sized houses rather than huge apartment blocks like lots of the other areas do. Once we reached the final stop, we got out, went on to the opposite side’s platform and got on the next tram going back to where we came from.

Once we got back into the centre we changed to tram No. 1, which is blue, and this time we went past the University to the northwest corner of the city, which wasn’t too exciting. Once we got back to the old town, we walked passed by the old university, the Law Faculty and the Faculty of Medicine. All of these buildings are in narrow cobbled streets. We walked through the old town for a while in search for a restaurant that could provide us with some vegan food. We found the Noodle Bar on Rue de Petit St Jean where we had some yummy noodly dishes. The last two years we’ve been spoiled by Victoria’s vegan restaurant scene (Green Cuisine, Lotus Pond, ReBar, Cafe Mole, Cafe Bliss) and we’re pretty certain that we’ll miss those delicious places dearly.

Train in the Old Town of Montpellier

Rita was struggling with her jet lag today and the rainy and windy weather didn’t help to elevate her mood. A coffee helped to wake her up though and by the time we reached what must be the best tea shop in town, she was almost cheerful again. We equipped ourselves with two nice tea mugs and one tea pot all in the yellow to orange colour range and each with a separate tea strainer and about 7 or 8 different kinds of teas. The tea menu listed over 200 different kinds of teas, including Mugicha, a Japanese tea that Ian hadn’t seen outside Japan before. This was certainly not our last visit to this shop. On the way back to our apartment, we encountered the tourist train (see photo) that runs through the narrow streets of the old town.

Fountain in the Antigone district

After a pretty good night’s sleep and a bit of breakfast, we headed out for our first full day in Montpellier. We needed to go to the UM2 campus for Rita to meet with her new boss, Charly, to do some paperwork. We walked to Place de la Comedie to get a tram. Public transport in Montpellier is run by Transports de l’Agglomération de Montpellier (TaM). And “public transport” means quite a bit more than just trams and buses — there’s a short-term bike rental scheme and a short-term car rental scheme as well.

Tram line No. 1 winds around the old town of Montpellier before heading northwest to the Hôpitaux-Facultés area of the city, where, like the name says, you find most of the hospitals and university campuses, as well as government research institutes, the zoo, and a bunch of other fun stuff. Charly had warned Rita that the UM2 campus isn’t too easy to find your way around (all the buildings just have numbers, no names or department listings…), but it wasn’t too bad. We only got lost once we got inside Charly’s building, perhaps because it has six different entrances, many of which don’t connect to each other inside, some of which allow you access to stairwells that don’t go anywhere, and other architectural oddities. The campus buildings aren’t the prettiest in the world, but I’m hoping that that’s just a sign that all the money that the French government spends on research goes to more useful things than shiney buildings. We used to laugh at the university administration in Bristol for their love of expensive showy building projects while people we knew fought for office space in their departments. Things seem different here.

Charly wasn’t in, and we were about an hour early for Rita’s scheduled meeting with him, so we decided to walk over to the CNRS campus to try to find Ian’s new office and boss. It’s only a 5-10 minute walk from one place to the other, which is pretty convenient. We located the offices of CEFE, the institute where Ian is going to work and found the office of Serge Rambal, Ian’s new boss. He was out at lunch, but one of his work experience students (not sure whether that’s a good translation: in French, she’s a stagiaire) was there, and she helped us locate Serge in the cafeteria. We had a quick chat, Ian arranged to come in on Monday morning (though not too early: Serge described himself as “pas très matinal”…), then Serge showed us an even quicker way to walk through the trees on the CNRS campus back to the university. The CNRS campus is pretty green. It’ll be very nice in the summer. Once back at UM2, Rita stayed with Charly to do administrative paperwork, while Ian sat outside and read for a while.

After the paperwork was done, we got a tram back into town, and went wandering. The streets of the old town of Montpellier are all very narrow and windy, and it’s easy to get lost. We just ambled around for a while, until we spotted a Middle Eastern restaurant called L’Autre Sud where we stopped for lunch — houmous, baba ghanoush, tabbouleh, something like imam bayildi, some falafel, fatayer sebanikh (little spinach pastries) and bread, all washed down with mint tea. Very good! We resisted the temptation of the many many delicious looking pastries. This time, at least.

