I got breakfast at a bakery today, which is a good place to start a rant. In Germany and much of Eastern Europe, one can buy cheap dairy products at bakeries in addition to baked goods, which is part of the reason, besides pastries' taking zero time to order or cook and being tasty, for which I grew so accustomed to stopping off at them for meals. No such luck in France. I usually drink water, which is not nearly as filling or healthy as milk or yogurt, when I eat pastries, which, in turn, forces me to buy more food later on to fill me up. France sucks, but you will here more about this later.
When I got to the train station, I discovered that the strike had, naturally, continued. I was lucky, though, in that it was barely going to affect my travel plans. I started reading Hermann Hesse's Magister Ludi, or The Glass Bead Game, which is probably even more pedantic than Midnight's Children, decided to read that book by the Japanese-British author about the butler instead, and got an yet another train to Saint Pierre des Corps, where I was to switch trains for Bordeaux.
What I remember form the train ride: fields of pale pink flowers, perhaps cultivated; rolling, sylvan hills; another castle; and a Frenchman with whom I talked about my travel plans and the strike.
"It is really terrible," he said in English. "Many people are commuting and cannot get home." He had taken the day off of work to go home to his family for the weekend, as he was not sure if he could catch a later train, as he would usually have done.
While I remember my conversation with the Frenchman as interesting, I recall little of its content, and the most interesting part about it was that it highlighted France's sucking. In France, everything is expensive, but nothing works -- it is a country of contradictions. France has incredible architecture, but the sidewalks are smeared with dog excrement; it has some of the oldest universities, as far as I know, in Europe, and yet its citizens seem barely educated enough to get its trains to work. The Czech Republic knows its place: while nothing in the Czech Republic works, everything is dirt cheap; the Czech Republic knows that it sucks. I would recommend that France either quit sucking or accept that it sucks, but I doubt that my words would have any impact. The French can be devilishly obstinate.
Bordeaux was a mirage of heat. As soon as I stepped off of the train, I could see that it was different from other French cities, as the man on the train said that it would be ("More Spanish," he said.). All of its buildings seemed to be made of sandstone or a kind of auburn brick, and all of them were falling apart. Bordeaux also had a highly-efficient tramway system, like Nantes, and an ideally-situated tourist office, both of which helped me to find my hotel quickly and start exploring the city.
The first thing that I did in Bordeaux was to get groceries. This alone led me to some cultural observations. Firstly, Bordeauxians are exceptionally solicitous. Every time I stopped to look at my giant tourist map for more than a few seconds, someone came up to me to ask if I needed help finding something; this happened three times over the course of, say, fifteen minutes. Another thing is that Bordeaux has very few buildings over three stories tall, but it is quite big, probably suggesting that many of its buildings were made centuries ago. Finally, I visited the best supermarket, I should think, that I have seen on this trip, but I did not start this blog in order to laud supermarkets. Suffice it to say that I got everything that I would need for the next two days for less than the price of dinner.
Bordeaux itself was a phantasmagoria. Many of its roads seemed to stretch for miles, each side of the street lined with old buildings with their shuttered windows, jutting window frames, and blue, wrought-iron gates with insignia - perhaps, the city stamp, or what have you - embossed in the stone above them. Near the city center, men walking in front of me vanished into unlit laundromats and empty cafes with names like "Carthage" and doorways barely wide enough to enter. Unshaven men in threadbare shorts cycled lazily down the middle of the road. Men with faces as dark and smooth as polished mahogany smoked cigarettes on their stoops, watching impassively. People walked in the streets, driven there by sidewalks too narrow to walk on. Cars drove or parked on wider sidewalks. Cars and people formed one chaotic, whirling flow in the labyrinthine heat of the city's searing asphalt.
