French Fancies

Hello! I'm finally ready to spill the beans about our holiday. If you hover your mouse over the photos it will give you more details(thanks for the tip Lisa). If you want me to email you any of the photos in better quality then let me know!

7th-14th September: Cap D’Agde

We flew from Stansted down to Montpellier, picked up our car (a grey Fiesta, nippier than we thought but not terribly interesting) and headed on down to Cap D’Agde on the south coast of France.
It’s a few hundred kilometres from the Spanish border, nice little resort that the French holiday in, but you rarely come across any other English people (hurrah!).


Our apartment was right in the centre of things and very nice with a good view over the harbour. We spent most of our days pottering around the area or on the beach. Whilst sunbathing one day, we saw a chap who really should have known better than to fall asleep on his back on a beach surrounded by topless ladies…


We ate lots of ice creams. And I mean LOTS of ice creams.
Well, you’ve got to, haven’t you? And Tudor, not content with having learnt most of his French from Del Boy, also decided to drink like Del Boy, as you can see:

I had a fit of hysterics one day when he strolled up to a man in a beach bar and greeted him with the words “Au Revoir Monsieur…” Probably rather cruelly, it took me about an hour to stop laughing.

One thing we noticed is that Cap D’Agde is full of bars boasting terrible TERRIBLE bands who sing their tuneless hearts out for the delight and pleasure of…well, no one as far as I can see. There was one chap who stirred up a huge crowd every night – people were literally 10 deep outside the bar listening to him massacre a bizarre garage/techno version of The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army (yes really, it had to be heard to be believed), whilst wearing a huge pair of trousers. We called him Monsieur Grand Pantalon. However, on our last night we discovered a band who could – God forbid – ACTUALLY PLAY. And they were brilliant. We sat transfixed whilst they played Sultans of Swing, Brothers in Arms (boy, don't they just love Dire Straits over there) and anything they could think of by Sting, which was nice because by some happy coincidence the lead singer sounded just like Sting. Although he looked more like a young Jim Dale.


Here are some photos from when we visited the very pretty Agde, the nearest biggish town and full of typical French narrow alleyways and overgrown ivy on ancient buildings:



We also went to Montpellier, which is the 3rd/4th/5th biggest city in France, according to what you read. What is big anyway? Population or area? Bit of both, peut-être? Anyway, size doesn’t matter, as we are so often told by the men in our lives… We absolutely loved it, it’s a very nice, modern, clean city with lots of fab architecture and some rather swooshy trams. We found out later on that we'd been sitting outside a cafe directly opposite the one where Judy and Nigel, Ellie's parents had been sitting, but we didn't see each other. What a coincidence, Deirdre Chambers!

Could live there, definitely. Ellie’s brother Max has just bought a flat there, apparently. We had lunch outside and, would you give it credence, an accordion player came to stand right next to us. I mean really, bung some onions round his neck and put him in a Breton shirt and we’d have had the full cliché right there…


The next day we got very lost on the way to Judy & Nigel’s house for lunch, thanks to a map which had clearly decided to depict a land of fantasy, instead of the actual French countryside, as some sort of hilarious joke to all tourists trying to get somewhere. Good one guys! When we finally arrived, we had a lovely lunch of bread, smoked salmon, prawns and cheese, followed by a swim in their lovely swimming pool (oh no! Swimming on a full stomach! How did we possibly survive?). A lovely day was had by all.


Later that day, seeing as it was our Anniversary, we went to a restaurant in Marseillan (a small village 15 mins from Cap D’Agde, not to be confused with Marseille, which is a big city 3 hours away!) called Le Chateau du Port.


Judy and Nigel had been going there for 20 years and tipped us off about it. They were right to of course, it was lovely. We discovered the Noilly Prat distillery was just behind it too, so Tudor had one as an aperitif just to be local.


Afterwards I was trying to work out the timer function on my new camera to take a piccie of us when an old man came up and offered to take it for us. We told him it was our fifth anniversary that day and, curiously, he told us (in French) that we only had two more bad years to go, then it would all be alright. Phew, thank goodness for that then!


