New Year's Eve and beforehand

After Carcassonne, the plan was to visit Arles. Arles is the really famous city where Van Gogh painted his famous cafe street scene and got a lot of inpsiration from. Unfortunately, after a day in the rain in Carcassonne, we didn't have the energy to take another day in the rain. Long before our train was even supposed to leave Montpellier, we decided against going out and surviving the rain and instead, stayed in town. Will got to experience my favorite tea place in Montpellier that has a huge selection of loose leaf tea combinations. We cruised the Christmas markets again and had a relaxing day.

Since my landlords left a few days before, they said that the washing machine was out of order. This proved to be very inconvenient as Will really needed to wash some clothes before the week was out. There is a laudromat near my house, by the tram station, so after lunch, we ventured out only to find that the laundromat had decided to only be open for like 3 hours on New Year's Eve. This sucked because then we had to figure out where a laundromat even WAS, near my place. Luckily, I remembered seeing one about 5 stops from my tram stop and we went there. It was really such a pain to not have a working washing machine or even have a laundromat nearby since we had to spend the better part of an afternoon shlepping to the laundromat and back. It turns out that the washing machine wasn't broken at all. They just needed to clean the filter and didn't do it before they went on their week vacation. How nice, huh?

After the laundry, we took a walk around the Jardin des Plantes that I have previously mentioned in this blog. Unfortunately, since it's so cold and dreary, many of the plants were either dead or on their way to their death. We walked around nonetheless and enjoyed an afternoon in the park. Now I always feel a sort of pressure to do something really cool for New Year's Eve and I was getting really worried that Will wanted to do something fun or go out or be in a club or whatever. Never to fear, he is/was very low-key.

Dinner was at home, some wonderful salmon again, but not as good as the Christmas dish that I made. We decided to stay in for New Year's Eve and just watch French TV and see how they do their New Year's countdown. In 2 words: disappointing and weird. Disappointing because there really wasn't a show devoted to the New Year's countdown or anything. There was this weird program where a bunch of people (I would assume famous French people but I didn't know who they were) were sitting around a big table talking. They were all dressed nice but it wasn't a "show". I felt like I was just watching a discussion panel on what their resolutions were and any other boring crap they wanted to mention. Weird because on 2 other channels, they kept showing these little vignettes of random performances. It was like watching Cirque du Soleil only was less talented people. We saw jugglers, singers, gymnasts and some musical revues (some of the revues were topless and/or scantily clad though!). The countdown for midnight was so lame. It was just some guy putting cards on the table from 10 to 0. One of the guys got up from the table at midnight, wished us all a Happy New Year and began to sing. He was not very talented, in my opinion. They had some sort of lame musical revue on that station once the guy got up to sing. We saw a live feed of fireworks in Germany and that was about it.

So, Happy 2009!! The French don't even come close to partying like the Americans!