First Day Out in Montpellier

Following the advice of Jean-Luc and Anne, we headed out this morning and walked along the St. Clement Aqueduct towards the city center.  When we first rode the bus to the B&B, we thought that we were staying quite far from the city center, but it’s actually only about a twenty minute walk to get to the edge of city center and about another five to get to the Place de la Comedie, Montpellier’s main square.

The Aqueduct led us to the Place Royale du Peyrou, a wide, tree-lined promenade and park, just on the outskirts of city center.  It wasn’t quite as grand as I had imagined when I researched Montpellier while doing our planning, but it was nice and there weren’t too many people around.  We actually started to feel a bit out of place today because it doesn’t seem like there are a lot of tourists in Montpellier and we definitely don’t look like we live here!

At the eastern end of the park we found Montpellier’s Arc de Triomphe, erected in 1691 (before the famous Arc de Triomphe in Paris) to glorify the monarchy and celebrate the achievements of King Louis XIV.  From here we tried to follow a self-guided walking tour from a book that Anne gave us, but the directions were very confusing so we gave up and decided we may as well just wander aimlessly once we got to the Place de la Comedie.

For lunch we tried looking for a restaurant Jean-Luc and Anne had recommended, but when we found the address on the business card they gave us, there was no restaurant there!  There was, however, a restaurant nearby that mainly served moules frites (mussels and fries), so we decided to give that a try.  We got one order of mussels and fries (the menu said that each order has a minimum of one kg of mussels and two kg of mussels just seemed like too much!) and a smoked salmon salad.  The mussels were pretty good but not the best we’ve ever had, but the salad was really, really wonderful – covered in smoked salmon, baby shrimp, octopus, and small mussels and done with a really nice light dressing.

We finished our day by checking out the Jardin des Plantes, France’s first botanical garden which is now maintained by Université Montpellier 1.  Then we took a longer route to walk back to the B&B, trying to find a supermarket of some sort to buy some snack foods and drinks, with no success.  It seems like grocery stores are not as prevalent as fresh markets here, but you can’t buy stuff like bottled water at a fresh market so where do you get it?  We’ll have to figure this out for tomorrow…