We also visited Bezier, a large town about half an hour away, which had one of the most breathtaking views we’d seen:

as well as a rather impressive Cathedral with a very big organ.

Our last night in Cap D’Agde nearly didn’t happen. We decided to try a shortcut we hadn’t taken before out of our apartment block, past the swimming pool. We got out and realised that the door to the port (at the bottom of an unlit stairwell) was either locked or wasn’t actually a door at all, so we tried to go back into the building to go out the conventional route. It was then we realised that the door was locked and none of our keys fitted it. We looked for another way in or out of the pool area: none. We were locked on a terrace, able to see the night going on without us, but unable to get near it! Eventually a man came down the stairs inside the building and we banged on the door shouting “Nous sommes bloqué!” and he came let us back in, telling us that the door was locked a that time of night. I said “Nous saison, MAINTENANT”. Which I thought at the time was “we know, NOW”, but in actual fact is ‘we season, NOW’. So he probably thought we were mentalists.

Other than that, the week was taken up with lots of eating and drinking, as is the law on holiday.


14th- 17th September: Marseille

It seems we packed up and left our Cap D’Agde apartment just in time. The season was beginning to end by now and, as if to make a point, the rain came down BIG style on the Tuesday morning we were leaving. We got trapped in a shop and watched as the ceiling of the shop next to us collapsed under the monsoon-style rain and a torrent of water ran down the shelves and through the shop like the Thames. We found our way to a café to sit until we were able to make it back to the car.

We drove via a place called Aigues-Mort, a medieval walled town full of quaint little shops, but it was mostly closed (Off-season? Lunchtime? Couldn’t be bothered?) and still bucketing down with rain so we wolfed down a quick crêpe and headed off again. We made it to Marseille in good time and found the guest house in which were staying, Villa Monticelli. You can see more about it here. We were in the Monticelli room, in case you’re interested. We were let in by a chap called Philippe, whom we wrongly assumed lived there or was perhaps the son of the owners. In fact he was another guest. We were shown round by Colette, one of our hosts, who didn’t speak English but, to my pride, I managed to keep up with most of her French instructions and questions. Later I met another couple who were staying there, Jet and Estelle, who were from a village near Paris and were staying in Marseille for two weeks on holiday. We settled in before heading out to find a restaurant in the centre of town but it was still pouring with rain and we ended up taking a wrong turn, leading us down a narrow road where we were offered drugs. We decided to call it a night and wound our way back to the residential area where we were staying instead. We found a small Chinese restaurant called Le Phenix D’Or, where we had a very pleasant meal.

The next day we breakfasted on the terrace with Jet, Estelle and Philippe, who turned out to be a Belgian man who was in town visiting his young son, Killian, who was also there as the French don’t go to school on Wednesdays.

We also met Jean, Colette’s husband, and a classic example of your basic, suave, charming Frenchman. We all got on very well indeed and had such a nice breakfast that none of us wanted it to end – we kept pouring more and more coffee and eating everything on the table (bread, croissants, pain au chocolat, fruit, yoghurts, home-made jams and honey…) Eventually we hit the town and did a long walk around the ancient buildings of the Vieux Port, up and down the shopping streets and up to Notre Dame de la Garde (big Cathedral on top of a hill, great views) on Le Petit Train. The English commentary was HILARIOUS, obviously a Frenchman trying to make his accent as ‘English’ as possible and as a result ending up as a cross between Prince Charles, Dick Van Dyke and Lloyd Grossman.


Eventually we dragged our wearing feet back to the Villa and went upstairs to write postcards on the terrace. This was very pleasant, until we made our way down at around 8pm to get changed for dinner and found that we had locked ourselves out of the downstairs part of the house where our room - and our key - was. Frantic enquiries to our fellow guests upstairs revealed that a) they didn’t have a key to the downstairs bit because they were staying upstairs b) our hosts had gone out to dinner and c) they weren’t going to be back for hours. Ah.

