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The last time I was a regular commuter, (other than getting to work on foot), I had a car and battled down New North Road in Auckland every morning. That was five years ago, so being in Paris and catching the train every day (either métro or RER, depending on strikes and my mood) is a novelty.

One of the few advantages of commuting is it gives you time to listen to music, if you’re inclined to take your mp3 player with you. This is pretty much what everyone does in Paris, unless they’re reading Frédéric Mitterand’s La Mauvaise Vie or a copy of 20 Minutes while the graffiti whizzes past outside.

Somehow I’ve ended up with a bunch of new electro-dancey type stuff on my iPhone playlist, and so my trips through the bowels of the City of Light have been accompanied by whiteboy disco. Apparently it’s what the kids are into these days. Allegedly.

Download Ali Love - Diminishing Returns (Extended Mix)

Ali Love sang on the Chemical Brother’s single Do It Again from a few years back. He’s now launching a solo career. The vinyl single of Diminishing Returns is due out in the UK on 16th November. The video is here.

Schwayze – Get U Home (Alan Wilkis Remix)

Meantime, our friend Alan Wilkis is back with a remix of Schwayze‘s Get U Home – it’s currently the most re-tweeted track on Hype Machine. Other artists asked to remix the tune include Paul Oakenfold, Italy’s The Bloody Beetroots, LMFAO, and Travis Barker, (I’ll pretend I’ve heard of all of these names, in a vain attempt to prove I’m still plugged into whatever scene I’m supposed to be plugged into). So Alan’s moving into the big league now. Just remember, you probably heard him here first.

So that geeky looking dude on the RER at Les Invalides station in the morning, trying not to dance? If it’s not Stéphane Guillon coming home from Radio France after his breakfast show slot, it’s probably me.

Today was a domestic day. There’s a list as long as my arm of things that need to be done now that I’ve moved into my apartment, so I was up fairly early and headed out in the drizzle to start checking things off.

First priority was bread for the day – the closest boulangerie to me is an outlet of Maison Kayser – a little expensive at €1.20 for a baguette tolbiac, but it’s good quality. I’ve seen cheaper boulangeries down among the shops around rue de Seine and rue de Buci , and one of these might become my local. But Maison Kayser is very convenient.

Down on Boulevard St Germain, the scooters were zipping along the slick street, showering pedestrians with spray. Even by 10am on a grey Saturday, the covered terrace of Les Deux Magots was filled with tourists. Monoprix on rue de Rennes had the electrical goods I was looking for – a kettle and lightbulbs.

I got back to the apartment to find my Pass Navigo had arrived by post. At last I can by a monthly pass and not bother with individual metro tickets. A small victory on the way to becoming integrated into life in Paris.

A Twitter exchange during the week had suggested the place to shop for new business shirts was rue de Turenne. So once more I ventured out into the rain, grabbed a metro north across the river. At Chatelet there was a poster advertising Iceland – a reminder of the dream I had last night when I visited Sigurdór there and we swapped music and tried to steal a fishing boat.

Sure enough, between the puddles on rue de Turenne, there were at least a dozen tailors and menswear shops – importers, prêt-à-porter, tailors. Beh,à peu près tout, quoi. And a few were even open. After talking to the manager (who looked Italian, like all managers of menswear stores throughout the world) in Cotton Park on rue des Filles du Calvaire, I picked up 3 shirts. The guy asked if I was from London. When he learned I was a New Zealand, he replied “Ah, oui. Long trip.” in English. He gave me a loyalty card in the hope that I might buy ten shirts this year. Long trip indeed.

The plan to jump straight back on the metro got a little waylaid – I ended up under the arcades at Place des Vosges (a great place-to-go-in-Paris-when-it’s-raining), and slipped through the puddles in the garden of the Hôtel de Sully to rue St Antoine. Realising I was halfway home already, I risked the grey skies by wandering westwards through le Marais – stopping to pick up some veg and sausage to fill my Kayser baguette at the Marché Baudoyer by St Gervais.

Along the quais beside the Seine, only a few brave bouquinistes were open for the tourist trade. The rain continued. Viewed from the Pont Neuf, the the city still managed to show off its autumn colours despite the general dampness. Crossing back onto the left bank with my bag of shirts, sausage and vegetables, I was soon home in time to assemble my sandwich for lunch.

