On the other side of the traffic circle was a place called ATAC that appeared to be some kind of supermarket, or perhaps even a discount store. It advertised itself as being open 24 hours, so I figured it ought to be open now (around 6pm). It wasn't. In fact, it looked as if it were locked up tight. So I turned and kept on walking.
Across the expressway (the Tours Peripherique) was the suburb of Joué les Tours (Play the Tours?????). This was where that "self check-in" hotel was located, and it could have been a dumpy little suburb anywhere in the developed world. A two-lane highway led past pole building businesses, ramshackle bungalows, eight-plex apartment courts, and schools surrounded by portable classrooms. The place had all the charm of Coralville in the '60s, but it wasn't an unpleasant walk.
My only stop was at a brand new McDonalds, which was really about the most interesting thing in Joué les Tours. They had a McDonaldland and a "McDrive" (a drive-thru). I had orange juice (which this time was from the standard machine, not fresh squeezed from the juicer) and a caramel sundae (try saying the word "sundae" to make it sound like a French word). The sundae was only €1.00, but the juice cost a steep €2.70. The help here was definitely different than in Paris. There fast food counters were staffed by immigrant women; here it was local schoolboys, just what you'd see on the evening shift in Iowa.
By the time I got back to the hotel it was nearly time for dinner. We ate at the hotel restaurant, which was very nice. The first course was a shrimp quiche. Never having cared much for any kind of seafood, I attempted to eat the eggs and leave the shrimp. That was followed by prime rib, with roasted potatoes and onions on the side, and then by apple tarts for dessert. While I may not have liked everything, I certainly couldn't complain about not being well fed on this trip.
After dinner I went out walking again. This time I took a stroll through the park next to the hotel. Parc des Bretonnieres (the park of the people from Brittany-and I wonder if "Bretonnieres" might not be some sort of service club) is a medium-sized city park built around a small lake. They have one of those fitness trails going through it, where you're supposed to stop every so often and do different calisthenics. I passed on on that, but I did have a pleasant walk through the park.
When I returned to the hotel Margaret and her Cresco comrades were sitting in the bar having coffee. They were discussing the trauma de jour, a girl whose ATM card wouldn't work. What apparently happened was that her card was set up to draw funds from a savings account, but in Europe the cards automatically take money from checking. The girl was in tears about it, and didn't seem to be comforted when Margaret and Michelle offered to loan her money until things were straightened out. Eventually they were able to contact her father, who transferred money to the correct account. That took time, though, and of course a couple of days is forever to a teenager.
Back in the room Paul and I flipped through the channels of French TV, which I can't say I found terribly inspiring. I don't speak French anywhere close to well enough to really understand television. I wish they had closed captioning, because I'm pretty sure I could get a lot of things through reading that I can't get through listening. That advance doesn't seem to exist yet in France, though, so I didn't catch much on TV.
Closed captioning is one of many ways that our country seems far ahead of Europe (and France in particular) in our treatment of handicapped people. I can't imagine being a disabled person in France. There are almost no sidewalk cuts and very few ramps, elevators, or handicapped restrooms in public buildings. I don't think any of the metro stations in Paris was handicap-equipped, and even if they were you'd have to be able to reach that lever that opens the doors. There were no accommodations for blind people, like the Braille signs you see in hotels here or the elevators that beep each time they pass a floor. We'd find that Spain was much better in its accommodation of the handicapped, but both countries could take a lesson from the Americans with Disabilities Act.
While there may not be accommodations for the handicapped, not speaking the language really wouldn't present much of a problem in France. I had heard from other people that the French had an attitude about their language and that they insisted that everyone speak it and speak it properly. If that was true in the past, it certainly isn't today. In Paris it was almost literally true that everyone spoke English, or at least enough English to deal with tourists. English was less common away from Paris, but service people were certainly pleasant about dealing with less than flawless French. When worse came to worse, the "point and smile" method worked just fine. There were English signs and guidebooks at all the touristic points of interest and in all the hotels we stayed at, and all the hotel desk staff appeared to be multilingual. I'm glad I knew at least a little French, but really it seemed less important here than in Quebec (the other place I've used it).
Eventually the TV became boring, so we just nodded off to sleep in the pleasant air-conditioned coolness.
I was up at 6am this morning. I enjoyed one of the most pleasant showers on the trip and then stuffed myself on the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet they served in the hotel restaurant. I had cereal (Frosted flakes), yogurt, rolls, a croissant, fruit, applesauce, juice, and coffee ... and I could have had quite a bit more.
