February of Fun France "Facts"
I spent today doing some long-overdue unpacking. And, as I've needed breaks from folding black tank tops or reorganizing my DVD collection, I've been reading thorough the archives of all the late Januaries/early Februaries I've written about in this blog. And, fuck did I used to have a lot to say about not a whole lot of activity. I mean, I knew that I had done that - written in painstaking detail on a daily basis for a year or so (not a month ago, Ryon and I sat in a fast food Mexican restaurant in center city laughing hysterically about this very fact). What I didn't realize was that even after I had become somewhat articulate, discovered spell check, and had stopped writing hour-by-hour accounts of each of my days with additional emotional and/or crazy commentary, I still wrote a lot in the way of LONG, descriptive pieces which could otherwise have been summed up with sentences like, "I went to see my cousin in a play; it was kind of funny." THAT me would have written a three volume novel about the mere act of flying over International waters kind of NEAR France, not to mention the flowery-prose-of-erudite-vocabulary-she-learned-reading-Oscar-Wilde-biographies attack she'd have had once she got here. And while that would certainly be overdoing things in a laughably ridiculous way, having only written 11 posts since I moved here (3 of which are not even ABOUT France) is another kind of ridiculous. So, I've decided that it's time to start another short-lived, semi-regular feature, and as such, I am proclaiming this month the February of Fun France "Facts" (oh, alliteration!). This means that every day this month, I will post at least a sentence or two on something I like/hate about, or something that happens in, or that I have noticed about, or that has happened to me in, or that has hit on me in France. And since, in actuality, the things I write will probably be more impressions than facts, we've placed the "facts" bit in quotation marks. So, here is our first "fact" of February:
This is a photo of the sunset on the side of the highway somewhere outside of Montpellier on 15 September 2007 taken on the night we had to hitchhike home from the beach and then went to a "rave" in a skatepark. The sunset was much more striking, all-consuming than this photo conveys.
This was the day that I went to Montpellier's neighbouring beach for the first (and thus far only) time. We kind of had some difficulty finding it, and by the time we got there, it was kind of late; the sun was already low in the sky, but it was still warm out, and still pretty.
We made a sand face instead of a sandcastle.
And by the time we had set off to go home, we had, unwittingly, already missed the last bus. So, we had no option but to hitchhike back to the city center, which felt kind of apropos after August with the Hitchhiker who had, once upon a time, also lived in Montpellier. We meandered down the highway for a while, immersed in the sunset pictured above. The sunset was so glorious that a young French woman pulled over to take a picture of it; we had a chat with her, and she agreed to drive us as far as she was going: a concert venue that was a fifteen minute walk from the end of the Montpellier tram line. So, she drove, we walked through bramble, and we got on tram, went home, and bought beer. But that very same night, we took the tram back to the end of the line, and walked through the same fields and highway, this time to the skatepark across from the concert hall. And this time, the ground was vibrating with music the whole way there.
There were two DJs, lots of reggae music, and many high, un-bathed French teenagers. I had the Heineken in my bag, which made the the drunkest of my friends.
There was dancing and drinking and babbling and eventually shivering on half-pipes. We started off home at 4:00 am, and had to walk the whole way because the trams don't run all night. The walk was impossibly long.
A friend fed us rations of single peanut M&Ms every five minutes to keep us motivated and alive. It was a very strange night, but probably one of my first good nights in Montpellier; I don't think we were home much before 7:00 am.
This is a photo of the sunset on the side of the highway somewhere outside of Montpellier on 15 September 2007 taken on the night we had to hitchhike home from the beach and then went to a "rave" in a skatepark. The sunset was much more striking, all-consuming than this photo conveys.
This was the day that I went to Montpellier's neighbouring beach for the first (and thus far only) time. We kind of had some difficulty finding it, and by the time we got there, it was kind of late; the sun was already low in the sky, but it was still warm out, and still pretty.
We made a sand face instead of a sandcastle.
And by the time we had set off to go home, we had, unwittingly, already missed the last bus. So, we had no option but to hitchhike back to the city center, which felt kind of apropos after August with the Hitchhiker who had, once upon a time, also lived in Montpellier. We meandered down the highway for a while, immersed in the sunset pictured above. The sunset was so glorious that a young French woman pulled over to take a picture of it; we had a chat with her, and she agreed to drive us as far as she was going: a concert venue that was a fifteen minute walk from the end of the Montpellier tram line. So, she drove, we walked through bramble, and we got on tram, went home, and bought beer. But that very same night, we took the tram back to the end of the line, and walked through the same fields and highway, this time to the skatepark across from the concert hall. And this time, the ground was vibrating with music the whole way there.
There were two DJs, lots of reggae music, and many high, un-bathed French teenagers. I had the Heineken in my bag, which made the the drunkest of my friends.
There was dancing and drinking and babbling and eventually shivering on half-pipes. We started off home at 4:00 am, and had to walk the whole way because the trams don't run all night. The walk was impossibly long.
A friend fed us rations of single peanut M&Ms every five minutes to keep us motivated and alive. It was a very strange night, but probably one of my first good nights in Montpellier; I don't think we were home much before 7:00 am.