Better Lattes than never!

Surreal image under the A709!

May 2018 will go down in the Greyrocks annals as a frantic but joyful month. As a consequence the rate of publication of posts has come to a near halt. Ruth now finds herself filling the gap for part of April! We spent eight days in Lattes:- as usual staying in our favourite mobile home on our favourite campsite. The weather was - perhaps - the best we have ever experienced there, after a soggy start. (Visits are always in Spring or Autumn so susceptible to the other sort!)
Over the winter we had arranged to have a long stay in an apartment nearby central Montpellier, and our regular reader will know that Greyrocks deems it their favourite city. This April we took advantage of several of its facets.

Cycling and Tramming
It is two years since Ruth could ride the bike around the area, so great was the joy when we completed several round trips to Montpellier itself - including a look at the building where we will be staying in October, and around the Port Marianne, where an impressive number of blocks of flats have been completed during the winter. The ducks were on the lake and the swans nesting. Bob saw a mammal  he thought was a beaver causing speculation about the difference between beaver, coypu and otter. Mr Google resolved it. This was a coypu and a bit of a pest! On other days we used the trams extensively to access - for example:

Culture and Politics
With such good weather the cinema was not needed as a refuge, but we still wanted to see at least one V.O. film at the Diagonal, so spent an afternoon watching A Sense of an Ending  (with a French title that is not a direct translation) Bob was the only man in the audience of twenty!

We also took the tram to an outer banlieue to the department's cultural centre to see an exhibition recently transferred from success in Paris which examines the social scientific aspects of racism. There was some English translation, but some challenges in the interactive bits. It was very engaging and predictably distressing!

Out in another ethnically mixed area  La Pleine Lune has undergone some refurbishment and we went to their Sunday "Aperotifunk" session with Neil Conti etc, whom we have seen twice before. They were very late starting, were down a few in the line-up and we needed to leave after just a few numbers, but still worth the journey.

The city has a proud leftist history and we came across two "manifestations" - one on behalf of the Kurds, and the other against Macron's labour reforms.

• Seaside

In the last post Greyrocks explained the zone system for Spring school holidays and that our stay coincided with that of both local and Parisian schools. Combine this fact with the glorious weather meant that the nearby resorts were heaving. we went twice to Palavas and neither occasion managed to have the shellfish lunch we sought, and once to Carnon. This latter involved an interesting journey on a very hot Saturday. We walked to the tram stop nearest to the campsite and boarded a crowded tram. It was clear from the trappings that most people were beach-bound, so when we reached the terminus most went to the bus stop. There were far too many for the capacity but grey hair got us on and one seat. We got of at Carnon rather than travelling on. and that turned out to be a good idea, as the town was en fete! Beside the marina were ranged a dozen different  oversized "table-top" games like shove-ha'penny and Connect 4 all beautifully crafted and free to use. Later a small and bizarre carnival procession passed by. Half the participants were in Argentinian colours, and others were vaguely Brazilian-themed or in random individual fancy costume. We spent hours taking all this in and then sharing an outdoor bar area with the resting marching band. For our return we walked to the tram terminus and hung around near our stop until La Boucherie opened. There we marked our last evening with a delicious cote de boeuf - which also furnished the next day's en route picnic!

And so ended another jolly stay!