We left the hotel around 7:30 and again got thoroughly lost driving around the city of Tours. Eventually we found the main information office, where we met our local guide. Her name sounded like Aubergine (eggplant???), but might have been something like Opeline. She showed us a few of the sites in downtown Tours (a place I would like to have gotten out and explored), and then we were on the autoroute back north.
When she talked on the bus microphone this guide was one of the most boring, unintelligible people I have ever heard. She was sitting just one seat in front of me, yet I could barely understand her. Most of what I did catch amounted to glaring grammatical errors-like a king who she said "died quite youngly".
There was a sign for road construction along the autoroute. It amounted to a group of people who were sweeping the expressway, by hand. It's interesting that that while "safety orange" is the color of construction in America, in Europe everything is a sort of Mountain Dew green-that same color they tried to paint fire trucks for a few years, until everyone complained because they weren't red.
We went north past that same €18.40 toll booth and then exited on to the old road, which we followed back south through the Loire Valley. We went through a bunch of dumpy little towns that I'm sure the tour books describe as quaint before we finally came to the 500-year-old walls that marked the domain of Chambord.
Chambord is a national park. Its enormous grounds, which were originally used for entertainment hunting by the French royal family, are now a nature preserve. They still hunt here; in fact, this coming weekend they were having a game fair, and they were setting up for that during our visit. The main thing to see here, though, is the Chateau de Chambord, one of the finest old castles in France.
The building of Chambord (pronounced shahm-board) was commissioned by King Francis I in 1519, and it is definitely one of the treasures of Renaissance architecture. The highlight is the main staircase, which is a double spiral design like the structure of DNA. It was designed by Leonardo da Vinci and, our guide told us, it highlights the Renaissance desire to see and be seen. To see this effect, we divided into groups and ascended the 500-year-old stairs. At several points along the way we could see the people in the other group, but we never did meet them until we got to the top. Apparently da Vinci's original design called for four intertwined spirals of stairs, but construction costs forced it to be trimmed to just two.
To give an idea of just how enormous Chambord is, the da Vinci stairs are one of eighty-four staircases in the chateau-thirteen of which are described as "grands escaliers" in French. The chateau has 440 rooms, 365 fireplaces (even though the place was apparently rarely used in winter), and 880 sculpted columns. It has been under restoration by the government of France since 1947, and even fifty-five years later those restorations are nowhere close to complete.
In addition to the staircase, the guide showed us Francis' apartment. Then we had time to explore other parts of the chateau on our own. I took a walk through Louis XIV's apartment (much more elaborate than Francis') and I paid a brief visit to the lovely little chapel (which the guide had described as "God's apartment). It intrigued me that there was still holy water in the chapel fonts. I can't imagine the place is used with any regularity for religious services (they have more problems finding parish priests in France than we have here, so I can't imagine they'd assign someone to a place that basically has no parish), but it is certainly well maintained.
They had a portable building with toilets set up on the grounds at Chambord. Inside the men's room was a sign in English and French asking patrons to please flush after using the facilities. At the bottom of the sign someone had written in French "ESPAGNOL, S'IL VOUS PLAIT" (Spanish, please). Below that someone had hand-written in Spanish "DESPUÉS PI-PI, AGUA" (after peeing, water). That word "pi-pi" (pronounced "pee-pee" - and as a verb it's "hacer pi-pi") seems to be the standard way to describe doing one's duty in Spanish. There doesn't seem to be anything either childish or vulgar about it, and several times both Cristina and José used the English phrase "make pee-pee" as a reason for stopping and taking a break. It was all I (and most of the group) could do to keep from laughing each time they said that, but apparently there's nothing particularly unusual about the phrase in Spanish.
While waiting for the rest of the group to get back to the bus I sipped a French soft drink called "Gini". It was lemon flavored, a flavor I'd learned to drink in the hot Spanish weather on my first trip to Europe. Lemon isn't particularly popular in France; in fact Gini was the only lemon brand I found. The slogan on the Gini can amused me. It said "la plus chaude des boissons froides" (the hottest of cold drinks).
