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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.

Leanna (top) and Bethany Mills (Photo: Natalie Grono/Sydney Morning Herald)

Once in a while, life throws unexpected meetings at you, meetings that take you completely outside your normal frame of reference.  I’ve had one of those moments this week. Today, I met Leanna Mills. It happened something like this:

Last night, coming home from dinner on the tram, I was talking with an English friend, (in English of course). A man sitting nearby turns around and looks at us. As my friend got off the tram, he gets up and comes over, and asks, in a strong Australian accent, “So, where’re you from mate?”

He finds out I’m from New Zealand, and I find out Nic’s from Newcastle, New South Wales. And he’s here in Montpellier with his family because his 14 year-old daughter Leanna is having life-saving surgery. For the sixth time.

Leanna and her younger sister Bethany (12) suffer from an extremely rare neurological condition called primary dystonia. There is no cure, and one of the few successful treatments is deep brain stimulation, which involves the implantation of electrodes in the brain. One of the only places in the world they undertake the procedure on children is the paediatric neurosurgery department at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Montpellier.

Nic and his wife Michelle don’t speak a word of French, but since 2005, the lives of two of their daughters are in the hands of a few French expert surgeons. As Nic told me, the Australian government provides part-funding for overseas treatment, but most of the enormous costs of travel, surgery and after-care have been paid for by Nic and his wife’s own fundraising efforts, and the help of a few generous donors.

I wanted to give Nic my contact details, but when we parted ways at our tram stop, I didn’t have a business card on me, and Nic didn’t have a pen. So I shook his hand and wished him well, and walked home. A late-night google search uncovered this article about the girls in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Today, I wrote down my contact details on a piece of paper, and stuck it in an envelope. The plan was to drop it at the reception desk at the hospital, and ask them to give it to Nic. I wasn’t even sure if the hospital staff would allow me to do that, given patient confidentiality rules.

But when I arrived at reception, the lady said “Ah yes, the Australian girl. She’s on the 5th floor in Pediatric Neurosurgery. Take the lift, and go on up.” So I found the ward, asked at the nurses’ station, and I was shown to Leanna’s room. Leanna and Nic were both asleep, but the nurse had no hesitation in waking them up to tell them they had a visitor.

I had originally planned to simply drop off a letter. I ended up staying two and a half hours. Stuck in France, the Mills have had few English-speaking visitors. Nic and I talked about the fundraising efforts, and the adventures and dramas the family have had over the course of ten years. A nurse came in, invited Leanna to a birthday party for one of the other patients, and she disappeared for half an hour in a wheelchair.

It seems a cliché to describe Leanna as a brave young woman. At the age of 14, she’s spent more time in hospital than most people experience in a lifetime. She has electrodes in her brain, a battery pack in her abdomen and wires inside her neck. And yet, one day out of intensive care, she was still smiling. And she insisted on getting my myspace address.

Just as remarkable are Leanna’s parents. Nic has given up his job to care for his daughters and to find ways to raise funds for treatment and care. They both look tired, but determined. Nick’s made a solid list of contacts and has grand plans to put together the financial footing the family will need in the future. There’s a book and a website on the way.

Even if the repeat surgery is succesful, there’s a long way to go – Leanna and Bethany both require ongoing monitoring, and changing the batteries in their brain stimulation devices requires surgery every two years for the rest of their lives. The costs involved are extraordinary – but without this treatment, the girls would die.

Bethany, two years younger, is back in Australia and by all accounts doing very well. The Mills’ youngest daughter Olivia also stayed behind in Newcastle with relatives this time, while the oldest daughter Katey travelled with her parents to spend the summer in Montpellier while Leanna underwent surgery.

Next week, the Mills hope to fly home to Australia. I’m going to try and keep in touch with this remarkable family, and when their website is live, I’ll post the link here. Because you never know who might be able to help.

If Montpellier has an internet celebrity, it’s Rémi Gaillard. He’s been making prank videos on the internet for ten years, and his clips have received over 350 million views on Youtube.

Many of his gags are filmed right here in Montpellier. One would have thought the locals would have got used to his antics by now, but Monsieur Gaillard always finds new ways to amuse and annoy: last year he turned the streets of the city into a Nintendo Mario Kart racetrack:

His classic clips include a re-creation of Saving Private Ryan on the beach at Palavas and the arrival of an astronaut on a golf course, but my favourite is when Rémi and friends turn a supermarket into a Pacman maze. (According to the “making of” article, all damage was repaid in full):

There is obviously an anarchist and possibly dadaist streak in Gaillard’s humour,  and his motto “C’est en faisant n’importe quoi qu’on devient n’importe qui” (roughly – “By doing whatever you can become whoever”) suggests that there may be a philosophy behind what he does. There is also money – he was hired last year by Orangina and Nike to make viral videos.

You can find dozens more videos on his site, nimportequi.com. Although his gags are largely harmless, it really is a wonder that Rémi hasn’t ended up in jail yet…

Ignoring that Indian proverb about mad dogs, Englishmen and the midday sun, and needing a break from writing my dissertation, I set out on a mission yesterday to explore Montpellier’s slightly neglected river – the Lez.

