Montpellier as it really is

 

Having shown here a few pictures of Montpellier France, a lovely medieval French city growing rapidly even as we speak (the fastest growing city in France), I am struck that with all my playful filters and whimsical takes on my own pictures, I maybe haven't fully conveyed what Montpellier plainly looks like. I am tempted to take my simple iphone pictures straight out of the phone and show you to them just as they are.

But then I reconsidered.

I mean, what about all that time I spent converting my pictues into Dr. Seuss illustrations? And honestly speaking, the pleasure I took in Montpellier is more of a cartoon at this point anyway. Vacation and newness, in a car free part of a city where most of it is 500 or more years old, overloads quickly with a kind of ridiculous charm. It takes awhile for a place like Montpellier to not be a kind of dreamworld.

I haven't gotten to that point yet.

Thus today's pictures of Montpellier, most of which you won't have seen yet, presented with a bit of whimsicality.

Tomorrow we'll drift on to darker subjects, but for today, here is all the possible charm I can express of Montpellier France. Even so, it has more than I can convey here.

The tarot reading of our trip to Montpellier

Though I already have recounted, and surely will recount more conventionally the features of our trip to Montpellier, I have created a complete tarot card reading of the trip. And if you have the gift this collection of distilled photographs will surely tell you everything you need to know about it. It will illustrate our conflicts, joys, challenges, and promise of a life in Montpellier. It is a journey through our every trial and triumph.

If you don't have the gift you can just look at my tarot card set of Montpellier to see a bit what Montpellier looked like.

You can also just take these cards and try tossing them into a cap.

They're versatile. 

I am back and I don't hate France!

 

Having turned a bit sour on my Belle Epoque City as a home, we went off to Montpellier for a week to visit our cousin and kick that city's wheels, so to speak. While we were gone I had loaded up clerkmanifesto with snacks for you, which I hope you enjoyed. Sometimes snacks are better than meals! But we are back now to some good, solid home cookin'!

Honestly, I have no idea why I'm talking like this.

But the truth is, we adored Montpellier, not just for its gloriously pedestrianized medeival center, but for its truly kind people and chill atmosphere. Where we live now pretends to be chill more than it actually is chill. Also Montpellier felt like France in a way that the places we've lived in and visited this first half year here didn't entirely. And oh how we liked it.

We liked it so much we might move there.

I will report on developments in the weeks to come.

Also, I have a substantial amount of pictures and a few written things from the time of this trip, so I'll be bringing these to you in the days to come. I took pictures in Montpellier and also experimented with some new and favorite stylistic reinterpretations of them, so hopefully I will be able to convey some of the charms of this stony city, with its little charming squares, festive student population, and wildly adorable sculptures. To give you a taste of our journey today I will give a little sampling of this variety of images of Montpellier. In the days to come I will no doubt present more coherent collections of my souvenir photos.

Across the street from a Thai Restaurant we became fond of:

A section of the enormous cathedral that is connected to one of the oldest medical schools in Europe:

A staircase in the more than 500 year old botanical gardens:

A not Roman, but rather 18th Century Aqueduct, quite grand, that used to supply water to the city. It is a purpose, as you can see with the rising sea levels, that is no longer relevent:

Just a quiet street in the center, which can open up at times, but usually remains peaceful from the lack of cars:

A grand old tree near the Arceaux neighborhood that had students picnicing under it. You will see more tarot cards like this tomorrow:

The small square next to where we stayed in the second half of our visit:

The interior of a Japanese Restaurant we liked, and it definitely looked it:

We come up to date

 

In a fit of precaution, I have prepopulated clerkmanifesto for 12 days ahead of our departure to Montpellier. These last few have employed finding, if not gems from the past, then at least compelling baubles, hopefully. I have written the introductions to these old posts before finding the posts, but I hope to be dazzled by my younger self.

Sometimes I am, and sometimes I am not.

Anyway, with today's post we come back up to date and tomorrow we meet, presumably, my time traveling self, who has now spent some time in Montpellier. Though knowing myself as I do, whether he will have any interest in discussing Montpellier is an open question.

Here then is a final (hopefully) curated visit to clerkmanifesto's past:

One liners

I found a collection of one-liners that struck me as so amusing that I jotted them down on one of the hundreds of scraps of paper I carry in my jean pockets. Then, as there wasn't much else to do with them, I shared them out with various of my co-workers and with an occasional lucky library patron as well.

I started with:

A friend told me I've been acting too much like a flamingo, so I put my foot down.

I like that one even if somehow it's not quite perfect, and I keep wanting to try and edit it. People laughed though.