We were standing downstairs feeling miserable and not believing this had happened to us TWICE, when Jet called down and suggested we call Colette & Jean to find out where they were having dinner and ask if anyone had a spare key. This he did, bless him, but just as he got through to Colette, Tudor shouted up the stairs “I’M IN!”. Turns out he’d looked under all the flower pots, mats and paraphernalia around the front door and had discovered the fuse box just inside the front door, which contained a spare key! My Hero!

The following morning at breakfast we apologised for our incompetence and regaled tales of our adventures to our fellow guests. We had another lovely long breakfast on the terrace, not a cloud in the sky. Philippe suggested that we all meet for an aperitif that evening, which we all thought was a lovely idea so arranged to meet back on the terrace at 7.30pm.

We drove down to a cute little place called Cassis, where we planned to have lunch before driving further down the coast to La Ciotat in order to pick up a boat tour of Les Calanques, the mountainous region surrounding Marseille. As the weather was so beautiful, we thought this was a splendid idea. However, when we got down to La Ciotat, the clouds came rolling in and, just as the boat left harbour, it began to tip down. We stayed out on deck for as long as possible before we were rained off, which Tudor (who hadn’t brought a jacket, silly boy) really really enjoyed as you can see.

The wind got up and the boat rolled, heaved and rocked its way round Les Calanques. We began to feel a bit green. The commentary on the boat was in French and although I was supposed to be translating for Tudor, I had absolutely no idea what it was all about. So, I made up a load of stuff. As you do. I knew they’d used Les Calanques when making a few films but had no idea which ones, so I used this as a basis for my translation. “Oh, that’s interesting,” I began after one announcement, “apparently they used that bit of cliff in one the Star Wars films”, with some degree of authority. After that, I must admit, I got a bit more desperate. “You know that bit in Thelma and Louise when they go over the cliff? They filmed that here”. “Goodness me! Apparently they shot some of Calender Girls in that cave…” “Hmmm. Fascinating. This is where they shot TRON.” I think I got away with it…


We got back to Marseille in time for a quick bath and made our way up to the terrace (making sure we brought our key) to meet Jean, Colette, Jet, Estelle, Philippe and Killian.


They all started on the red wine and Pastis (what do you mean you don’t drink? You actually don’t drink? At all? Are you sure? Je ne comprends pas! I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t drink before etc etc.) and after an hour or two, we all decided that we were having too good a time to go anywhere else so we better get some food out. They asked us if we liked oysters and our admission that we’d never actually tried them was met with astonishment and cries of “we’ll have to change that then”. Oysters and du pain was prepared and Tudor and I were instructed as to how to eat them.

Well.

You know how oysters look really horrible? You know how you look at them and think they LOOK like they’d taste like chewy, salty snot with bits of sand in it but obviously they can’t do or people wouldn’t eat them…

Well, people are very strange.

Tudor and I were very polite, had two each and said that it was an interesting taste, really not too bad actually, mmm, thanks we’re really full now. And then Philippe presented me with the last one. I thought, what the hell, I’ll go for it, and he took a picture of me necking it:


Seconds later my hand flew to my mouth as I thought, to my horror, oh my god, I’m going to be sick on the table, how utterly embarrassing. You will, gentle reader, be glad to know I managed to hold in this most basic of urges but it was a close run thing, I can tell you.

Tudor and I still haven’t tired of marvelling that some people actually seem to LIKE eating those things. Never again…

Oysters aside, the evening was so very very pleasant and we all had such a lovely time that I still get a warm feeling thinking about it. Take a few strangers, bung them together in a Marseille villa and they became a surrogate family…ahhh. We all exchanged email addresses and promised to visit/stay in touch. And do you know what? I think we actually will!

The next morning Jean insisted on getting up very early to prepare us breakfast before we left for the airport. Philippe also joined us, despite that fact that there was no reason for him to get up so early, bless. Since none of us were really morning people, coupled with the fact that we hadn’t got to bed till about 1.30am, it was a quiet affair but very lovely nonetheless. We made it to the airport, dropped off the car and caught the plane home to Gatwick.

Well thanks for reading my tome, hope it's okay an' all. Quite pleased with how it's all worked out with pictures and so on. I reckon I could get some fun out of this blog business!