As I already talked about, since a few weeks the new Shopping Center: Centre Commercial Odysseum is opened. As many locals and oponents of this whole shopping center already said, the traffic is a mess. Of course, many nice shops, but the traffic was and is a problem. The narrow entrance roads that lead to the Shopping Center all go to and through lots of roundabouts. Those roundabouts have not just the mainroads going to, also the sideroads are busy roads. So the traffic lines up many meter/kilometers. Last week I was lucky to start work late afternoon and so I used a quiet morning to go to the Centre Commercial and do some sightseeing and shopping. I found the new, big Bookstore / DVD/Musicstore Sauramps and a nice toy store. Lots of shoe, bag, clothes stores. I even found the machines to pay the parkingticket. But while trying to find a parking I was also a little confused, like others as well. The entrance ways are still not marked clear enough. One parkinggarage entrance road is more like a dead end road. Well if you continue you are in the tram station at the Odysseum. If you want to return, you have to maneuver your car in a smal area. Overall, pretty bad.
Anyway I took some pictures from the nice looking upper Level with the blue sky (that we still have, even though the temperatures went down from 27C to 17C during the day and down to 4C at night).
Saturday I drove to Montpellier and I took my Videocamera with me. Well, almost as expected, the traffic was bad. From Autoroute A9, Exit 29 was already a traffic jam backing up to th right lane on A9. Took about 10 minutes to finally get to the mainroad to Montpellier. I taped it on Video and made a small Video.
Right now the Exits are reconstructed. So hopefully in the near future the traffic from the Highway is having a easier exit 🙂
But the exits will be stressed even more. The Montpellier Football (soccer) Team is in the premier League since this year and they are good, very good. They are on top of the teams together with Lyon. Also Rugby is of course still a huge thing here in Montpellier. So we will see, how the future will be.
Ah well, I also uploaded a video for Fabian. Some TGV Trains going through Baillargues trainstation (in HD):
In a few days I will see my family again, I am so excited. Just finished cleaning the apartment a bit 🙂
A bientot
Marc-Eric