Bordeaux was probably rich at one point -- its heyday appears to have been six hundred years ago -- but it now creates the impression of appalling poverty. Again I saw the suitcase, desk fan, cloth, key chain, rubber boot stores; again I saw dead grocery stores with stacks of despondent-looking fruit. Nowhere are people as desperate to sell things, as far as my experience goes, as in the poorer areas in France. (Yes, this just goes to show how limited my experience is.) People seem more suspicious, more on-edge in cities like Bordeaux. I am reminded of having stood in front of a cathedral in Paris across from which, in a little park peppered with benches, a bunch of bums were lounging, and only across the street from them were again normal cafes with normal people. (I do not mean to be so down on bums; I am looking at them more as a reflection of poverty than a problem in themselves.) I do not mean to be so down on Bordeaux as a city, but it was shockingly poor, reinforcing the unexpectedness of many sides of this trip to France.
I have few observations with which to end this letter. Firstly, this hotel, like the one in Blois, is environmentally-friendly, yet another French contradiction (They care about the environment, but the air in Bordeaux is cigarette smoke.). Like many large French cities, Bordeaux was treeless. One could walk for several blocks in the center of town without seeing any greenery besides clumps of weeds or grass growing in cracks in the sidewalk. The French countryside seems like an antidote to the hell of its cities: the poppies and the wildflowers, yellow and tangerine orange, outside of Angers were spectacular, and the hills and trees breathed with life. The birdsong in Angers was the best that I had heard on trip so far (Few birds besides pigeons and swallows were dumb enough to live in Bordeaux.). The best birds that I have so far heard were little buggers the size of chickadees, but with ruddy plumage. France is full of reminders of both world wars, and it seems that the French are very grateful to the Americans for having liberated them, as there are streets and plazas named after American presidents. Finally, a Russian idiom to finish things off: the stingy pay twice over. If I had been willing to pay for a slightly better hotel in Nantes with a cancellation plan, I would have avoided having to pay more for a last-minute booking and pay for a booking that I did not even use (as it was on the wrong day). I hardly ever make hotel reservations that cannot be cancelled for free, but I expect that I had found the cheapest one available and been overly confident that my route through France would not change. Perhaps it would have been better to have gotten a more expensive, but higher-quality product the first time around, as a low-quality one will generally fail to work and require that one buy the high-quality one in the end anyway.
That was not quite the finish. The real finish of this post is what I have been saying all along: on future trips, I am not going to try to see reasonable amounts at a time of whatever countries I visit. That more or less concludes my thoughts for now.
When I got to the train station, I discovered that the strike had, naturally, continued. I was lucky, though, in that it was barely going to affect my travel plans. I started reading Hermann Hesse's Magister Ludi, or The Glass Bead Game, which is probably even more pedantic than Midnight's Children, decided to read that book by the Japanese-British author about the butler instead, and got an yet another train to Saint Pierre des Corps, where I was to switch trains for Bordeaux.
What I remember form the train ride: fields of pale pink flowers, perhaps cultivated; rolling, sylvan hills; another castle; and a Frenchman with whom I talked about my travel plans and the strike.
"It is really terrible," he said in English. "Many people are commuting and cannot get home." He had taken the day off of work to go home to his family for the weekend, as he was not sure if he could catch a later train, as he would usually have done.
While I remember my conversation with the Frenchman as interesting, I recall little of its content, and the most interesting part about it was that it highlighted France's sucking. In France, everything is expensive, but nothing works -- it is a country of contradictions. France has incredible architecture, but the sidewalks are smeared with dog excrement; it has some of the oldest universities, as far as I know, in Europe, and yet its citizens seem barely educated enough to get its trains to work. The Czech Republic knows its place: while nothing in the Czech Republic works, everything is dirt cheap; the Czech Republic knows that it sucks. I would recommend that France either quit sucking or accept that it sucks, but I doubt that my words would have any impact. The French can be devilishly obstinate.
Bordeaux was a mirage of heat. As soon as I stepped off of the train, I could see that it was different from other French cities, as the man on the train said that it would be ("More Spanish," he said.). All of its buildings seemed to be made of sandstone or a kind of auburn brick, and all of them were falling apart. Bordeaux also had a highly-efficient tramway system, like Nantes, and an ideally-situated tourist office, both of which helped me to find my hotel quickly and start exploring the city.