Having brought up soft drinks, I'll comment just a little more on them. Pepsi definitely dominates the soft drink market in France. That surprised me, because everywhere else I've gone except Russia (where at the time Pepsi was the only American product available), it's been Coke that was far and away the leader. I added numerous French items to my collection of Pepsi containers on this trip, without having to go out of my way to look for anything. In addition to regular Pepsi, the same company makes Pepsi Light and a sickeningly sweet fruit concoction called Orangina. There are vending machines with those three products, plus bottled water, absolutely everywhere-a definite change from 1985 when I saw virtually no vending machines at all. Sizes have gotten a lot larger in the past 17 years, too. Then cans and bottles were notably smaller than they were in America. Today the standard can is 33 centiliters, which is virtually the same as our 12-ounce can. The standard bottle they sell in vending machines is 500 milliliters (why cans are in centiliters and bottles in milliliters, I don't know), or about 16 ounces. In stores they sell 1, 2, and 3 liter bottles. Fast food places still don't have the "super size" cups they have back home, but the other sizes have increased to fit the American standard. Outside of a grocery store, all pop is expensive. The cheapest cans I saw in vending machines were €1.80, and €2 was the standard price for bottles.
We left Chambord at 10:25 and returned to the old road. It intrigued me that there was almost no traffic on the road. Since there was also not a huge amount of traffic on the autoroute, my conclusion would be that people must drive a lot less in France than they do in America. France is a heavily populated country. It's about the size of Texas, but has almost three times as many people (60 million). It's also well developed and fairly prosperous, so it surprised me a bit there weren't more cars on the highways. We did, however, see an amazing number of bicycles. It wasn't anywhere close to Tour de France time, but apparently a lot of people here just ride bikes for either fun or as a means of transportation.
We saw some interesting signs along the highway. One group that stood out was all the cautionary signs, each of which had the word "RAPPEL" on a little red and white sign above it. Apparently "rappel" means "recall" in Franch. I had never heard the word before though, and I kept picturing people rock-climbing around a curve.
One thing that stood out was that there were almost no stop signs. Often minor intersections are unmarked, and where main roads come together they either have a traffic circle or a sort of semi-exit set-up. It was also interesting that where there were stop signs (mostly in town), they looked like our signs and said "STOP". I've seen "ARRET" signs in Quebec (and even in French-speaking areas of Ontario and Manitoba, for that matter), so it amazed me that the home of the French language would put the English word on their signs.
There is an interesting way of marking passing zones on the rural roads, too. Instead of the double-line system we use, in France there's always just one white line down the center of a highway. It's dashed if you can pass and solid if you can't (which is most of the time). When you get toward the end of a passing zone, the dashes turn into arrows that point back toward your lane-a clue that you need to get back over now.
The roads wind a lot and go up and down a lot of hills. That gave José quite a work-out using the gear shift. More correctly, I should say gear shifts, because there were actually two. There was a stick shift on the floor that appeared to have six forward gears, plus a lever on the dashboard he could put in at least four different positions to make smaller shifting effects. My father used to describe driving vehicles that worked that way, but I'd never seen one up close.
We went through Bracieaux, which really was a quaint little town, and then through Chevery. It's interesting that the towns here are made up of individual houses. With most of my knowledge of Europe coming from Spain (where everyone lived in apartments twenty years ago) and England (where all my mother's penpals lived in rowhouses), it surprised me to see so many single-family homes here. That really does seem to be the standard in rural France, though. While many of them were new, there were some detached homes that were obviously old (even historic), so it's not just a modern trend.
Away from the towns the landscape around here looks a lot like central California-intensely farmed with crops of assorted vegetables. The whole country seems to be agricultural, and most of it is very flat and open. There are quite a lot of individual farmsteads here, where people live on their land. That, too, is different from Spain. There everyone lives in a village and commutes to the farm. I'd guess there's some of that in France, too, since there are definitely fewer farmhouses than you'd see in Iowa. It is pretty generally settled in the rural areas, though.
As I was taking all this in Margaret, Paul, and most of the kids on the bus were sleeping. I really can't imagine traveling to a foreign country and sleeping while you travel. Whenever I go anywhere, I want to find out everything I can about the place. After a while Paul started snoring quite loudly, and José joking-saying that his driving must be smooth and restful.
Our second stop of the day was another of the famous Loire Valley chateaus, this time Chenonceau (shen-on-sew), which is located on the tree-lined Cher River. I didn't care for this place as much as Chambord. It's privately owned, and parts of it struck me as a bit of a tourist trap. It is pretty, though. The main palace is actually built atop a bridge over the river. Outside there are formal gardens, with strange plants such as apple trees that had been trained to grow horizontally. The inside is much more formally restored than Chambord was, though I'm not sure it's all entirely authentic.
