Internet access at last!

Saturday, September 4, 2010 Day 66

Roger is beginning to chafe under the lack of internet access. He has finished all the e-books on his computer and is dying for more. He is thinking about taking his computer to the internet café down the street, but when I was there yesterday, I didn’t need my computer – there were already plenty of computers with quite large (21” diagonal? larger?) and there were probably 20 or so mostly guys in there playing computer games. I had taken my computer because I needed to get on-line to print a form from there, but I had put the other docs on a flash drive so there was not much of a problem accessing them. I don’t know if they will let him use his own computer there or not.

Francis arrived at 2:00 and checked a few things out while waiting for Orange to call. They finally did, and after he worked a bit of magic, we had internet service! Thank you, Francis! It appears that the internet option had been turned off at the Orange for some reason, as if the customer opted out of it temporarily. But we don’t really care what the problem is, we are just very glad to have an internet connection again. Further, Francis said he would bill Mr. Stevenson for the work!

We were so starved for on-line access that we stayed in the apartment on the internet until close to 6:00, when we forced ourselves to get up and out for a bit. We walked for probably an hour, reacquainting ourselves first with the Peyrou, which is a large plaza area at the highest point of Montpellier. The plaza is built of interlinking terraces and stone staircases and is capped with an Arc de Triomphe. At the opposite end of the plaza is the Aqueduct St. Clement, which runs for 15 km and was built in the 18th century to supply water to the city. It supplies water to the city fountains. I think, but have not been able to ascertain, that the plaza is built on a huge water tank fed by the aqueduct. It is topped by a structure called a water tank, which marks the greatest height to which a building can be built in Montpellier. From there we explored the botanical gardens a bit, although they are large and we did not take the time to tour them extensively. When we were here in the fall, a portion of the more formal gardens was closed. We will be investigating further in greater detail at a future date – the gardens, which are a ten-minute walk from our apartment, are a lovely place to have a picnic.

We noticed that the area seems rather dry – I do not know when it last rained here. Many of the trees along the Peyrou have leaves which have begun to turn yellow and brown and fall off. Other areas look similarly dry. Historically July and August are dry months, and the past couple of months could have been even dryer than normal – I haven’t kept track. These first few days in the south have been warm but not too hot, for which we are grateful since our apartment doesn’t have air conditioning. We do have fans, which help considerably. Once the sun goes down, the ambient air cools off. We open our windows and the interior of the apartment becomes quite tolerable.