On the map, it seemed like a simple exercise – following the river from Antigone northwards to Castelnau and then catching the tram back from from Place Charles de Gaulle. However, Montpellier has not quite reconciled itself with its river, making the journey more of a trek through suburban streets than a waterside ramble.

I started out at the eastern end of the Antigone quarter – a complex of monumental buildings aligned along an axis running a kilometre from the Hôtel de la Région all the way back to the Polygone shopping centre in the centre of town.

Antigone was designed by Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill, and although some praise its sweeping vision, I’m sweepingly unconvinced. The whole thing is vaguely totalitarian, as if it were dreamt up in fever dream by Ceaucescu. The scariest thing is people actually choose to live there.

I’ve been told by a couple of people that that fountain in the river was designed to be taller that the jet d’eau in Geneva – but when they switched it on, it soaked the diners on the terraces of the chain restaurants on the opposite bank. So today fountain plays at 33% strength. True or not, it’s a nice anecdote.

Continuing north from the Esplanade de l’Europe, the footpath soon deviated away from the riverbank – and I realised that despite the other magnificent infrastructure investments made by Montpellier, there was no public right of way along the banks of the Lez. Instead, you have to thread your way through side streets, very rarely glimpsing the river.

I never made it to Castelnau – my route involved traversing the main railway line, and the only crossing point was a road tunnel without any visible pedestrian footpath. So I backtracked through Les Aubes and Les Beaux-Arts (a rather interesting, slightly bohemian central suburb) to the centre-ville and caught the tram home.

Re-reading my map, it seems the northern stretches of the Lez are more promising for a riverside walk. So my next plan is to start from Place Charles de Gaulle and head north from there towards the zoo. I’ll just wait for a day when the temperature isn’t quite 34 degrees…

After the storm, the trams
rumble and flash.
Sluiced of oil by rain, they
hiss and sing through curves:
like slow fingers on wet glass.

Between the tracks, a boy
orbits a chiding father.
Thrusting his willow wand, he
dares demons to join his marvelous project:
to snare and slow down the sun.

Tomorrow, the trams
will void themselves of voice,
Tamed by rest and lubrication.
Unscathed, the sun will spy
a wooden sabre rusting in a gutter.

But for now, the grey-arched day belongs
to roaring dragons on Sunday timetables,
to white arrows pointing to hospitals, and
to the mercury dancing in sandals
one footstep ahead of his shadow.

Montpellier, August 2009.

A few cat-sitting gigs here in Montpellier have not filled the wallet, but they have filled the apartment with cat hair, and the whisky cabinet with new bottles, allowing some interesting comparative tastings.  I’m no expert on single malts (as compared to, say Dubber and Clutch), but increasingly I know what I like.

To me, (and I’m going to sound like a complete tosser when I write this), whisky doesn’t taste of things like wine does. Rather, whisky tastes of ideas and images. Short scenarios that shoot out of the glass at you.

I’ve been progressively tweeting descriptions as I open each bottle. Here are those tweet-sized chunks, assembled in one place:

Cragganmore: felt-tipped tulip petals, newly unfurled bracken fronds, and the kitchen door of a Birmingham curry house.

Talisker 10 yr old: charcoal oxygen filters, aluminium window-frames and dodgy 1940s fuseboxes. Like drinking C-3PO. Délicieux.

Oban 14 yr: this is definitely what Maurice Sendak used to clean his paintbrushes while illustrating “Where the Wild Things Are“

Dalwhinnie 10: Wednesdays at boarding school. Freshly laundered woollen socks, a locker room full of rugby balls and matron’s stern gaze.

Lagavulin 16 year old: Wow. Salty. Driftwood and neptunes necklace. Spicy treacle and seagull feathers. Mooring ropes at half-tide in a November sea-fog.

Aberlour 10 year old: you remember that class trip to the colonial museum with the old sweet shop, the stuffed elephant and Melissa wetting her pants?

Glenkinchie 12 year old: weekends on your uncle’s farm, amidst Victorian furnishings, mouldy tourist calendars from 1954

Bowmore Islay 12 year old: fossilised kauri gum, barnacles left too long on the mantlepiece and the bilge water from an Arthur Ransome novel.

Last night at dinner in Mauguio, the aperitif included ravioli réunionnaises, and frogs’ legs:

Although anglo-saxon stereotypes would hold that French people eat cuisses de grenouille (and equally slimy escargots) all the time, this simply isn’t true. A particular speciality of the lyonnais, frogs legs aren’t something that appears on the table very often. However it was inevitable that they would cross my plate at some point while I am living in France.

The verdict – sautéed in oil with herbs and vegetables and possibly some gros sel, frogs legs taste of very little at all. The texture of the flesh is very similar to scallops, and they’re full of little thighbones.  They aren’t unpleasant, but I’m not going to rush out and buy some myself to cook for lunch…

When I planned my move to France, I partially imagined that I’d have French friends, and that we’d speak in French all the time: erudite conversations about new-wave cinema in late-night cafés and jokes about Sarkozy amidst Gauloise smoke. The reality so far has actually been more interesting, and introduced the dilemmas of being a “foreigner” in a strange land.