The first thing that I did in Bordeaux was to get groceries. This alone led me to some cultural observations. Firstly, Bordeauxians are exceptionally solicitous. Every time I stopped to look at my giant tourist map for more than a few seconds, someone came up to me to ask if I needed help finding something; this happened three times over the course of, say, fifteen minutes. Another thing is that Bordeaux has very few buildings over three stories tall, but it is quite big, probably suggesting that many of its buildings were made centuries ago. Finally, I visited the best supermarket, I should think, that I have seen on this trip, but I did not start this blog in order to laud supermarkets. Suffice it to say that I got everything that I would need for the next two days for less than the price of dinner.
Bordeaux itself was a phantasmagoria. Many of its roads seemed to stretch for miles, each side of the street lined with old buildings with their shuttered windows, jutting window frames, and blue, wrought-iron gates with insignia - perhaps, the city stamp, or what have you - embossed in the stone above them. Near the city center, men walking in front of me vanished into unlit laundromats and empty cafes with names like "Carthage" and doorways barely wide enough to enter. Unshaven men in threadbare shorts cycled lazily down the middle of the road. Men with faces as dark and smooth as polished mahogany smoked cigarettes on their stoops, watching impassively. People walked in the streets, driven there by sidewalks too narrow to walk on. Cars drove or parked on wider sidewalks. Cars and people formed one chaotic, whirling flow in the labyrinthine heat of the city's searing asphalt.
Bordeaux was probably rich at one point -- its heyday appears to have been six hundred years ago -- but it now creates the impression of appalling poverty. Again I saw the suitcase, desk fan, cloth, key chain, rubber boot stores; again I saw dead grocery stores with stacks of despondent-looking fruit. Nowhere are people as desperate to sell things, as far as my experience goes, as in the poorer areas in France. (Yes, this just goes to show how limited my experience is.) People seem more suspicious, more on-edge in cities like Bordeaux. I am reminded of having stood in front of a cathedral in Paris across from which, in a little park peppered with benches, a bunch of bums were lounging, and only across the street from them were again normal cafes with normal people. (I do not mean to be so down on bums; I am looking at them more as a reflection of poverty than a problem in themselves.) I do not mean to be so down on Bordeaux as a city, but it was shockingly poor, reinforcing the unexpectedness of many sides of this trip to France.
I have few observations with which to end this letter. Firstly, this hotel, like the one in Blois, is environmentally-friendly, yet another French contradiction (They care about the environment, but the air in Bordeaux is cigarette smoke.). Like many large French cities, Bordeaux was treeless. One could walk for several blocks in the center of town without seeing any greenery besides clumps of weeds or grass growing in cracks in the sidewalk. The French countryside seems like an antidote to the hell of its cities: the poppies and the wildflowers, yellow and tangerine orange, outside of Angers were spectacular, and the hills and trees breathed with life. The birdsong in Angers was the best that I had heard on trip so far (Few birds besides pigeons and swallows were dumb enough to live in Bordeaux.). The best birds that I have so far heard were little buggers the size of chickadees, but with ruddy plumage. France is full of reminders of both world wars, and it seems that the French are very grateful to the Americans for having liberated them, as there are streets and plazas named after American presidents. Finally, a Russian idiom to finish things off: the stingy pay twice over. If I had been willing to pay for a slightly better hotel in Nantes with a cancellation plan, I would have avoided having to pay more for a last-minute booking and pay for a booking that I did not even use (as it was on the wrong day). I hardly ever make hotel reservations that cannot be cancelled for free, but I expect that I had found the cheapest one available and been overly confident that my route through France would not change. Perhaps it would have been better to have gotten a more expensive, but higher-quality product the first time around, as a low-quality one will generally fail to work and require that one buy the high-quality one in the end anyway.
That was not quite the finish. The real finish of this post is what I have been saying all along: on future trips, I am not going to try to see reasonable amounts at a time of whatever countries I visit. That more or less concludes my thoughts for now.
 |
| Bordeaux's architects were anathema to passable streets. |
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