Today's main activity was a visit to the Musee Fabre, the main art gallery of Montpellier. The building was a palace with lots of huge ornate rooms. The collection was in 2 sections, pre about 1820 and post about 1820. Each section was on several different floors but they didnot connect. The lifts were not working.. So , to look at the paintings chronologically, you started at the ground went up 3 floors ( think old palace, uneven stone steps, about 40 steps between floors. In context, there are 13 steps between each floor in my building in Canberra), then when you got to the top, about 1820, you went all the way down and started up again. I tried hard to be in the right mood, but the first half of the paintings were really dark in colour , lots of nymphs and shepherds doing whatever, people picnicing, or Jesus being put onto the cross or taken down or some other religious figure. Good friday is not a thing here. I was quite taken by 2 portraits side by side. One was by Alexis Belle of Antoine Crozat , about 1715. He was dressed in really fancy clothes, with a supercilious smug expression. Apparently he was the wealthiest man in France at the time - he was a slave trader , taking slaves from Africa to the south of North america. Next to him was his wife, painted by someone else a bit later. She also had fine lace on her, but she had a friendly gentle expression. She was doing her needlework on a frame and had a thimble on a finger. Maybe they lived in separate parts of their palace.
I had lunch afterwards and learnt a lesson.. I sat down at a table at a restaurant without looking at their board , which most places have, indicating what their Plat du jour - dish of the day - was. This is usually a simpler version of something on the menu, or maybe completely different, but always a few Euros cheaper than most of the main dishes. I was given the menu and when she came to take my order I asked her if they had a plat du jour. She said no, but rattled off 2 dishes. One was steak tartar and the other a fish dish , dorade, which my dictionary translates as sea bream. There was already a dorade dish on the menu but i asked for the one she said, not having a clue what else she said about the dish. After she left, I figured that the 2 dishes she rattled off were probably specials which are often nicer, but more expensive, than things on the menu. As it turned out, I was right. But it came with lots of vegetables, so that was good.
Then I came back here and stopped at the little group of shops to by something for my dinner . I was pleased there was a queue in the pastry shop. Gave me a chance to choose.
Notes to self : Continue to look every which way when crossing some of the roads around here that are paved exactly the same as the footpaths and there is nothing to distinguish when the footpath ends and the road begins ie no gutters or height difference and no lines to tell the cars where to go. So the cars, motor bikes and bicycles all go where they like.
WISE debit card , as advertised, gives a better exchange rate than 28 degree card.
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