Next on the list of things to do was to find out about mobile phones. As everywhere else, there are a million and one possible plans, hundreds of phones to choose from, and it’s all in French! We’ve got some idea what we want now, but we can’t do anything about it until we’ve opened a French bank account, and we can’t do that until we both have job contracts. One step at a time…

We spent the rest of the afternoon walking around an area of Montpellier with some newer buildings near the river. Surprisingly nice, and pretty pleasant down by the river where we stopped for a coffee outside a café.

Night-time street view.

On the way back to our apartment, we walked through Place de la Comédie, the main square of Montepellier, and saw a big tent containing a bunch of stalls and displays about the Cévennes national park, which lies to the north of Montpellier. We talked to lots of people about lots of different things there, hiking, mountain biking, skiing (there’s a little ski hill just about an hour and a half from Montpellier, which we didn’t know about before), a meteorological observatory up in the hills there, and some other things. Then we went outside and drank some local wine while listening to some musicians playing concertinas and pipes. Very civilised! Serge (who grew up in Montpellier) says that it’s not a very touristy town, as most people head straight for the beaches, but there were lots and lots of people around. Mostly locals, I guess. It seems like a very lively and pleasant place, and I think we’re going to have a lot of fun here. We’ll definitely be spending quite a bit of time in the Cévennes!

A short walk through the night-time streets took us home to dinner and sleep.

Staircase at 23 rue de la Valfère

So, we arrived in Montpellier yesterday afternoon. We had a 6:00 a.m. taxi pickup from Stef’s place, where we stayed for the last couple of days in Victoria (thanks, Stef!), then a short flight to Vancouver. After time for some fried rice for breakfast (!), we took another flight to Montreal, where we were welcomed by deep snow, with more falling. We just had time to walk to the gate for our flight before boarding, but we then sat at the gate for a while waiting for some delayed passengers, then sat for about 15 minutes while the plane got the deluxe deicing treatment — hot water jets all over the wings multiple times, followed by fluorescent green antifreeze sprayed everywhere. All under bright floodlights. I think the Montreal airport people have dealt with a bit of snow before! They had at least five snowploughs rolling up and down the runway between planes, so although the rate of take-offs and landings was definitely reduced from clear conditions, there was no real interruption to service. Pretty impressive, particularly when you think how 5 millimetres of snow is enough to shut down Heathrow and Gatwick completely!

The flight to Paris felt long, but was uneventful. Ian read on his Kindle, Rita watched trashy films. We even had some vaguely edible food. And we were only delayed by about an hour overall.

And then we were back in Europe! The area of Paris airport we ended up in is undergoing renovations, which meant that baggage reclaim was a bit of a bear-pit, but we sorted ourselves out eventually and walked to the SNCF station to get on a TGV to Montpellier. And because it’s France, and it’s not strike season yet, the train ride was fast, efficient and on time. We had to change trains in Valence, but we arrived in Montpellier at the advertised time.

Rue de la Valfère from our window

We tried to get a taxi from the station to our apartment (we had heavy bags — everything we need for 2-3 months until the rest of our stuff arrives), but the taxi driver we spoke to told us it would be quicker to walk! The old town of Montpellier is mostly pedestrianised, or has tram tracks down the middle of the street, or the roads are being dug up for more tram tracks. Anyway, it was only about a mile, and Rita had printed out a map, so we did it on foot, looking like proper tourists with our huge rucksacks on our backs, and our smaller rucksacks on our fronts.

We met Brice Bossy, the guy who owns the apartment we’re renting, and he led us up the winding spiral staircase to our apartment, which is in a building that was constructed in 1795 (that’s older than Canada!). The apartment is pretty nice, very modern despite being in such an old building, and fully furnished so we can survive without any extras. Anyway, we went out to grab a bit of quick food from a supermarket, had some dinner, and fell into bed after a long day and a half.

More tomorrow, where we meet our future colleagues, drink coffee and wine (well hello, France!) and look at lots of cute old stuff. There will be more photos too…