bordeaux

Finally, updating my travel stories! I don't have any pics of Bordeaux, but I just finished the ones from the Pays Basque.

My friend and I didn't actually do too much in Bordeaux, as most of the activities there have to do with long wine tours just outside of the city. We didn't have the money or time to do those, so we mostly just walked around.

On the way down (around a 3.5 hour train ride) we sat across from a French guy about our age who seemed mildly interested in listening to us, though it didn't seem like he understood much. He was wearing a Mets hat and I was curious about it, so after a while I asked if he was a fan. He said a friend who lives in New York gave it to him, but he's never been there himself. But, he added, next year his company (the Societe Generale) will be sending him to live there for a couple of years. He turned out to be from Bayonne, a city in the Basque region we were about to visit. So he was interested in what I had to say about New York, and he gave us advice about what to do in Bordeaux and the Pays Basque.

The three of us (including Julien, this French guy) got off the train at a station next to Bordeaux, but there was some sort of transportation strike that would make it difficult to get into the city. He explained this and said his sister was picking him up from there and could drive us, too. (Okay, so that sounds sketchy, but he had been very helpful and informative so we decided it was okay to go with him.) She was just as nice as him and drove us to our hostel, and even invited us out with her friends later.

After leaving them we walked to the city center and scouted out places to do wine tasting and get food. Bordeaux has very few boulangeries and patisseries - shops where you get fresh bread, pastries, sandwiches, etc, where we eat most of the time - but an abundance of wine bars. So while it was a challenge finding real food, we got plenty of wine tasting opportunities. We decided probably the people in Bordeaux drink wine all day instead of eating.

The city is very 18th century, packed with elegant and stately brownstones with small wrought-iron balconies and laid out in wide avenues and lots of circles. Most parks and squares have Neo-Classical designs, particularly the area around the town hall. I can't think of an area of NYC to compare it to (sort of like around Columbus Circle, I guess) but for those of you who know Paris, most of Bordeaux resembles the areas of Trocadero or the Ecole Militaire/Invalides.

There is a cathedral in the middle of the city that seemed like your typical late Gothic structure, but it turned out to be very strangely set up and slightly traumatizing for someone who has been studying church architecture. We saw it from far away and noted the two towers sticking up over the buildings of the town. Nothing unusual in that. So we walked towards it and eventually could see the normal-looking facade with the traditional three doors, biggest in the middle, and the portals above them...everything was fine until I noticed that the cross shape seemed off. Normally churches are set up in a cross pattern, and the main entrance is at the bottom of it, so you walk through the longest portion and up to the transept, where the lines cross each other. Sometimes in redoing the entrances, they will make you go through one of the small doors on the short arms of the cross, but the original main entrance is always at the bottom.

This one, however, has its real main entrance - towers, portals, everything - on the left arm of the cross. What?! I walked around to the bottom to see if a change was made to the original layout, and indeed there was evidence that there used to be a door there, but nothing indicating any towers or main portal there. This cathedral is lopsided. The inside was really pretty, actually, but I was very distracted by its outside craziness. All this fuss probably seems like I'm overreacting, but it was WEIRD.

Soon after leaving the cathedral we got a text from Charlotte, the girl who drove us into the city, saying she'd pick us up in 20 minutes. Oops. We had to book it back to our hostel an change quickly before she arrived. She took us to her apartment (very large for a student apartment!), where there were probably 15 other students, her friends. They were all extremely nice and excited to meet us, but hardly any spoke English at all. One guy insisted he spoke well but actually was worse than most Parisians I meet. Another girl had an incredible accent (she sounds British, one would hardly know from her accent that she was French) but a very limited vocabulary.

It was a typical college-type hang out session - with a bunch of people just sitting around talking and listening to music - except the food. The French equivalent of college snacky food is little handmade pizzas, baguettes with a vast selection of cheese, crab, and other random food one would probably never see in an American student's apartment (unless it's me or Carol, I suppose!)

Anyway, all the students were really interesting and cool. The Universite de Bordeaux is the largest campus in France, so I suppose the most diverse, too. They were all eager to discuss politics, language, and cultural differences between the U.S. and France with us, and ask questions about student life in the U.S. We even met a couple of guys from Guinea who are studying there; they were particularly interesting to talk to, and it made me happy to be able to talk with people whom I certainly wouldn't have been able to without French.

Unfortunately my allergies had been bad that week since things had started blooming, and without tissues an such I was fast becoming a mess. Around 2 we went to a club with them but I had to leave soon after, although they tried to convince us to stay out until 4 with them. It was a really good time, and definitely worth giving up some sightseeing time, as we actually made a bunch of interesting French friends.