This post is not about food. Mostly. At least most of my vacation pictures don’t feature food, in a vast departure from my normal routine of photographing my meals and pretty much nothing else. Not that we didn’t eat well during our week in the Languedoc. Our first stop was Montpellier, where we stayed with a colleague of Nick’s. He took us to Les Estivales, a weekly food-and-wine event in downtown Montpellier. A glass and three 10cl pours of wine cost just four euros, and there were food stands up and down the main drag, selling everything from paella to aligot. The three of us indulged in mussels, calamari, some skinny little sausages that looked like SlimJims but tasted way better, some tuna-filled African “empanadas” whose proper name I have forgotten, a trio of vegetable-laden tartines, and probably a few more things that got lost somewhere between the third and fourth tastes of wine. The next day we lunched at a café on the beach, and after sunning ourselves most of the afternoon (don’t forget your sunscreen, kids!) we stopped to pick up an array of seafood and vegetables which we grilled on our host’s balcony.
The next day Nick and I headed south. We stopped in Béziers for lunch, and were pleasantly surprised by Le P’tit Semard, a cute little restaurant featuring fresh seasonal products from Béziers’ main market, conveniently located across the street. I say we were pleasantly surprised because when you arrive in an unfamiliar French town at 2pm on a Sunday, the chances of you finding something to eat, period, are slim. That it would also be a worthwhile meal is almost too much to hope for, but we got lucky this time.
After lunch we decided to take a stroll through the town, and stopped to take a look at the Madeleine church, originally built in the 10th century. The architecture was definitely different from the Gothic style with its sturdy stone walls, square construction, and few small windows. But these windows had some amazing colors. Outside we read some of the history of the church, which was mostly horrible and bloody. At one point, there was a massacre, the leader of which was quoted as saying, “Kill them all. God will know his own.”
Under semi-threatening skies we took the bridge out of town with the top down on our convertible (did I mention that we rented a convertible? We did, and it was awesome.) but put it back up before hitting the main road, not wanting to get caught in a sudden rainstorm.
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