A short musical interlude. Icelandic pianist Sunna Gunnlaugs wrote a piece today marking the recent birthday of Thelonius Monk: interesting to read the perspectives of a contemporary jazz musician on her relationship to Monk’s music.

She also found some really nice video clips to illustrate her article. I particularly liked this one – the Bill Evans Trio playing Round Midnight in Sweden in 1970. It’s rare to see acoustic jazz of this era filmed in colour, and still in such good condition. Eddie Gomez is the bass player, Marty Morell is on drums.

For an insight into Monk’s life, music and idiosyncrancies, Leslie Gourse’s biography Straight No Chaser is highly recommended.

So it turned out that my temporary landlord in Paris is a trumpet player. And a very good one. And I was invited to his gig last night on in a basement on rue Palestro. Although I’d been told they were going to play “electro-pop-jazz”, I really had little idea what to expect, but I was not disappointed!

Image: Anne Lacomb

Ici et Lui (Here and Him) is a duo formed in 2006 by brothers Thomas and Pierre David, who both have been on the scene for quite some time (their biographies talk of previous recording contracts with Universal, various prizes from musical schools and regular gigs with orchestras and artists around Paris).

Their suprisingly effective set-up involves Thomas on guitar (a Telecaster) and Pierre on trumpet, with both brothers sharing duties on vocals, samplers and effects pedals. The performance itself, in a basement bar that squeezed in about 20 people, crossed so many stylistic boundaries that it could really only be called “music”, in the broadest sense of the word. And although it’s definitely not comedy music, Thomas and Pierre’s dry stage humour worked really well in the intimate of a Paris cellar.

Highlights included “a homage to chanson française” using melodies based on (I think) a whole-tone scale, a cover version of Desmond Dekker‘s Shanty Town (complete with Jamaican English sung with French accents) and a short lecture on composer Steve Reich‘s theory of voice melody.

Image: Emmanuel Schmitt

It was all slightly surrealist. They sample the continuity announcer from Radio France Inter, slip in some beatboxing, sing in Japanese, and play some mean unison bebop lines (the album includes a lo-fi hip hop version of Charlie Parker’s Ornithology).  Boris Vian would’ve been proud.

Their album pop electro jazz has just been released this month (available from, among others, iTunes and fnac.com). But Ici et Lui’s live show should definitely be seen. They play every first Wednesday of the month at Les Cariatides in the 2nd arrondissement. Free entry!

Ici et Lui on myspace

Ici et Lui + guests
Wednesday 4th November and 2nd December
20h30
Les Cariatides
3, rue de Palestro
Paris 75002
Metro: Etienne Marcel

Well, I’ve arrived in Paris, and am coping with a 10 degree difference in daytime temperature (17C in Paris, 27C in Montpellier). Grey skies and rain are things that I really haven’t seen for 9 months. But overall, it’s going well, even if I haven’t been north of the Seine yet.

It’s good to know that reasonable price food and veg is still available, even here in Paris. I ran down to the marché Villemain (Wednesdays and Sundays on rue d’Alésia in the 14th arrondissement) and picked up the following for EUR4.70:

Red and green peppers, courgettes, muscat grapes, onions and mushrooms, all origine française according to the blackboards. The market can’t compete with the Marché des Arceaux in Montpellier, where you can buy direct from the producers, and one gets the impression that Parisian markets are a little more insulated from seasonality, but at least the marchands were all friendly. I just wish there had been a cheese stall – I could have done with a nice slice of cantal for sandwiches and dessert.

I’m also discovering some unique joys of apartment-hunting in Paris. This afternoon I arrived a little early at a property I was looking at. Hanging around outside, I noticed every few minutes a tourist would come past and take a photo of a rather run-down and graffiti-covered building across the street.

Eventually, the estate agent zoomed up on his scooter (it’s Paris, you really think he’d arrive by car?) and parked on the pavement. He pointed across the road at the colourful wall. “See that place? Don’t worry monsieur, it’s not a squat. It’s just Serge Gainsbourg’s house.”