 No one got this one, and maybe you or I wouldn't either if we were hearing it instead of reading it:

I, for one, like roman numerals.

but either way it's frightfully clever. 

I was also fond of:

Dark humor is like food, not everyone gets it.

which just goes deeper as you think of it.

But there was one of these one-liners that I'd written down and just kind of held onto. There was something a touch uncomfortable about it, and I didn't want to say it. But maybe because of that I ended up having to try it out to see how it felt:

People say I'm condescending, (leaning in) that means I talk down to people.

Perhaps it was just a tiny bit too close to home. One doesn't want people to think 

"Yeah, I can see that." 



Ah well...


They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian;  Well they're not laughing now!

Ocean diving

 

As our mysterious neighbors repeatedly slam some door over and over again for some reasons we simply can't fathom, I withdraw from the mortal world of France, accounts of our resettling, and exotic stories of apartment living to disappear into the history of Clerkmanifesto.

As I have mentioned over the last days, to cover time away from a computer and the possibility of a much extended sojourn to Montpellier and god knows where else, I am pulling up a few historic posts so you can get another look at them. It's like I am diving into the depths of the ocean searching for pearls or lost treasures on the sea floor.

If I don't come up, haul me in by my breathing tube.

Here you go, ten years old and not only does it still apply, but perhaps now more literally as well:

This is called

"The Conundrum"

Sometimes I wander the Internet. I don't know what I'm looking for there. Do you? Well, you. Look who I'm asking this of. You have found it. But I am out there looking for my own clerkmanifesto. Maybe that's what you'll be exiled to do as well, as soon as this one is over for the day.

Amid the festive desolation of this vast Internet I kick the tires and poke around in the weeds. How can something so large be so small? At its best I listen to the music of famous and talented people. At its worst I sink down to the comment sections of machine stamped articles where only the names have been changed. And there my heart is taken from me. My blood is stirred. And wild, angry responses to the careless and misguided comment of strangers flood into my mind.

I roll up my sleeves. I sharpen my pen. And only at the last minute, I remember:

These aren't people. This is the Internet.

Another nibble at history

 

As mentioned yesterday, I am taking a wander through the history of clerkmanifesto, just a random stroll, to bring back up something we might like. In a few days we'll be back up to date with posting here in France, and I am most likely already back home in the Belle Epoque City. But to be safe, as I'll have no computer on my trip, I bring you this chosen relic which I must have liked enough to write and publish at one point, and hopefully also liked so much that I thought you would want to see it again, if you have ever even seen it at all.

Wait here and I'll see what I can find...

Ha, I went to 2018 and this one was the very first one I looked at! How could I resist:

Wolves Return to France

It's a good news/bad news situation as viable wolf populations have returned to France. 

The European Gray Wolf went extinct in France in the thirties, but in the early nineties a pair of Italian wolves crossed the Alps into France. Now there are over 500 wolves in France and they are considered to be "Demographically viable", which means, and I'm just winging it here, they are viable in a demographic way.

The really great thing about this is that there are way too many rabbits in France and everyone is hoping the wolves will eat up some of the rabbits. Also looking like winners in this ecological triumph are the sellers and manufacturers of Grandmotherly disguises, who will be expecting increased business for their line in small, outlying villages.  Of course, the sheep herders of France are not happy about the situation and have even brought their sheep to Paris to express their dismay. 

However, it is not the sheep herders who need to be kept happy...

it's the woodcutters.

Looking for wheat among chaff

Occasionally, when I am looking to keep clerkmanifesto going when I am not available to regularly work on it, and I am prestocking it heavily with posts, I look to my history. With thousands of posts to draw from it is nice to bring out something long forgotten and give it one more chance in the light. I don't honestly know if there are any readers besides me who on occasion drift back to some long past clerkmanifesto era and read through a couple weeks or months of little essays or pictures like they're eating peanuts. But if there are out there among you (or even you yourself!) people who do this, it still seems unlikely we will both be covering the same ground on so sprawling a historical record as is Clerkmanifesto, and no one is likely to be rolling their eyes having just read one of these reposts chosen from the thousands.

My motif when doing this historic posting lately is to be random, often pulling unseen an anniversary post that evenly matches the day of posting, but I have had a change of heart. Why not read back until I find something that speaks to me? Why not look for something I'd specifically like to show you again?

So for the next three days, until I know I will safely be back to post again (as far as anyone can know such a thing!), I will go wandering into clerkmanifesto history, among the vast library days, and find something I like.

And then I'll bring it here and see if I can get it to fly a little farther.