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Greetings from Montpellier, if, like us, this is a city you would find hard to place on a map it is a few miles inland from the south coast of France half way between Marseilles and the Spanish border. Why are we here? Having booked a boat on the Canal du Midi I then looked at how to get there, after many searches of all the usual suspects (Ryanair, Easyjet, Flybe, BA etc) the best option was to fly to Montpellier or Toulouse and catch a train, Bristol to Montpellier with Easyjet had the best timings so Montpellier it is.
And what a great find. It is a lovely city, very few cars, nice open squares and some seriously good museums. It would be ideal for a short break, it was only two and a half hours from take off to sitting in the main square drinking beer watching some excellent acrobats; the small airport is a 15 minute taxi ride from the centre so with hand luggage you are through in no time at all.  The picture above shows the acrobats being helped by Mikey who is 3 years old, he was mimicking them in the crowd so they brought him on stage!

We happened to time our visit with an Arts Festival run between June and late August and are now tired out having had a full of day of culture.
This morning we did the contemporary art museum which was mostly video art. This normally leaves me cold but one sequence was brilliant, a line of cars being driven through a city in Spain with huge pictures of “Villains” from the Franco era on the roofs but displayed upside down. So a regal procession through the city, the clever bit was that at the end the film was shown upside down (so the pictures were the right way round) which confused my little the brain and was very effective (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QllF0mwJe_I). One other street artist was famous for selling snowballs from a stall in New York, it did not say how many he sold.

After lunch we went back in time to the Musée Fabre which has a seriously good collection of art from the Renaissance to the present day. Our favourites were the Bruegels and paintings in the same Flemish style by a chap called David Teniers (1610 – 1690). They both favour slightly comedic subjects such as raucous behaviour in taverns, in one picture of an army getting ready for battle there was a dog pooping, perhaps he got bored painting the serious stuff or the person who commissioned the picture did not pay up. 

After a couple of hours we were galleried out and had to have a beer / ice cream whilst people watching. After a nice rest in our hotel we will put on our glad rags and hit the city, tomorrow we head off south on the train and hopefully collect our boat.

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