Introduction

My declaration that I was going on vacation in France, alone, for three weeks, elicited one of two responses from co-workers: bewilderment or congratulations. 

Occitanie is a region in the south of France and abuts Spain and the Mediterranean. It includes Toulouse, Perpignan, Carcassonne, and Montpellier. Montpellier is France's eighth largest city and its fastest growing.

Montpellier is a young city relative to Narbonne, Nîmes, and Arles,

Place de la Comédie in Montpellier

which were built by the Romans. Montpellier is young in other ways as well. It has a large student population, a growing high tech sector, an up-and-coming wine district and it's 20 minutes by car to the beach. When I arrived locals asked me, “Why Montpellier?” Why would a 50-year old American come here instead of some place more  glamorous and “Facebookey,” like Paris, Bordeaux or Cannes. The answer: I went to Montpellier to flush my brain, to continue writing my second novel, and to learn about Occitan, the regional language that predated French. I had been to Montpellier more twenty years ago, and I loved the setting, the people, and the proximity to the Mediterranean.

No definitive guide on Occitanie would be complete without visiting Toulouse, the capital of Languedoc. Toulouse was at one time the third largest city in the Latin-speaking world. Today, it's

Place de la Comédie

France's fourth largest city, and it's the headquarters of Airbus and home to over 100,000 university students. Toulouse still clings proudly to its Languedoc roots -- the subway trains make announcements in both French and Occitan. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time during this visit to spend in Toulouse, but I will likely stay there next time. I would like to say I went for the food, but I subsisted mainly on salads, cheeses, and bread from the local Carrefour. French meals are rich and usually come in multiple courses. Eating alone at restaurants can be a drag, and restaurants are expensive. During my 18-day stay, I ate at 11 restaurants, and not all of the meals were impressive.

This account is part travelogue, part memoir. It's not one where I go to France to overcome a broken heart, nor is it one where I buy a

Shopping area in Montpellier's Centre Ville

cottage and describe in  harrowing detail the process of restoring it. Rather, it is more like an amuse bouche, a bite-sized treat intended to stoke your appetite before a meal. I am not a France expert, nor a historian, nor a professional traveller. I am a policy analyst at the California Public Utilities Commission. My foreign language studies were in Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese, in that order, and my fluency level in those three goes in reverse order.

My first trip to France was in 1995. I was supposed to meet my wife in Paris, but I miscalculated my departure date and missed my flight. In the days before cell phones and the Internet, I made a telephone call, international long distance, to the Grand Hotel des Balcons in the Saint Germain/Latin Quarter. I tried to explain my situation and have the front desk leave a

View from Palais du Peyrou

message for my wife. for when I miss our meeting time. I called United Airlines and said I had missed my flight. They were understanding and had me buy another ticket for roughly the same price as my original flight. When I arrived a day later, the hotel front desk told me my wife would be meeting me in the afternoon, so I had the remainder of the morning and early afternoon to explore Paris. With absolutely no knowledge of French but a solid grasp of Mandarin Chinese, I headed to Avenue d’Ivry, home to Chinatown.

The great thing about knowing Chinese is there are Chinatowns everywhere

Chinese calligraphy gallery in Montpellier

. There's a long history of Chinese living in France. During first few decades of the twentieth century, well-known Chinese leaders like Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping studied in Paris. My knowledge of French culture began through television cinema. I grew up watching "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau" on public television. I saw the quirky movie, "Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe" when it came out in the theater in the 1970s. In college, I saw "Diva," and listened to the soundtrack over and over for a year. In graduate school, I saw the Catherine Deneuve in "Indochine" and was inspired by Jean Yanne's character, Guy, who was head of the French security services. Guy was smitten by Catherine Deneuve's character, but he didn't stand a chance winning her over. Despite this, he embodied a joie de vivre that I aspired to have later in life. 

I first visited Montpellier in 1995. My wife had spent her junior year abroad studying at Université Paul Valéry, which is the liberal arts companion to the better-known medical university in Montpellier. We boarded a TGV bullet train in Gare de Lyon and

Musée Fabre in Montpellier

disembarked at Montpellier Saint-Roch. What I remember most about that trip was the postcard-ready Place de la Comédie, flanked on one end by the opera house and on the other by the Charles de Gaulle Esplanade. In the center of the square sits the majestic "Three Graces," fountain built in 1790 by Étienne d'Antoine. Walk up the hill toward the Roman aqueducts, and you find the Porte du Peyrou, which is similar in design to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris but was built over 100 years earlier in 1693.

I remember hearing from our open hotel window someone playing music by the Counting Crows, and I remember being surprised by how quickly American music made its way to France. Now, with YouTube and Amazon and Netflix available everywhere, my sense of surprise seems quaint.

Two daughters and a decade later, I enrolled in first year French at Sacramento City College where I learned how to ask for the bill at a restaurant, order a beer at a bar, and say where I was born.

Later, in 2000, we moved to Tokyo. I was working for Vodafone in supply chain management and network engineering, and my job required travel to Europe several times a

Cathédrale Saint Pierre 

year. Vodafone's partner company in France was SFR, a company formed with the French railway system, and I went to France on several occasions to meet with SFR and the parent company, Cegetel. My rudimentary French enabled me to check in to hotels and order food, but it wasn’t necessary, because in Paris you can do that in English. The idea that Parisians only speak French and disdain English is as outdated as Jerry Lewis and his “Nutty Professor” movies.

Our son was born in Tokyo. He traveled around with us in a Baby Bjorn-type pack, facing forward. With his blonde hair, little blue eyes, and dangling pencil legs, Japanese people said he looked like a space alien, and I have to agree. I wrote a song about him. It depicts him as a modern-day troubadour wandering through Carcassonne, France. He meets a girl there, and he tries to woo her with poems by Rimbaud.

Entrance to La Cité in Carcassonne

 I hadn’t been to Carcassonne, but I was intrigued by my French teacher’s description of it. Six years after we returned to the States, our family of five traveled to Paris and Lisbon for vacation. In Paris, we rented an apartment down the hill from Sacre-Couer in Montmarte. It was August, and we slept with the windows open, which meant we got to hear someone’s rendition of Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry” from the steps of Sacre Couer six or seven times a night.

It was nice being able to cook our own food and have a place with multiple rooms (unlike a hotel), but the drawback was every family outing required negotiation to lure the family out of the apartment before 9 a.m.

Barge canal in Carnon

For my solo trip two years later, the goal was to stay in one city for the duration and take day trips to nearby towns. I was free to decide on a whim, without negotiating, to visit Arles one morning and stay in town the next. Solitude can be freeing. The following pages dive into some day trips, my impressions of sites, and some experiences along the way. I would return to Montpellier in a heartbeat. The city is a perfect combination of healthy, vibrant city life with an architecture and culture dating back almost a thousand years.

The crocodile design appeared on Roman coins used in Nîmes