Our guide gave us some interesting background history on the place (such as how the king who built it worked in both his wife's and his mistress's initials in the monograms that adorn every surface), and then we had time to explore on our own. I went through the place pretty quickly (honestly, to some extent, if you've seen one castle, you've seen them all). So I went back to the bus and sipped some vending machine coffee as I talked with the driver.
I really had quite an interesting discussion with José-all in Spanish. That alone amazed me, because I'm not sure that 17 years ago I said more than a few words to anyone. José lives in what he calls a small town (about 25,000 people) just southwest of Madrid. He is 43 years old and has been a driver for about 15 years. He works for a company that is based in Barcelona that operates buses all over Europe. (Apparently a large percentage of bus drivers in Europe are Spaniards, because wages are somewhat lower in Spain than they are elsewhere on the continent.) He has driven in every country in Europe, and while he basically speaks only Spanish, he has picked up enough of the other European languages to be able to drive without any problems. He thinks Scandinavia is the most beautiful part of Europe, followed by northern Spain and Greece. He says the hardest places to drive in Europe are Italy and Germany, and the easiest place is Spain. He has driven in England (on the "wrong" side of the road), but he says even that is easier than driving in Italy. José has a family, but he can sometimes be away from home for three weeks at a time. He says the pay is good, though, and there is always steady work.
We left Chenonceau at 1:10 (you'll notice it's still not anywhere close to lunchtime) and continued southward. It was interesting to me that while the countryside was still very rural, there were city bus stops all along the road. We passed a number of caves, some of which are apparently used for growing mushrooms and others of which were habitations in prehistoric times. In the fields we saw every kind of crop imaginable; probably most unusual was poppies.
Things quickly became more and more suburban as we approached Tours. There were traffic circles everywhere. The term in French is apparently "rond-pont", though in Paris they were sometimes called "etoiles" (stars) from the roads that went off in all directions. We went under an enormous viaduct that carries the tracks for the TGV, France's famous high-speed train. Literally underneath the bridge was a "camping", a seedy little campground with no charm whatsoever.
The guide asked where the group was from and seemed a bit surprised when we said Iowa. She had apparently been an exchange student somewhere southeast of Des Moines. I guess it really is a small world.
We made our way back down the flower-lined boulevards of Tours and back through the downtown area. Rather abruptly we switched from the sprawling new downtown to the tiny historic area of the city. Here we saw a classic Gothic cathedral, complete with flying buttresses and a vast vaulted sanctuary. The guide then gave us more dull commentary about what seemed like every building in the historic district. Honestly, I found the modern downtown more interesting, but she said next to nothing about it.
We passed a pleasant fountain that was dedicated to the U.S. troops who served here in World War I. Technically the land for the fountain was given by Tours to the people of the United States, and the guide explained to us that technically it can be considered U.S. land. Just beyond the fountain there was a major construction project. They're apparently putting in underground parking, but in the process they uncovered the original city harbor. The parking ramp is being put on hold while they do archaeological excavation.
Our ultimate destination in Tours was the medieval district, which looked like an British town to me-the sort of place you see in documentaries on Shakespeare. The buildings are all half-timbered, sort of like an old Super 8 motel, with steeply pitched slate roofs. It's really hard to believe that they're the better part of a thousand years old; they're remarkably well preserved.
While it's a pretty area, I can't say I cared a lot for medieval Tours. While the buildings are real, the neighborhood is fake. I don't think much of anyone lives here; it's all just restaurants and gift shops. It reminded me of the historic district in Quebec City, where you see an old artsy district that basically exists for the benefit of tourists. In Tours it's also for the benefit of college students who want a picturesque place to get drunk, but the concept is the same.
While we were out exploring the medieval district, José had parked the bus next to a very modern building that was part of the nearby university. A delivery truck came by while we were away and clipped the outside mirror on the outside of the bus. When we got back José was replacing the broken mirror with a spare, which had a big crack running the length of it. He said that would get us to Madrid, and there he could get a good replacement at "Lavapies", a district in the old city south of downtown where I remember having been 17 years ago.
After replacing the mirror, José and the driver of the delivery truck had to deal with the paperwork of the accident. Cristina served as interpreter between the French-speaking delivery driver and José. It amazed me just how much paperwork there was, but apparently everything is taken care of on the spot in Europe, rather than being reported and dealt with later.
While we waited a UPS truck double-parked next to the delivery truck. The driver got out to deliver some packages to the university, and it was interesting that he was in a tank top and shorts. I always picture UPS drivers in neatly pressed brown uniforms, and a tank top definitely didn't fit the image they try to convey in America.
