Sète!

(Video from the highest point in Sète)

Yesterday I went to Sète, it's marked in yellow, further south than Montpellier. It's known as the Venice of France, and it definitely lived up to it's name yesterday. Gorgeous!

We got off the bus a little too early and had to walk a ways to the office of tourism. Oh darn, had to stare at this for a half hour, my life is obviously so difficult...

SETE

So after a beautiful walk we got to the main center of the city...

Like...seriously, what is this amazingness??? Half of the conversation between us was something like :"it's so pretty here, it's so peaceful here, I'm so jealous of the people who get to live here."

The office of tourism was definitely the way to go, the lady was super helpful in telling us where the best places are, how to get there, etc. 

We first went to this museum, which was open to the public for free due to the Patrimoine weekend, more on that in the next blog post. 

I have no idea what this critter was, but I liked it. 

Monsieur Paul Valery himself, my university's namesake.

I'm generally not a museum person, but I really liked some of the stuff there

A huge cemetery

Bonjour Chat...

Then we trekked up, and up, and up to the highest point in Sète, it was a nice little hike. 

The view

There are a few things in life that will always, always, without fail make me happy. One of those is finding any sort of fruit tree/edible plant that I can access, preferably without needing to hop a fence. So I was overjoyed when we found fig trees everywhere. 

We found Chapelle de la Notre Dame de la Salette, which was way different than any European church I have ever seen. Very interesting, I liked it a lot. 

These grow all over the place here, I've never seen anything like it

Then we walked along the Mediterranean all the way back to downtown. 

We got back, ate some lunch. I had a Tielle Sétoise, which is a traditional dish of the area. 

http://www.lsf-france.com/typical-dish-from-sete-the-tielle-setoise-2/

It's filled with calamari and a tomato sauce, fantastic.

Then we bused to the beach, where I jumped in the water, then proceeded to fall asleep on the sand. I had slept only a few hours the night before due to an unsuccessful attempt to go to a "discotheque" the night before and we had walked all day, so the nap was nice. 

Total, the trip - food and transportation - cost less than 10 euro. It was definitely a success. I highly recommend it. Ahh, so fantastic to get away for a little bit.