playing catch-ups

I'm in Bologna today. I've covered a bit of territory since I last wrote, so this post will be south of France, and the next one will be Venice, and hopefully somewhere in central Italy I'll be writing about the place I'm actually in.

From Barcelona I went back to the south coast of France to meet up with Macgregor and his partner Anton, who were down from Paris for a few days. We met up in the space-age medieval town of Montpellier. Trams and electric mini-buses zoomed hushly around the town centre. The few cars allowed for residents' use got in and out thanks to remote-operated retractable bollards set into the cobblestones. We were just there to eat and drink and ogle, really. Montpellier's a student town, but not as we know it--there was nobody sharing jugs of warm beer or customising their Cure t-shirts in scruffy cellar bars--all the casually coiffed, tanned young things went gliding back and forth between little tables under big umbrellas, carrying aperitifs and violin cases.

The boys shouted me lots of delicious local food, lots of drinks with heart-shaped swizzle sticks in, and sundry other good things. Thankyou Anton and Macgregor! To recover from our debaucheries we ambled around the medieval university gardens for a few hours. Montpellier's arguing with Genoa as to who has the oldest gardens in Europe, apparently. There were medicinal herb beds and frogs in the ponds and a small observatory. Then we had more drinks with swizzle sticks.

I had thought I'd go straight from there to Venice, where I was due to meet up again with Barcelona Matt. I discovered it would take about 24 hours on the train, rather than the seven or eight I'd anticipated. Moreover, for obscure bureaucratic reasons I wasn't allowed to book a couchette. I was supposed to get on the night train and ask the conductor if there were any beds left. Umm, no. So I stopped for a couple of days at the Cote d'Azur. It turns out these movie stars and media magnates are really onto something--it's gorgeous. It was soothing to be by the sea after so long away from it. Yes, there are pebbles instead of sand at Nice, there are cute little ripples instead of breakers, and there are odd patches of beach cordoned off and planted with corn-straight rows of umbrellas and deck chairs, to rent by the day or for the season or gratis to hotel guests. But there are also familiar things. Kids leaping, writhing piscine in the air, off the ends of piers. Fishing rods by the water's edge, half-attended by men holding beers. People in groups, with guitars and dogs, or alone and peaceful, with books or cigarettes or their thoughts for company. Travelling alone one doesn't often find other solitary people except at beaches and parks. A bit of Nature seems to grant some sort of reprieve from socialising.

I day-tripped to Cannes, which was worth it for the train ride. The road and train tracks are seperated from the sea by a thin strip of sand, and I saw sun bathers dotted along it in ones and twos, flashing past the window like a code I couldn't read. The town itself was a bit manic--the little pockets of beach not claimed by the umbrellas of the five-star hotel enclosures were shared between a few pleb bathers and some parked bulldozers. Europe seems to be almost entirely under construction--whether this is in preparation for High Season or a constant thing, I don't know, but those bulldozers in the sand, with their prim little yellow and black no-entry skirts, were a first for me. So I abandoned the Cannes script, sat in a park next to a billboard-sized photograph of Sharon Stone in diamonds, and tried to toast my pastey legs while reading a book. It was short stories by someone whose name I can't remember--I abandoned the book in Nice--and he had some nice Obs on Human Condition stuff going on, but he used that leaves-in-wind-look-like-shoal-of-fish simile, which was disappointing. And he used the word 'rebarbative' too often.

I also had a moment with one of those eerie self-cleaning toilets. I put in my forty cents and all that, but I freaked out at the hydraulic airlock noise the door made as it was closing, and jumped out again. I had to hold it in all afternoon because people kept directing me back to the hateful things and I couldn't say 'I don't want to drown in disinfectant' in French. Life really does revolve around toilet breaks and clean clothes when you backpack, but I'll spare you the anecdotes.

Oh, oh, oh! I nearly forgot the most amazing place I saw in France. I had to stop over in Marseille for a couple of hours on my way to Nice. I stepped out of the station, which is on a hill looking over the town, and was hit by a blast of excitement and malice I've not met since London. Maybe moreso. Even before the first smelly crazy person asked me for money or the meaning of life--and you can be asked many times in two hours--I could feel the hot, rank breath of the place on my neck. It's very beautiful. Rocky red hills all around, and in the hollow in between, a huge grid of grime-blackened, battered city. I made a little sortie but, mapless and on a time limit, I could only go so far as I could safely backtrack. My backtracking plans were scuttled by a man--yes, a smelly one--who slipped his arm around my waist and tried to steer me toward a group of sketchy characters. Finally, a chance to use my battle French! Mais quest-ce tu veux? Degage! Which worked fine, but then I couldn't walk past him again, so I beat it back to the station by the simplest alternative route I could find. But the place really appealed to me. I'd like to come back and explore it properly, perhaps with a couple of sane locals and/or a bodyguard. It was just so alive, it made the rest of France look like a theme park. Is that why I liked it so much?

Have to catch my train to Florence, I'll tell you about Venice soon.