Eventually José and the delivery driver settled things up and we were on our way down the autoroute again. Just past Tours was another tollbooth, this time with a huge back-up. It reminded me of the back-ups on the Illinois tollways on holiday weekends. We eventually paid our toll (again by credit card) and set off south. The landscape got hillier south of Tours, more what I think of in Europe. It was still heavily farmed, though, with compact fields of widely varied crops.
After about an hour we stopped for lunch. By now it was around 3:30pm, and even with the big breakfast I was absolutely famished. We again ate at a L'Arche cafeteria, and I again had the "menu saveur". This time the only "vegetable" available was French fries, but the dessert amounted to pre-packaged cups of yogurt or flan. I supplemented lunch by buying a chocolate and pistachio ice cream "coronet" from a vending machine outside.
We drove south past Potiers and "Futurescope", which is apparently a science-oriented theme park not unlike Epcot Center. Late in the afternoon we stopped for gas and "pi-pi" at yet another of those aires. We spent quite a bit of time browsing through the convenience store at the aire. In honor of the world cup I ended up picking up "futbol surprise", an enormous cardboard cone wrapped in soccer-oriented paper and filled with little kid's toys. The big toy was a squirt gun shaped like a dinosaur, which I'll keep as a souvenir of France.
When I went back to the bus I decided to take a picture of the pump, showing the price José had paid for our fuel. The bus used diesel, which in France is called gazoil and cost about €.89 per liter. Our total bill was €216.91-over $200 just for a tank of gas. I asked José what sort of mileage the bus got. In Europe they measure fuel efficiency in terms of "liters per hundred kilometers", so lower is better than higher. This bus got 30 l/hkm, which if you do the rather complex algebra works out to about 71/2 miles per gallon.
It was evening by the time we got to Bordeaux. Again neither José nor Cristina really knew exactly how to get to our hotel. Cristina had a map that had been faxed to her that basically looked like a bunch of circles with lines between them. We spent nearly two hours driving from one traffic circle to another, all the while seeing "beautiful" suburban Bordeaux (mostly the town of Merignac)-which is one of the dumpiest places I've ever been to in my life. We kept coming past the same things over and over, most notably a sign for a crematorium that brought to mind that mass grave they found in Georgia earlier this year. We also kept passing the same shopping center with an enormous Carrefour supermarket and a three-floor cement block building where they sold nothing but beds.
We were lost, but neither José nor Cristina seemed to want to do anything about it. Neither wanted to stop to ask directions. Once again Cristina insisted that it was too expensive to use her Spanish cell phone in France, and it never seemed to occur to anyone that there were public phone booths all over the place.
I kept my mouth shut all through this, because Cristina and José were close to being at each other's throats. They reminded me of a married couple on the verge of divorce. Each time we stopped at a traffic light, they would argue over which way we should go, and the argument would usually lead to sarcastic comments both ways. That would continue until Cristina would say "está en verde" (it's green) with a huff, and José would set off again. This kept up until after sunset.
We wandered through the back side of an industrial park and then made our way into the city proper. Somehow, I think totally by accident, we managed to find our hotel. Strangely, though, it was a different hotel than our itinerary had said we were staying in. We were supposed to stay at a place called the Kyriad, and instead we were at the Hotel Alton. I wasn't going to complain, though; a hotel is a hotel, and we were here.
This was really a kind of weird hotel. It was a massive place that rambled down hallway after hallway around a flower-filled courtyard. The lights in the hallways were on a timer, so that after about 30 seconds they shut off automatically. There were switches in the halls where you could turn them on, but there were similar switches that served as doorbells for the rooms, so you had to be careful which button you pushed. The rooms were oddly shaped and badly lit. They had kitchenettes in every room, which in America is usually a sign of a place that is going downhill. It was definitely not my favorite place, but at least they had a bed.
It was after 10:00 when we ate dinner. It started with couscous, a Middle Eastern pasta dish which is apparently quite popular in France. That was followed up by a hamburger roll-up thing with potatoes on the side and then a very dry cake for dessert. We also had the omnipresent bread, which accompanies every meal in Europe. José had joined us for dinner, and he was obviously unimpressed with the quality of French bread. He described it as "gum" and felt its chewiness gave you nothing to sink your teeth into.
They had satellite TV at the hotel, and we were able to pick up the CNN European service, which originates in London. Honestly, there wasn't much of anything happening in the world, but it was good to hear some news in English.
