Day Tripping Part 1: Sète

During my week and a half vacation that officially started on Saturday morning, a few of the other assistants and I have banded together to go on short day trips within the near-Montpellier region. Today's destination was Sète, a huge fishing port in southern France. Sète is a 20 minute train ride from downtown Montpellier and actually, it is the next stop on the train from my city of Frontignan. Basically, if I stayed on my train to go to school for another 10 minutes, I would be in Sète (pronounced "set")

Anyway, Dawn, 3 other American assistants (Junko, Cathy, & Aleksey) and I went on our little trip. Once we arrived in Sète, we kind of realized we had no idea where to go. It should be noted that there is an assistant that we know that works in Sète so we knew that it was pretty and had a beautiful beach. Upon arrival, we set about walking to the Tourism Office which was downtown. Along the way, we saw the awesome canals as seen in this picture here:
After walking and finally finding the toursit office, we decided that we would take one of the cruise ships that goes all around the little isthmus of Sète however, that didn't leave until 3pm and we had many hours to kill until then. So we thought we would walk to the beach that we heard so much about. It turns out that it was a little too far to walk so we ended up at the Cimitière Marin seen in this photo here:



It's literally a cemetary overlooking the sea. It was really amazing and very old. The very famous French poet, Paul Valery, is buried here and yes, we did see his grave. It was one of the least impressive compared to all the large tombs that you see in the photo. Originally, this cemetary was called the Cemetary for Rich People but they eventually changed it to the Maritime Cemetary which is a little less mean to everyone in general, don't you think?

After the cemetary, we wandered for what seemed like forever back downtown to get some lunch before our 1-hour tour on the boat cruise. We finally settled on a place that had some great seafood specials. 3 of our group got muscles and fries which is very popular in Southern France. I got the shark steak and fries and Cathy got some really tender beef and fries. What can I say? We all love fries. I tried some of the muscles and they were very tasty to my surprise. The shark steak, on the other hand, just kinda tasted like bland fish. I don't know if it was the sauce that wasn't so tasty or just the fish itself. It wasn't terrible but it was not worth getting again. The cool thing about getting muscles here is that they are served in a huge black pot with a lid. You remove the lid to begin eating them and the lid then becomes your discard place for all the shells. It's really quite ingenious AND you get like 30-40 muscles. It's a huge meal for a normally quite small price. Our desserts were all pretty varied. We had: ice cream (chocolate and pistachio), crème au caramel (which was like flan basically but not as tasty), a lemony tart (which was really good) and an "ile flottant" (which translates to "floating island" and it was like a huge dollop of meringue floating in a sea of caramel and goodness all inside a big ice cream glass.) The "ile flottant" was amazing and I will definitely order that again.

Here we are at lunch:
(Aleksey, Dawn, Junko & I)

After lunch, it was time for the 1-hour tour of the harbor. We rode on the cruise line Aquarius as seen in the photos below:

We even got English translations on these little handheld speaker things for the tour so we didn't have to listen to the French guide. Basically, we got to see all of Sète from the waterside and learn a little about the city in general. We even stopped in harbor, out in the sea, and looked in the little viewing portals below deck for fish and whatnot. I only saw rocks and tiny fish but it was cool no less. My favorite part of the trip was when the captain came on the loud speaker and was talking about all the ships we saw around us. Then he just kind of randomly said, in French of course: "And to your right there is the boat TARZAN!" He literally yelled the boat name for no reason which made all of us laugh hysterically and we continued to yell it to each other for the remainder of the trip and our time in Sète.

After the cruise, we thought we could ride on the city train tour for only 1 Euro with our cruise pass because that is what it said on the back of our pass. It turns out that we only got a 1 Euro discount and it was still 4 Euros to take the train so Aleksey said "what a rip-off!" we all laughed and off we went to go home.

It was a great day trip and I can't wait for Day Tripping Part 2.

Your British word lesson of the day: smart = cool/good In a sentence: That sweater is really smart! (or) Are we going to the beach today? Smart!