Montpellier is in some respects an outlier among cities in the south of France. Unlike Toulouse, Nimes, Avignon and others, it has no Roman or Greek roots. It is a newer city (by the standards of Europe), having been established about 1000 A.D. when the local lords, the Guilhems, combined a couple of villages, built a castle and surrounded the whole thing with a wall.
In Europe there is almost always an interesting thing or two to know about even the smallest and least famous town or village.
The first recorded interesting thing about Pezenas is that in 980, the Vicomte de Beziers gave the town to his daughter Garsinde as a dowry, on her marriage to the Count of Carcassonne.
This is my second visit to Tourbes, a tiny village in the south of France. I housesat Cassie and Nousha here in March of 2016 and the homeowners kindly invited me for a return engagement.
We resume our walking tour of ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the Markt at the Stadhuis (City Hall basically).
Some of my happiest experiences abroad have been walking around small cities or towns, admiring hidden gardens, or exploring narrow streets that sometime give on to beautiful vistas, or spotting little architectural details, like this glowing blue tile on a shopfront in ‘s-Hertogenbosch.
On my first excursion into the city of Potsdam, I decided to visit Sanssouci. The simplicity of this intention revealed the depth of my ignorance. I knew the name ‘Sans Souci’ (French for ‘carefree’, or as the Australians would say, ‘no worries mate’) as the title of the summer palace of Frederick the Great. I had a vague idea that the palace was in a large park and that the park contained other buildings and structures. But, I reasoned, how complicated could it be? No doubt I would arrive at the palace and then tourist friendly signposts would point me in the direction of anything else I was inclined to see.
As I have written at length about elsewhere, seeing is not believing when it comes to the so-called historic centre of Potsdam.
There is history in Potsdam beyond the ‘historic centre’ however. The area in which I am housesitting was once a large East German military and Stasi training area. The pretty red brick buildings opposite my apartment complex, were housing for Russian soldiers during the Cold War.
When I arrived in Potsdam, I took a tram from the train station through the centre of the city to the more suburban area where my housesit is located. I passed a huge pink rococo building which I had assumed was one of the palaces of Frederick the Great.
Twenty kilometres south of the important site of Uxmal, is a 2740 acre national preserve which contains the ruins of another Mayan site, Kabah.
On the Sunday before I left ‘s-Herogenbosch for Berlin, I decided to visit Utrecht. I wandered up to the station to start my trip about mid-morning, when I felt like it. I love how many trains there are in Europe going just about everywhere, just about all the time.
The train station in Utrecht is modern and enormous. I made my way through the big shopping mall attached to the station, reflecting on how much Dutch I have been able to figure out, just because it looks a lot like English sometimes.