End of my first week of Classes

Today was a pretty relaxing day, there was a reason I built my class schedule to exclude Fridays.  Last night, a group from my program went out on the town, to a small bar called “Charlie’s Beer.”  It was decked out with both Rock and Roll and Charlie Chaplin paraphernalia. It was an interesting little place.

Today, I slept in (which felt nice after having to get up at 6:30 yesterday), had a little breakfast, and then went into town.  My objective was to find the city’s library.  Because Montpellier is a university town and has been for several hundred years, I’ve been told that it is quite exquisite for doing research in.  I wanted to find it so that I may do research for my upcoming Honors Thesis, which will deal with immigration policies under French presidents Sarkozi and Hollande and the impact that the growing far-right nationalist movement has had upon that issue.   

I went through the Polygone, a four-floored shopping complex just off of the Place de la Comédie, and emerged in Antigone, Montpellier’s newest district.  It was quite the impressive sight: monolithic architecture modeled off of Ancient Greece, in the vein of the Acropolis.  Each street and building is named from Greek mythology, and the sweeping arches and columns encircle a series of wide-open plazas leading to the hôtel de ville, or mayor’s office.  It wasn’t very busy today, even though chic shops and restaurants open out of the stone walls onto the plazas, and it seemed to be a world apart from the frenetic energy of the Polygone, Comédie, and even the shopping areas of the Old City.   Here, one could almost imagine being in the empty remains of some long lost Hellenic civilization, the wind sweeping through the long wind tunnel and the shouts of children at play from the nearby école (elementary school) echoed eerily off of the stone faces of the buildings like the voices of a vanished population.

Okay, I’ll stop being depressing now.

After that, I wandered over to the Old City and ordered a café du crème and people watched for a while before heading back home.  Tonight I am organizing a little get-together with some of my friends from the program.  We are going to a pub called Fitzpatrick’s, owned by two Irish brothers, that apparently has live Irish music on Friday nights.  Surprisingly enough, I found some people in my program who love that genre as much as I do, so I am looking forward to it.