Bordeaux

While in the US we celebrate Halloween, in France, they celebrate the Day of the Dead. Essentially the same thing, the difference is that the French get a day off on Nov 1 for this day. I have all confidence that each and every French person is honoring their ancestors on this free Monday, I’m just not as sure that they all went to church to do so, thus the necessity of a day off is….? No complaints from me though. 3 day weekend for me! My roommate and I decided about a month ago that we wanted to spend this weekend in the Bordeaux region as it is a part of France neither of us had been to. We had a little wavering when the strikes were happening because our plan was to rent a car and the strikes were making shortages of fuel. Cars without fuel don’t work too well. Thankfully the striking subsided enough and the Ministry of the Interior went around all the strikers anyway and imported fuel from Russia and Italy before breaking up the blockages in the French distribution system, so we had plenty of fuel to get to Bordeaux. We left Friday night after work and drove mostly in the dark to get there. Not that interesting…until we actually drove into the city and then it was awesome that we arrived at night. Bordeaux does a great job of lighting up its city at night. The buildings have great architecture and the bridge over the Garonne River is illuminated and looks really neat. The Gambetta theme of this trip started in Bordeaux and by that I mean that in every city we visited in the southwest there was something named Gambetta. In Bordeaux, it was the place in which our hotel was located just off of. (I just wikipedia-ed for you and he was a French statesman who came to prominence after the Franco-Prussian war. Consider yourself educated.) I either haven’t been paying very good attention or he is really just popular in the southwest, because I have never heard his name before this trip. He was with us every step of the way on this one though.
Despite the rain we walked around Bordeaux a bit when we arrived and walked to the Esplanade to see the fair that was going on. It reminded me of Oktoberfest if no one had gone. Really it was just like any other fair at home with horribly-bad for you food and over-priced games. Interesting to walk through it in France though and feel like I could be in a Springfield somewhere in the US.
The next day our culinary opinion of Bordeaux did not get the proper introduction I’m sure, because we waited 30 minutes for sandwiches at an outdoor that were absolutely awful. I was hoping for something about 400% better, but good food can’t be found with ease all the time, so we’ll chalk that one up to just a bad choice by us. We did get to enjoy the sunshine and some intriguing people watching. We saw the funny looking cathedral, I say that because the spires are on the side and not at the head of the church. It is always nice to see interesting twists on standard church designs. We attempted in vain to use the size of Bordeaux and its abundance of shopping, to find my roommate a pair of boots, but had to move on without a purchase. While I wasn’t in Bordeaux for a significant amount of time, I really enjoyed the city and its exuberance.