We arrived at lunchtime and the city was awash in green. Ireland was slated to play Georgia that night in Bordeaux and it seemed half the city was speaking English, but with sweet accents! I was amused by the rather Harry Potterishness of it all, where as in the beginning of the fourth book, Ireland plays Bulgaria in the Quidditch World Cup (which is very similar to rugby, right?) The Irish were even wearing silly green top hats and long green scarves. After sandwiches we decided that first thing was first and started with a couple "maison du vin" or wine houses to witness the local product. The prices ranged from € 2 to € 2,300 a bottle, including a 1955 bottle we saw 
locked behind glass. One wine house went straight up four stories of spiral staircase; the whole way lined with shelf after shelf of local Rouge, Rosé and Blanche. Across town, we checked out the peaceful St. Michael of Bordeaux and then wandered back through the Arab part of town and then the trendy shopping district to find the UNESCO protected, and totally enormous St. André cathedral, which was started in the 1000's. This visit was followed by a café stop where I indulged in my new love of chocolate-almond croissants. We spent the rest of the afternoon napping in the incredibly beautiful and very popular Public Gardens, full of dogs, freebies, classic Fords on display, picnickers, swans, and puppet shows and for a while a wonderful Jazz Cello accompanied by piano and drums. 
We continued our weekend of excessive eating at a little Italian café where I had homemade fresh pasta with pesto that wasn't quite as amazing as I was hoping. We headed out after dinner in search of a big screen in a square to watch the rest of the rugby game; ironically three of us had three tops on. We found it in time to catch the last 10 minutes of the game, drink a pint of beer and cheer on Ireland as they barely managed to pull back the lead from Georgia at the last minute. 
After the game we wandered back into town to find a place to sleep (i.e. a park) and stopped into a tiny Kabab shop that was still open to buy a bottle of cheap wine and some more beer. To our surprise we spent the next twenty minutes having our ears talked off by a rather flamboyant and very drunk Moroccan who in fairly good English informed us that all real French people smell like garbage, Americans are nice, our French was excellent and insisted we take the shops wine for free and eat something. He also introduced us to his "new friends" the Russian lady and the other poor Arab souls who were enjoying a late nigh Kabab in the little shop. It was absolutely hilarious. Joel and I split our bottle of really cheap Rosé that tasted like a bad red as we headed in search of sleeping arrangements. Jack, our slightly more stressed out traveling companion, insisted on checking with hotels we passed for open rooms, but of course, no luck. We finally walked most of the way across town, hopped the wall of a park (they are almost always locked at night in France) and spent a rather sleepless, incredibly cold (Joel, Amy and I spooned all night for warmth) and slightly damp night in the grass. We moved to a new park at seven to avoid the police and dozed until the sun just started to warm up the city. I felt it was an extremely interesting experience, as I have never been, in a sense, homeless. It was hard to walk past glowing warm windows and know that tonight, I was going to be cold and sleep deprived and that there was nothing I could do about it. But as I lay in the park I was thankful that my belly was full and that I couldn't hear the sound of missiles or AK-47's in the background as so many people do in this world do, every night.
We kicked off our morning with fresh squeezed orange juice, pastries and, of course, café and headed down the check out the open-air fish market by the quay. It was particularly cool and filled with extra tasty looking pre-prepared dishes in addition to the usual array of very fresh fish. Jack wanted to try oysters, so I downed by first oyster shooter with Jack and Joel, who'd never tired them either. It was, well, interesting. Slimy and it tasted like the sea... I wasn't so impressed. But then Joel, (he's posing with it on the left, next to our oysters) treated us to a Delicious bottle of Rouge and we sat around drinking red wine in the market for over an hour at 11 o'clock in the morning. It was wonderful. We also checked out the farmer's 
market next door that had beautiful fresh molded cheeses that were intensely decorated and also intensely expensive! We ate lunch at a cute little café that served traditional French dishes in little terracotta casserole dishes, mostly right out of the oven. Jack ended up with odd mounds of black goo in his lunch served with mashed potatoes and applesauce, but I gave it a taste and it wasn't too bad. I discovered later looking in my travel guide that it was blood sausage, or basically just curdled blood. Lovely. We topped lunch off with scrumptious ice cream cones. Joel and Amy dared to get "les puits d'amour" (wells of love), which consisted of four ice cream scoops and topped with an absolute mountain of whipped cream and hot chocolate sauce! We nursed pained stomachs in a park across the river and then caught a late train home to end a weekend of food and wine and more food!
This is a group of most of the Indepent students (students without an organizing program here) that went to a fancy dinner last weekend to celebrate the end of the Pré-Stage. We are posing with our (lucky) monitor Dario, who has also become a friend of ours. Actually it was his house we were drinking beer and watching moives at last week, and he has a rather sweet vespa, on which he likes to give "Italian Driving Lessons"....
No comments:
Post a Comment