Beach bum?

 Since my last post, things have made quite a turn around! It doesn't hurt that these past two weeks have been absolutely filled with the most glorious weather imaginable - mid 20's celsius up to maximum of 30 one particularly warm Friday, so much sunshine you just can't take it anymore, and a general feeling of premature summer ease and relaxation that seems to be floating around the air about as tangibly as the smell of crêpe and kebab when walking past some of my favorite quick order places.

So, what exactly have I been up to? Well, this past weekend, I went to the beach. Not once, not twice, but three times in five days. Whoop de doo, you're saying, right? After all, I live near the beach, don't I? Well, here's the astonishing part - central Montpellier is 10 km from the coast, and Vert-Bois (my residence) is another 5/6 to the north. Why is this important? Well, I went to the beach each of these times by bike! And after an interesting experience that I'll recount later, I came back from my third and final beach trip and did some calculations - I biked a grand total of 90 km (that's more than 50 miles) in these few days. I had no idea I had it in me! I ended up too exhausted to move for the next day or two, dragging my self to salsa rehearsal and trying to put up a good performace.

Friday afternoon after my physiology course, in which I'm currently learning about all the complex wonders of the endocrine system, I tell myself this: "hey, nice weather we're having! You deserve a break from "real" training (running and more running), why don't you take a nice relaxing bike ride around town before you need to be at the train station? Well, that nice and easy bike ride ended up leading me somewhere totally different than I envisioned, and so when I found myself on the south side of town I though hey, what the heck, off to the beach! So away I went. In a brilliant move of city planning, Montpellier has a dedicated bike road - removed from the highway - that runs directly along the river, all the way until it spits you out at the Mediterranean Sea. And let me tell you, it's glorious.

A picture, so you don't have to just take my word for it :)

Stopped to make a friend!

So, I enjoy myself for the entire 30 minutes I could spend on the beach (bike ride of an hour from centre of town) until I have to get back to town like greased lightning - another group of students from the same exchange program in Chambéry (where we went skiing, remember?) were coming to visit for the weekend, and a few of us agreed to greet them at the train station. So I, being late, pratically flew back and got there in time, a little scruffy but on time!

The students from Chambéry came with us on our regional trip the next day, in which we visited the Viaduc de Millau, officially the tallest bridge in the world! It was lovely.

Seriously. Behemoth. And still beautiful.

Surrounding view.

We also visited a pleasant medieval town called La Couvertoirade, which I'll pass over for now, and the town of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon in which, yes, you guessed it!, the famously moldy Roquefort cheese is made. Now, let me say one thing here. The French take their cheese SERIOUSLY. Like, you think it's a joke when people call American cheese plastic, but it's true. Even though I will say time and time again how I really don't enjoy Roquefort (it's potent stuff), at the end of our tour of the caves de Roquefort (yes, you read correctly: cheese cave. This cheese sits and develops in these caves for months and months) when we were offered several samples, I tried. Although I'll stick to less potent cheese without colonies of penicillin fungus inside, thanks, I still was savvy enough to notice that this is good cheese. Very good. Sure, the caves smelled kind of like old feet, but it was overall a very informative tour - and we got to learn just why these caves, and only these caves (with a couple others nearby), are right for making this cheese. Has to do with the constant air currents that run through these particular rock formations, etc etc.

Qui a coupé le fromage?

Moving on to Sunday. The other exchange students were being taken to the beach in the morning (by bus). Seeing as how there are very few buses and I preferred to sleep in and come on my own a little later by the gorgeous bike path, I planned to meet the group around noon. As it turns out, they had decided to go to the beach at Carnon, not Palavas (the beach I went to Friday), which is actually 15 km from the centre ville - which was really no problem, I got to enjoy myself some more by the river and the awesome salt lakes that greet you just when you're starting to get reeeeally close.

So, I manage to be a good little navigator and find them on the sand fairly easily. I, being warm, set my towel down and go for an obligatory hop in the water. I was brave enough to get all the way in (really really cold), but didn't stay for more than a few minutes because my feet were getting numb. So out again I go. No sooner do I plop my behind down on my towel before I notice that there's an air of stress about. Our program coordinator's on the phone, with a girl who - as it turns out - had been missing since yesterday night when the kids went out. So, as soon as the phone is hung up, our coordinator (who is wonderful and sweet and definitely didn't deserve having to deal with this) looks at me with that look on her face. You know the one - the one where someone's about to ask you a favor. How did I arrive? By bike, I respond. Is there a seat on the back? Well, there's a small kind of rack that you can sit on in a pinch, but my tires are a little under pumped. I'm still uninformed on the "missing" portion of this, and why everyone's suddenly looking at me.

Well, the situation: it's after 12h30. The next bus to Montpellier departs at 13h30. The following bus will not be here until two-odd hours later. The problem with that? That's when these kids' train leaves. Apparently, the missing girl wanted to come catch everybody at the beach, took a different bus, and ended up staying on the bus until La Grande Motte - which is way off to the east. Now, it's time to play Fun With Maps!

I should be a cartographer.

Point A, my dorm in Montpellier, is off-screen. Also 16 kilometres away. Point B, Palavas, is where I went on Friday. C is Carnon, where the group is, and 5 km farther east. La Grande Motte is off the map to the right.

So, it appears to be up to me here. I ask what the girl looks like and where she is (they'd finally managed to establish phone contact with her, so that's good), put my shorts back on that wet behind of mine, and get back on the bike to hunt her down. Point D is where I found her, walking on the road parallel to the beach in our direction - which she had been doing for the past hour, she told me, visibly upset. Now, by the time I found her it was already past 1 pm. 4 km is about 2.5 miles. A brisk walk is 4 mph. Conclusion? Walking wasn't going to cut it. Had to calm her down (lost in a strange city, walking alone with nothing but her phone for over an hour, with the threat of being stranded and missing her train? Yeah, stressful.) and convince her to get on the back of my bike so I could ride her back. Halfway there the road got too narrow for it to be safe (riding with a shaky person on the back ain't easy, let me tell you) so we have to abandon that. Five minutes of walking later, receive an increasingly panicked call from our coordinator saying that the bus leaves in 10 minutes and everyone else has already left the beach to try and hold the bus. I hang up, calmly explain the situation to our poor stressed girl, and finally get her on my bike with me running alongside to direct her. After all that, we make it back to the beach and they run off to catch the bus, leaving me alone to take a much needed nap on the sand. All in a day's work, I suppose.

I don't think there was much point to this story, except that I added another 8 km to my day...and that if I hadn't shown up when I did, I'd hate to see how this day would have ended. Also, perhaps I'm too nice for my own good since I seem to find myself in these sorts of scenarios more frequently than I probably should. Despite the fact that my parents seem to find me generally incompetent, on the whole I'm not too bad at taking care of business when the need arises - or maybe I'm just better at taking care of others than I am of myself. Ha, who knows?

So that was a lot of writing. Uh, conclusions? Finished up the weekend at the beach and got my legs all nice and burnt on the ride back, in which there was a beastly wind blowing against me the entire way. It was torture, but I did it. Oh, and managed to recover my energy enough to go back to the beach (this time, with another friend! Together! On bikes!) on Tuesday, with picnic of sammiches and gummy worms. So, like I said, total = 90 kilometers. I'm trying to decide if this qualifies me as a beach bum or a beast.

Heading home under the beautiful evening sun. Also, when did my arms get so buff?

Until next time, when I talk about...the ballet!