At dinner several of the girls were whining about wanting to stay up and visit in each other's rooms. I felt like suggesting that they should have visited on the bus, instead of sleeping all the time, but I thought better of it. The tour company we were traveling with had a definite 11:00 curfew. Dinner was already pushing us past that curfew, and Paul was certainly in no mood to put it later still. He emphatically said that there would be no exceptions, and that was that.
... or so we thought. Not long after the official bed check, Cristina had called around to rooms asking when people wanted a wake-up call the following morning. No one was in one of the rooms belonging to some girls from Oskaloosa. She called us to let Paul know that, and he-well, let's just politely say he was less than happy. It turned out that three people were playing cards in another room. There was nothing terrible going on, but they had still directly disobeyed the rules. Paul's method of dealing with it was to make the group (I think one boy and two girls) his "friends" for the next few days. He sat with them on the bus, and everywhere he went, they went with him. The message did get through pretty well, and we had no more serious incidents on the trip.
As I went to bed tonight I thought again of Brad Nelson, the minor league baseball player from Garrigan. He had been selected to play in the Midwest League All-Star Game, and sometime while I was asleep they'd be playing that game in Lansing, Michigan. As I faded off to sleep, I wondered how things would go for him. As it turned out, they went quite well. While he was 0 for 1 in the game itself, Brad won the home run derby that they played before the game-which is really the ultimate honor at an all-star game. After the all-star game, Brad continued to have an outstanding season in Beloit, leading all of organized baseball (all levels, major or minor league) in runs batted in. As I write this in early August, he was just promoted to the High Desert Mavericks in Victorville, California (by brother John's birthplace), and it looks like he's also doing great there. I said in last year's travelogue that I was looking forward to seeing Brad in the Majors one day; I'm even more confident of that now
We were up around 6:30 this morning. This hotel also had a breakfast buffet, though not nearly so nice as the one we had in Tours. We ate, and then at 7:40 we got on the bus and left for the day.
It was chilly and rainy as we set off, and that gloom pretty much frames my opinion of Bordeaux overall. We covered just about everyplace in the city-though much of it not intentionally-and I was about equally unimpressed with everything. Perhaps most memorable was the graffiti; it was absolutely everywhere in Bordeaux. Even traffic signs were tagged, and nobody seemed to bother cleaning anything up.
We went around the Bordeaux peripherique right at rush hour, past dumpy factories and tacky suburban sprawl. We kept seeing signs for that Carrefour store we passed over and over again last night in Merignac. We also passed a car dealer who stacked the cars vertically in little elevator affairs, and we passed another of those ATAC supermarkets. Like the one in Tours, it had a "24 heures" sign, and also like Tours it was closed.
We took Exit 6 off the peripherique and wandered around forever on two-lane roads through densely built suburbs. It reminded me a lot of Wisconsin, where they have a lot of two-lane suburban strips. On the day I wrote this paragraph I had driven through Prairie du Chien, and traveling down the tacky congested strip there was like déjà vu.
We kept seeing signs that said "CASINO". At first I assumed they were for-well-casinos. (That would also be like Wisconsin, where there seems to be an Indian reservation around every bend.) Apparently, though, the term is used to mean "strip mall" or "shopping center" in France. I suppose they must feel you're taking a gamble buying stuff there.
We crawled around a maze of two-lane suburban roads, broken only by the endless traffic circles. Eventually we made it into a residential area, full of detached cement block homes with tile roofs. While the residents were obviously much wealthier, it intrigued me that the construction was identical to what I had seen in Merida, Mexico years ago.
Many of the homes here face away from the street, and all of them have brick, stone, or cement block walls keeping the riff-raff on the street out. (In Bordeaux those walls as often as not are covered with graffiti.) That's certainly a different feeling than you get in American suburbs, where the open yards frame the homes and fences are more for decoration or for keeping pets and children safe.
The houses weren't the only buildings with tile roofs. Everything in southern France seems to be roofed in tile. Even pole building warehouses had red tile on top.
Our destination this morning was a winery that was located in an old town of Margeaux, which has now become a suburb. By now it was no surprise that we couldn't find it. After driving around aimlessly for a while, we eventually stopped in front of the Margeaux post office (la poste). José asked a man who was parked nearby for directions, and the man decided it was easier to just lead us there in our car-which is precisely what he did.
