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As I was walking to work this morning, listening to my mp3 player, the album 'Time' by ELO was playing, which I thought was a particularly appropriate choice for the slight feeling of disconnection which I'm living with.

Yesterday, after work, my fellow American Eric and I decided to go into Montpellier proper and look around. He was interested in finding a French-English dictionary, and I was interested in going out and seeing more. (Also, postcards). So we walked down to the train station, which is in the middle of a small mall containing a movie theatre (which holds both American and French movies) and two restaurants, one of which seemed to be American-themed.

The electronic screen for the train thankfully had a 'change language' feature, so it wasn't difficult to get ourselves round trip tickets into the city. We weren't entirely sure where to get off, so we chose a likely spot (outside of a train station) and got off of the tram. We then started wandering around the city.

It turns out that most stores in Montpellier close by 7 (19h), which meant we were too late for them. We were on time for one small cigarette and candy seller, who had two racks of postcards out on the street. I bought three, as well as two candybars, one which is a Mars bar and the other was a 'Lion' bar, which turned out to be wafers covered with chocolate and rice crisps. Now, if I can only find out how to get postage!

We also found a music store (Eric plays guitar, and bought a travel electric guitar which is marvelous in it's small size and features), but it was closed already (see last paragraph). Although there were restaurants and bars open, Eric and I decided we were tired (and a little worried about when the tram stops running), so we returned to our home stop (which is luckily at the end of the line and thus very easy to remember) and stopped at a restaurant called 'US Route 66'.

US Route 66 is like an applebees reflected in French culture. It features fajitas, pizzas (Eric had been in Chicago, Oklahoma, and Texas, and told me that he'd never seen the pizzas named after these areas in those areas), burgers, and other American food. Although the Waitress did not really understand much English, we got by by pointing to the menu and doing our best to pronounce the French. This worked well enough. My cheeseburger was pretty good, and it was American enough a place that my fries came with both mayonaise and ketchup. Eric's chicken fajitas weren't too bad either, although the mixture of chicken and peppers were covered with cheese sauce instead of having shredded cheese to sprinkle on top.

But hey - we ate, it was good. There was a bit of confusion at the end - apparently in France there's no tipping of waiters anymore - but we paid the bill and walked back to the hotel, where I established that I wasn't going to be able to use the internet in my room, and just sat around and read stuff on the computer.

This morning breakfast was at a buffet, as I did not oversleep. Croisant, coffee, some chocolate flavored cereal, and some bread and jam. Nummy, if simple, and that done I wandered back to work and typed this up.

More later!