Bordeaux

Sorry it's been so long between posts - I didn't have any internet access in Italy. I will add some pictures to this tommorrow and also add another post for my time in Italy.

Day 17 (Wednesday 11th July)

It's 4pm and I'm sitting on a train on my way from Paris to Bordeaux. I saw most of the main tourist sights in Paris, but I would have liked to actually climb the Arc de Triomph, and to have visited the Musee d'Orsee and the modern museum. It would have been interesting to visit one of the cemeteries too. I will definitely come back to Paris one day if I have the chance.


Day 17 continued

Got to Bordeaux a bit after 5pm and caught a tram to my hotel. The room was a little small but the location was perfect and the people friendly. I asked the lady behind the desk to suggest a restaurant for dinner and she sent me to a place on a little lane leading away from one of the open squares. The roads in Bordeaux really are the tiny little alleyways that you see in movies or read about in books, and rectangular grids play no part in their layout. I found the restaurant ok and had a really nice traditional french dinner, starting with escargot. For desert I had proffiterole, but rather than several little proffiteroles the size of walnuts like Mum used to make this was a single large proffiterole the size of a grapefruit. It came with a scoop of coffee icecream in the middle and was delicious.


Day 18 (Thursday 12th July)

Went on a full day wine tour through the graves region of Bordeaux. Tasting in France is not like back home - in Australia you will usually be offered a bubbly if they make one, a dry white, a sweet white, two or three reds and often a desert wine or a fortified as well. The Chateaux we went to gave you one white and one red and that was it. The wine was nice, the scenery very beautiful, and I learnt a fair bit about the traditions behind wine making in Bordeaux. Single variety wines are quite common, maybe even the majority in Australia, whereas in Bordeaux they are almost entirely blends. Where a wine in Australia will emphasise what variety or varieties it is in Bordeaux you are almost never told. The name of the Chateaux that makes it and the region it comes from is supposed to tell you everything you need to know. The tour included lunch at one of the chateaux, which was delicious.


Day 19 (Friday 13th July)

I had to go down to the train station to book my tickets for the trip to Venice. This proved to be more of a challenge than I had anticipated: only one of the ticket sellers spoke English, and that not well; the train I had planned to catch was booked out and I had to get one six and a half hours earlier leaving at 5.50am; and the trip had to sections - one from Bordeaux to Nice, and then from Nice on to Venice, and the guy in Bordeaux didn't know how to book the Nice to Venice section. But after much patience and hand gesturing on both sides we finally got it sorted out.

After that I set out on foot to explore the Bordeaux township. It really is still the medieval town, and parts of the orginal defensive wall can still be seen. I climbed the steeple of one of the churches and got to look out over the town. It is almost entirely 3-4 stories high, with no single story dwellings and almost no highrise as well. The streets are so narrow and twisiting that when you look down on the roofs you can't even tell where they run.

The sun came out today and this was probably the first real summers day I have experienced. The temperature would have been about 30 degrees and the humidity about 60 percent which caused the locals to talk about the heat but as you can imagine didn't have a huge impact on a Darwin boy.

There is an interesting monument/park in town called the mirror of the moon. It is a stone plain with a variety of water jets that do different things in a rotating pattern. Sometimes it is no more than a millimetre thick sheen across the stones, sometimes it sprays out mist and almost vanishes in the cloud and at other times 5-8cm of water covers it. It has become the favourite playground of the local kids, and the young at heart, and draws a crowd on a summer afternoon.


Day 20 (Saturday 14th July - BASTILLE DAY)

It's about 2pm and I'm sitting on a train again, this time on my way from Bordeaux to Nice. I get to Nice around 2.30pm and then have 7 hours to look around before I get on the overnight sleeper train to Venice. It's Bastille Day out there, which is supposed to be big deal here although I haven't seen any sign of it yet as I've been on the train since before sunrise. Hopefully I can get in the swing of things this afternoon which may help me sleep better on the train tonight.