The vineyard tour was markedly less interesting than its equivalent in California. Any vineyard tour is essentially an industrial tour. Such tours are most interesting when something is actually happening in the factory. The California the wineries are big enough that things do happen year round-and even when there isn't much of anything going on, the staff have dealt with enough tourists that they can give you the impression that you're seeing something of interest. At the winery in Bordeaux absolutely nothing was going on. What's more, the guide spoke limited English, so she really wasn't even able to explain the winemaking process or tell us much about what we did see. Moreover, with a tour mostly of teenagers, we couldn't have a wine tasting (though that didn't stop José from indulging). Technically the kids could have drunk in France, but they were all underage in America, and the company and school regulations expressly forbid it-as well they should.
We drove back to Bordeaux proper past a really dumpy industrial park-absolutely characterless cement block boxes set among weeds, scraggly trees, and mud. It's nothing I didn't see all over Mississippi and Louisiana, but hardly what would come to mind when I think of France. Largest among the factories was "Ford Aquitaine, SAS", which stretched from one traffic circle to another-probably better than a kilometer in length.
While Bordeaux was worse than most places, it's really kind of sad that the vast majority of France lives, works, and shops in what amount to really grungy American-style suburbs. I've read that Australia is like that, but I didn't really expect it in a place people think of as so "cultural" and so "beautiful". If people would borrow any concept from America, I can't imagine why it would be suburban sprawl. I've always thought the suburbs were the worst part of American cities. They have all the disadvantages of a big city (traffic, crime, etc.) without the nice museums, parks, historic sites, and top-rate entertainment facilities. In France they seem to have gone head over heels for suburban living, though. In Paris, for instance, less than 2 million people live in the city proper, while nearly 12 million live in the area. The smaller cities have similar settlement patterns. I guess the lure of single-family homes over city apartments must be very strong.
The problem is these really aren't nice suburbs, by anyone's definition. While they're mostly pretty new, they come across like the seedy old inner suburbs of American cities. They're not poor, but there's nothing beautiful about them whatsoever; saying they're tacky would be a generous description. It reminded me of when we used to drive up the then two-lane Manheim Road in Chicagoland thirty years ago to take Margaret to O'Hare for her earlier trips to Europe. Manheim is mostly six lanes now, and widening it got rid of a lot of the seedy strip malls and post-war bungalows. The French suburbs could use both of those improvements.
On our way back into the city proper, we passed the hotel we were supposed to have stayed at last night-the Kyriad Bordeaux-Lac, which would have been right off the autoroute. It looked as if it would have been a pleasant hotel, and I pondered again why we didn't end up staying there.
It was sunny by the time we reached the city proper, but that did little to improve my opinion of Bordeaux. It really is a dumpy city, with very little I could find to recommend it. While there is a small historic area (more on that later), most of the city proper appears to date from the twentieth century. What's more, almost every surface in the place is covered with graffiti. It reminded me of the pictures you used to see of the New York subway. They've cleaned that up, but they sure haven't cleaned up anything in Bordeaux.
Right downtown we passed what used to be a central market. Now abandoned, it had big holes in its graffiti-covered walls. There was a pleasant riverfront park right next door, though with a view of that market one direction and abandoned factories the other way, I can't imagine anyone would want to spend much time there (and no one was there as we drove by).
There is one big difference between Bordeaux and similarly bleak American cities (Baton Rouge, Gary, Detroit, etc.): while in American cities the slums are usually filled by people of color, in Bordeaux everyone is white. It was really almost spooky just how white of a city it was. Paris had a lot of Third World immigrants, and Tours had exchange students from overseas, but in Bordeaux there was no one who wasn't natively French. The people in Bordeaux were also decidedly older than those in either Tours or Paris. It was no surprise that a college town like Tours tended toward the young side, and Paris seemed to have a pretty good cross-section of all age groups. Bordeaux, though, was definitely heavy on senior citizens. While it was a big city, it came across in some ways like those dying towns in Iowa where about the only people left are retired.
Again we proceeded to get completely lost. We drove along the riverfront boulevard, past the port of Bordeaux and a set of locks. Before long we were back to the peripherique, where we made a U-turn and went back downtown. We again passed the abandoned market, and at a stop light nearby there was a beggar going from car to car. Once again José and Cristina argued about how we should go, making for a rather tense trip.
We were looking for the central tourist office, and Cristina appeared to have fairly detailed directions on how to get there. Unfortunately there was a major construction project (we found out later they were putting in a new tramway-though why what amounts to a streetcar should require underground excavation, I don't know), and that blocked the main access to the historic area. We kept cruising up and down the riverfront drive for probably twenty minutes, but then eventually we took a minor street and eventually reached the tourist office.