Bienvenue à Paris.

The first part of the trip towards Paris took me up some back roads from Montpellier to Clermont-Ferrand, over the top of the Cévennes. It was a spectacular and remarkably traffic-free drive, made all the more fun by a computer glitch (I assume) at the car hire company that allocated me a BMW rather than a Peugeot.

It’s an hour or so from Montpellier to St-Jean-du-Gard, winding through the arrière-pays of northern Languedoc. October means hunting season, and the roads were dotted with huddles of parked cars. Hunters were pacing up and down in flourescent jackets, rifles draped over their arm, their dogs tensed and ready to dash into the undergrowth to retrieve whatever furry or feathery things their dayglo-orange masters had just killed.

131 years ago, Robert Louis Stevenson passed through St-Jean-du-Gard with a donkey, but today I just stopped to buy lunch before starting along the twisty high road to Florac, the départmentale route 9 known as the Corniche des Cévennes.

The Cévennes is another one of those relatively under-appreciated parts of France, formed by deep river gorges and high plateaus (called les causses) reaching up to a thousand metres and more above sea level. The region’s ruggedness and isolation meant that historically it was a refuge for French Protestants, and one of the hotbeds of resistance during the Second World War. Even today it’s a remote place: the Lozère département is the least populated in France, and has the highest average altitude of any region.

As the road climbs higher you leave coastal Languedoc behind. Vineyards and terracotta architecture give way to slate roofs, cattle farms and pine forests. When the road emerges onto the plateaux above 800 metres, the vast stretches of high country reminded me of the central North Island of New Zealand: sparse grasslands and plantation forest line the route. All that was missing was a snowy Mount Ruapehu peeking over the horizon.

Even after you leave the Corniche, the route towards Clermont-Ferrand loses little of its altitude. I passed through Marvejols (an interesting-looking town with an old centre that is probably worth a return visit) before joining the A75 autoroute that zaps north-south across the midriff of France, three quarters of a mile up in the sky.

A final detour from the A75 took me past the Viaduc de Garabit – a 120-metre tall railway bridge crossing the Truyère river. It was one of the major engineering achievments of Gustave Eiffel, who completed it in 1884 before starting work on a rather large tower in Paris. But Paris is for tomorrow. Today was about driving across the roof of France.

Tomorrow I leave Montpellier for the big city, a job and the real world. I’ve enjoyed my 9 months here, and that’s really down to the people I’ve met and the friends I’ve made. I’ll miss the city and it’s easygoing style, but I’ll miss the people more.

I reckon that I made more friends in 9 months in Montpellier than I did in 2.5 years in Oxford. Don’t get me wrong, my Oxford friends are wonderful, (and they know who they are) but the quantity and ease of contacts made in Montpellier has been extraordinary.

In Montpellier, I seemed to spend a lot of time going out, despite my student budget. Having drinks and late-evening meals as the sun sets over the old town. Watching films at the Cinéma Diagonal and Odysseum. River-swimming at the Pont du Diable. Wine tasting on the Esplanade during les Estivales.

It has been, as you might imagine, a pretty wonderful lifestyle, and I even managed to complete a masters thesis in between the fun I was having.  Whatever happens next in the big adventure, at least part of it has been spent living in the south of France.

So I’d just like to say thanks to my friends here, and especially to anyone I’ve left off this list! : Ariel, Ed, Severine, Isabelle, Claudia, Daniel, Laura, @paztek, Dédé le Camionneur, Eva, Nadiha, Wendy, Georges, Serge, Mick’n'Hazel, Mariannick, Janice, Alain, Nancy, Pierre-Yves, Raphael, Marion, Amandine, Régis, Lazare, Marie-Anne, Camille, Shamille, Dany le Setois, Cathy and Nathalie.

It’s not an adieu, it’s an au revoir. I’ll be back.

Winter hikes around the coastal lagoons

Ruined farmhouses in the arrière-pays

Asking directions from the locals, somewhere in the garrigue

Marsillargues cherries bought fresh from the Marché des Arceaux

Orangina, shady trees and a boules tournament in Sommières

Oh, and vineyards. Lots and lots of vineyards.