Montpellier: The French Persuasion

We have a fair few days in that city.  A vacation town on the southern coast where all the girls that pass you on the street are French and pretty and come from all over the country.  They hold themselves differently, and some of them, the prettiest ones, wore those pants I adore so much that look like MC Hammer's, except with sex appeal.  Up to that point in our travails we had contended, quite unanimously, that the prettiest, the most beautiful samples of the female form resided in Denmark.  Copenhagen in the north, where the sun only sets for a short spell, where the girls all rode by on their bicycles, perfectly bronzed like some Victoria's Secret's summer campaign.  They're slim statuesque and delicate, naturally gorgeous, and a look from them sends the heart flying.

This is different though. Something's still flying, but it's a touch lower.  It's their swagger, I think (or whatever the female version of swagger is), a sexiness ingrained in their culture for generations.  A sharpness, an attitude, and an urgency, physical, that shies the heart in it's shell but wakes the loins.  Excites passion.  And when they pass us by, we can't help but to turn and watch them walk away and fade into the busy sidewalks.  French women hold a power over men that I think no others can boast.  They control our gaze with the simplest tap of a cigarette, and they brush it off with a quick hair flip.

Too bad we're just a poor, half-broke quartet of malnourished Americans.  What the hell would they want with us.  "Life is sheet, get to know thees," Max says with a french accent and a curt bow to Robin Williams' stand-up routine.  His courtship with cocaine in the 90's truly brought some gems to the surface.   And we laugh with an "Ah, ouai!" and try to forget the swaying hips and the fast walk disappearing behind us.  An occurrence that happens way too often in Montpellier.  Oh, les filles francaise de la Sud.  Je t'adore.


It's a quaint city, small, not really many tourist attractions, but it's by no means tiny.  One can still spend days getting lost down the stone paved streets, and drink his fill at the summer wine festival on Fridays.  We do it all.  We drink shit wine sitting on stone down Rue de such-and-such in the late night with three flirting, drunk Czech girls, just passing through like we are. We sit on the steps of Le Corum, behind the band, and booze-dance our Friday away, eyes closed, in the embalming summer darkness.  We book tickets to Unighted in Nice.  We take the bus down to the beach to dip into the Med once again.  The beaches are topless, but the only ones seeming to abide are much too old for it.  Like old wrinkly balloons whose helium's gone sour.  Ugh.  Not giving a fuck is so often wasted on the elderly, and always, it seems, at the most inopportune moments.  But the sea feels good in the sunlight, and we splash, and dive, and play like dolphins, and race, and fake-rescue each other from sharks (Grant's a lifeguard, so we know the proper fake-rescue techniques).

So refreshing.  I think the salt water is something I'll always need in life, because when I'm in it, all that weight of living sinks through my shorts and it's lost to the current, and I come back to shore ten times lighter, even with the salt and water hanging off me until I shake, shake, shake it like a wet dog.  Montpellier is a vacation from our travels.  A little R&R.  We're here for two days.