Ice skating

Skating with Russian speakers: how it works

Of all our meet-ups in town, skating takes the least organising. The organiser posts a day and a time in the chat, anyone who’s coming replies by direct message, and at the rink everyone buys their own ticket and hires their own skates. There’s no community fee: the only money involved goes to the rink, and you pay for yourself and nobody else. You don’t need to be able to skate, and the invitation says so in plain words: “any level”. Once on the ice you can go round in a group, take photos, or just lean on the boards and talk.

Végapolis is a big indoor rink in the Odysseum district of Montpellier, with a main arena and a tunnel lit up in colour. It’s open all year round, which is why we’ve found a reason to go out on the ice in August as well as in October. You don’t need a car: Odysseum is the last stop on tram line 1, and the rink is a few minutes’ walk from the stop. If you do drive, you park at the shopping centre.

24 August 2025: ice in the middle of a heatwave

The first outing grew out of the one thing everyone in the chat was talking about at the end of August: where to hide from the heat. Kayaks, water and shade were all on the table when the organiser came at the problem from the opposite direction and suggested ice skating. The announcement went up on 18 August, six days before the Sunday. The rink was open from 14:00 to 19:00 that day, and we met at 16:00 - enough time for the ticket desk and the hire counter, with three hours of ice still to come.

Entry and skate hire together came to €10 a head, with no limit on how long you skated. The main request in the announcement was about clothes: “Don’t forget a hat, gloves and socks!” A woolly hat is a hard thing to put on when it’s forty degrees outside, but on the ice your hands start to freeze after twenty minutes, and the socks are for wearing under hired skates.

At 15:56 the organiser posted straight from the ice: “We’re at the rink. Anyone who was planning to come - join us.” Around five a video landed in the chat, though nobody posted photos that day; a couple of shots from the ice turned up later. It was a small group, the chat never recorded exactly how many, and we won’t make up a number. What we got was exactly what we’d had in mind: laps of the ice in shorts and woolly hats at the same time. Then on 2 September the organiser asked: “Shall we do skating again one weekend in October?” That’s how a one-off idea turned into a series.

4 October 2026: opening the skating season

We went back on the first Sunday of October. The announcement was short: meet at 14:00 by the rink on Place de France, and bring hats, gloves and “a bit of courage to actually get out on the ice”. The day before, a picture went up in the channel: a raccoon in a beret, on skates, asking “Skating tomorrow? Let’s go!”

We started in the tunnel, where four people in hats and hoodies took a selfie under red, green and yellow light; that was the first photo to go round the chat. Then came the main ice, where one of us held another by the hands while she glided along bent forward with her arms out wide - which is precisely what the courage was for. To finish, we laid our skates in a circle with the toes pointing in and shot them from above: black hockey skates, red-and-black ones, white figure skates. That’s now our group photo from the rink.

How to join the next outing

We’ll announce the next outing in the chat, with the day, the time to meet and the meeting point by the rink. Bring a hat, gloves and warm socks; skates are hired on the spot, so you don’t need your own. If you’ve never stood on ice before, say so in the chat - there’s a reason the invitation says “any level”.