Thursday night tango at Place Saint-Anne, Montpellier

So far, all my friends in France speak English. Which is not to say we all speak English together often. But it is something we all have in common. My friends fall into three broad categories:

• British and American expats (they are unavoidable, and the ones I’ve met aren’t annoying)
• French citizens who are bilingual from birth (ie. they had an anglophone parent)
• French citizens who learnt English as a second language and may have spent time in anglophone countries

Conversations with all these people often take place in French, but sometimes we switch between English and French mid-stream, depending on the subject matter and whether we think one or the other language can express an idea (or tell a joke) better.

Context plays a role: for instance, it’s ridiculous to speak to my American or British friends in French, but if a francophone friend walks into the room, we’ll switch to French so we don’t seem like we’re rudely talking in a foreign language behind their back.

Abandoned shopfront, Montpellier

I’m coming to the conclusion that my relationships in this country will always pivot around the unavoidable fact that I am a foreigner, and an anglo-saxon to boot. Perhaps this is why my friends here all speak English – at some level they all relate to the challenge of sitting inside and outside a culture at the same time.

The nature of being a foreigner does not make friendships less genuine or more distant here. It’s just a question of becoming comfortable with your role as an intermediary between two languages and cultures. Given my accent and life experience, it’s impossible to be accepted as a French person, so it’s not worth trying. But in the end, I didn’t move to France to become French.

Maybe life in France is a bit like finding oneself in an ocean – swimming in French but breathing in English. Both languages are necessary to make progress and to stay afloat.

The mouth of the Hérault river at Grau d’Agde

Tuesday was the 14th of July – Bastille Day, but nobody calls it that here. It’s just “le quartorze juillet” or “La Fête Nationale“.  Some friends and I decided to mark the occasion by going out to the Domaine de Grammont for the pique-nique républicaine and the 11pm fireworks.

Grammont is on the outskirts of the city, slightly beyond the reach of trams and regular buses, so the municipalité laid on free shuttle buses to take the crowds out to the Domaine. So far, so good.

The picnic was fun, we sat in the grounds of the château, munching on sandwiches and learning about life in Dublin and Omaha, Nebraska. And the 30 minutes of fireworks (with musical accompaniment) was easily the best display I’ve ever seen. Sometimes, France manages to do things exactly right, and this was one of those moments.

The great disappointment of the evening was the organisation of the return transport – with tens of thousands of people trying to get back into town after the display, there was a bottleneck involving too few buses, large numbers of increasingly frustrated citizens and an absence of any apparent control or organisation. It was, to use a colourful Nebraskan metaphor, “a total clusterf*ck“.

The motorcycle police seemed to be there simply to keep the scene clear of private cars to allow the buses, the bus drivers and the general public to have a big argument with one another.  With no crowd barriers, lots of young children, alcohol-fuelled anger and dozens of slow-moving buses, the potential for either violence or a serious accident was very real.

In the end, we gave up on the buses and the restless peasantry and walked 10 minutes back to the tram at Odysseum. Ironic (or perhaps appropriate?) that a festival designed to celebrate national unity, and those great valeurs républicaines of fraternité, égalité and liberté should culminate in a display of méprise, colère and bordel.

Spectacular and beautiful state-funded largesse, followed immediately by organisational chaos,  small-minded arguments between citizens and a near-riot.   I continue to fall in love with this country more and more.

Canadians have hockey, Americans have little league, New Zealanders have barefoot beach rugby, the English have rainy weekends in Brighton.  But if you want to evoke the sun-kissed childhood of a French person from the south, just mention toro-piscine.

La toro-piscine was a summer amusement for kids in southern France long before skateboarding and the roller coaster, and seems to remain today a distinctive and well-loved part the culture of the region.

From the Camargue westwards, bull sports are popular across the south. Most towns and many villages have their own purpose-built arènes. There’s la corrida (real bulls and real death), la course camarguaise, (real bulls but no death) various runnings of the bulls, and la toro-piscine (young cows, silly games and prizes for the kids).

Last night I went to the toro-piscine at Palavas with my landlady and her cousins from northern Alsace, who like me had never been to a bullring before. Palavas is a beachside town near Montpellier, with funfairs, cheesy souvenir shops and an overpriced revolving restaurants in a tower – a little like Blackpool, but with sunshine.  And, like most southern resort towns, Palavas runs bulls during the summer season.

Cows (les vachettes) and the game equipment are provided by the arena, but the competitors are volunteers from the crowd, who play individually in teams for prizes. In the centre of the arena is a pool, (hence piscine), and one of the classic games involves coaxing the vachette to chase you across the pool. There is real danger, real tension and real laughs.

At the end of the evening, a bull, wearing a bell around his neck is trotted out to “collect” his vachette. Sometimes the vachette is eager to depart the ring, and sometimes she’s reluctant – as if she’s had too much fun with her human friends to bother with her boyfriend.

Here’s a 2-minute highlights reel: