Nîmes/Avignon/Montpellier/Arles, France

I've been quite busy on these French trains recently. You can get special offers as low as €1 for a single fare if you look hard enough. Also there's a French app called BlaBlaCar for car ride-sharing (as opposed to car ride-hailing) which can get you from place to place cheaply if you're travelling flexibly and solo, which I always am.  

Anyway, I have four places to report from:

• Nîmes is where I've been staying and it has a remarkably well-preserved Roman amphitheatre, at which Metallica filmed a feature-length concert movie in 2009.
• Arles is chiefly famous these days because Vincent Van Gogh lived there. There's a signposted walk that takes you round some of the scenes he painted.
• Avignon was where one of the Popes lived, back in the days when there were two Popes. (This has nothing to do with the 2019 film "The Two Popes". See here for details.)
• Montpellier, well, I can't think of anything to make your eyebrows go up. But it's very nice.

Wandering around places like these, or their equivalents in Spain or Italy, makes me feel a bit bashful about just how much wilful ugliness we put up with in our towns and cities in the UK. I know it's not fair to compare everywhere with Seville or Florence, but even so, it sometimes feels like even the most obscure and run-down continental towns have nicer architecture and more greenery and less litter than almost anywhere back in Blighty. 

In my own home town there's been a lot of redevelopment recently, and it's very welcome, but must it always be limited to glass & steel & concrete? Couldn't it involve water or grass or trees? And must 'regeneration' always mean just adding another street full of vape shops and bookmakers? 

It must however be said that France isn't immune to municipal ugliness. In Paris, the modernist area of La Défense is like some kind of huge dystopian sci-fi fantasy; basically it's Milton Keynes on steroids. Also, our beer is better & cheaper than theirs. So on the whole it's looking like a draw. Until the World Cup, at least.

Place de la République, Arles

Alyscamps, Arles

A sidestreet in Avignon. Painter at centre, painting.

Palace of the Popes, Avignon

In Montpellier:
an apartment building where balconies are taken very seriously indeed.

Hôtel de Région Occitanie, Montpellier

Place de la Comédie, Montpellier

Nîmes
L-R: Roman amphitheatre, Court of Appeal, and Pradier fountain

Les Jardins de la Fontaine, Nîmes

Edd vs Food #167
Chicken supreme at Le Bistrot de Tatie Agnès, Nîmes

Grenoble, France

Before arriving in Grenoble I checked the local weather forecast, and all it told me was: 'Moderate Avalanche Warning'. Thanks guys.

When my first Spain trip began in January 2017, I was already past forty, but it was the first time that I'd ever gone to sunnier climes during winter. Straight away I realised that going to sunnier climes during winter was an absolute no-brainer. Nothing lifts the mood like feeling the sun on your face. This is one reason why, on this trip, I've been heading south as fast as the TGV will take me.

That said, Grenoble is a fair way above sea level and it's been pretty chilly. Snow-capped Alps loom at the end of every street. And one inevitable sacrifice when travelling in winter is that the photos are never quite as good as the views. But I'm here for the memories, not the photos. Also, everything is much more pleasant when you avoid the high-season crowds.

While here I had one properly sunny day and I devoted it to exploring a small town called Vizille, a half-hour bus ride to the south. (People from Vizille are called Vizillois. This is the kind of detailed local knowledge that you never get until you're researching your travel blog on Wikipedia.) See pictures below. It's nice to get out of the big cities and I will try to do more of this in the weeks to come, even if I have to hire a left-hand-drive car in which to do it.

Grenoble is one of five French communes that were honoured by De Gaulle for their particularly active part in the Resistance during WW2. Back home in the UK, while we rightly revere the memories of the Blitz Spirit and the Battle of Britain, it's important to remember that it takes a whole new level of spirit to keep fighting back when the enemy is literally knocking at your front door. 

Obviously the memorials and the monuments here are annotated tactfully. They don't refer to Germany or to the German people. But at the same time, they don't cover things up. I saw a plaque in Dijon paying tribute to the 'victimes de la barbarie Nazi'. There are no bland platitudes about 'the fallen', as if what happened during 1939-1945 was a natural disaster like an earthquake or a tsunami. We should always call things by their real names. Because the same thing might come back one day, and we never quite know which direction it'll come from; and from a British perspective, when you remind yourself who makes up the five permanent members of the UN security council, it fans the flames of Francophilia a bit. As does being here, and eating their food, and drinking their wine. Vive la France.

Looking east from the Bastille. About the same climb as Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh.
That little blotch of reflected orange sunlight on the horizon, left of centre...
It's Mont Blanc, France's tallest mountain, roughly 70 miles away to the north-east.

Central Grenoble at dusk, looking west along the Isère river

Château de Vizille

Château again, from across the park

Looking southeast from Le Péage de Vizille

Fish and chips. Served with...chips???

Edd vs Food #166
French tacos at Snappy Food, Vizille.
Merguez sausage and fries within. Cheese throughout.

Lyon, France

Here in Lyon I seized my opportunity to make France the 11th foreign country in which I've attended a professional football match. (It'd be 12 if I included Scotland.) 

Olympique Lyonnais ('OL', just like Olympique Marseille get called 'OM') are one of the bigger French clubs, 6th on the all-time title-winning list. I had hoped they'd be playing Toulouse, so that I could make a witty pun about "to lose", but it wasn't to be. Anyway the home team won 2-0. For the first goal I thought the striker should have chipped the keeper when he was 1-on-1; in the event, he did it the harder way, but he did it well.

OL's home ground is now named after their sponsor Groupama, but it used to be called the Stade des Lumières, ie the 'Stadium of Light'. It's literally about 8 miles out of town - as if Sunderland had built their own Stadium of Light in Murton. The Groupama has a capacity of 60,000 but the crowd was still smaller than what Sunderland attracted against Crystal Palace the night before. Just saying.

As is almost always the case when watching football abroad, I was impressed by the atmosphere and the constant singing, but I couldn't help noticing that the singing in question was a) rigidly orchestrated by drums & loudspeakers, and b) completely unrelated to the game. It's always the same songs, over and over again. Whereas I think there's something genuinely precious about the way British football crowds constantly refine their repertoires in response to what's happening on the pitch. In 2003 I was at a match where we somehow managed to score three own goals in eight minutes: the crowd erupted into 'Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life', and then when one irate fan (who hadn't seen the funny side) got forcibly thrown out by the police, he was serenaded with 'there's only one lucky b*****d'.

Incidentally, did you know that for several years there was a French TV programme covering the English Premier League called 'Match Of Ze Day'? Priceless. It was presented by former Newcastle-based shampoo salesman David Ginola. Sample here.

Anyway I promise that there'll be no more football-related content in this year's blog. And there won't be any beer-related waffle, because France is a bit of a desert where good IPAs are concerned. Fortunately the wine situation is rather more satisfactory. I'll endeavour to enlarge on this and other more wholesome topics in the coming weeks.

Lyon from on high

Court of Appeal. Roughly the reverse of the photo above. 

On the banks of the Rhône

Western entrance to the Tête D'or parc

Hôtel de Ville

Roman amphitheatre (estimated date of construction is 15BC)

Pre-match shenanigans at Olympique Lyonnais

Edd vs Food #165
Set menu for lunch at the Midipopote cafe, 140 Ave Félix Faure, Lyon 69003
Tender beef shoulder bourgignon with carrots & pasta.
Creamy broccoli / chorizo / cranberry / walnut / red onion salad on the side