A middle-aged woman was our tour guide in Bordeaux. She was trilingual in French, Spanish, and English, so she mostly gave her driving directions directly to José in Spanish. At one point when she had told him to turn, but he didn't turn as soon as she expected, she exclaimed, "La, la, la! ¡Aquí, aquí!", combining both French and Spanish in one mouthful.
The guide found most of historic Bordeaux beautiful. She justified her opinion by pointing out every example of symmetry and geometry in the dull, look-alike edifices of the old city. One traffic circle that she simply gushed over was surrounded by identical gray stone buildings with identical balconies by every window. There was no monument in the middle of the circle, nor any vegetation to be seen anywhere. The geometry of the boring architecture, though, apparently made it scenic.
In several places the guide pointed to preparations that were being made for the "Fête de Bons Vins" (Good Wine Festival), which is apparently Bordeaux's summer celebration. It's interesting that in America you get a lot of food fairs (and alcohol is certainly a big part of many of them), but I don't think even Milwaukee or Napa has a "summerfest" dedicated to beverages.
In her brief history of Bordeaux, the guide mentioned that its most important era was during the slave trade. She really didn't mention much of any history since that era, and it made me wonder just what the economy of the city is today. They have industrial parks out in the suburbs, but except for the run-down port I really didn't see much of any major employers downtown.
The first of two real points of interest we stopped at in Bordeaux was its cathedral. The guide described the cathedral as "eclectic"-noting that it had been added onto and modernized many times, and therefore showed examples of many different styles of architecture. We made our way past a beggar at the door and into the main church, where the most interesting thing was that the organist was practicing as we walked by. Outside the guide directed our attention to the fact that they were in the process of cleaning the limestone façade. There was certainly a difference between the cleaned an uncleaned-basically gray vs. black-but I can't say I found either part exceptionally beautiful.
The other point of interest we saw was the Bordeaux opera house. I'm sure the guide told us how old it was, but I really don't remember. It looked to me like it dated to the 1800s (sort of neoclassical), but it could well be a bit older. It certainly isn't old, though, in the sense of the Loire chateaus. All we really saw at the opera was the lobby (which houses an information center) and a grand staircase that leads to the auditorium. We didn't see in the auditorium itself, nor did we look at the stage or backstage areas. I've toured old theatres in Chicago, St. Louis, and Atlanta, and there we got to actually see everything up close. Here we really didn't see much of anything.
After that rather superficial tour we had about forty-five minutes to kill on our own. Many of the kids used the time to change money. Paul went to a bank with one of his students and noted afterward that the bank teller tried to give the girl a €200 note. Since even €20 is more than some businesses wanted to take, €200 would be absolutely unspendable. Paul doesn't really speak French (and neither did the student), but he managed to come up with the phrase "plus petit", which the teller easily understood.
I killed some time at a "Tabac"-officially a tobacco store (something you don't see very often in America these days), but really more of a convenience store, with food, books, tourist-oriented gifts, and assorted sundries. I bought a book about Bordeaux (which really didn't tell me much more than the guide had) and some postcards.
I also made a point of using a kiosk toilet. They have these all over the place in France, on street corners and near the entrances to parks. They are oval-shaped corrugated metal shacks, usually painted green, with "TOILETTE" written above the door in an antique script. They work like a vending machine. You deposit coins (in this case €.30), and the door opens. You go in, close the door, and a light comes on. You then use the facilities and open the door. Once you leave, the door closes again, and you hear a huge spraying noise like a car wash. In fact the entire facility is cleaned with boiling water and then quick dried between uses. Unfortunately the cleaning process doesn't catch junk that people throw in the sink; it just sits there and gets wet. The toilet paper was also wet to the point of being unusable. Fortunately that wasn't a problem for me, but it would have been for any woman.
I still had a good half hour to wait after I had used the toilet. I kept wandering around in the two-block or so area nearby. The most interesting thing was the building the toilet happened to be in front of, which bore a sign that said "Night Club Le Monseigneur". Again I was intrigued by the use of English, that this was a "night club" rather than a "boite de nuit". I also kept wondering just how much the monsignor got around to have his own club.
Eventually everyone got back, and we made our way back to the bus. We left Bordeaux by a totally different route than we had been on any of the times we were lost. We did, however, eventually make our way back to the autoroute, and we were quickly out of the city.
We stopped for a late lunch at a different brand of cafeteria (I guess "L'Arche" doesn't control every aire-just most of them). They didn't have the "menu saveur", and the a la carte prices were rather expensive. Once again I had ham and rice, together with an apple tart for dessert. The total for that alone was about €15. I also bought a tiny little bottle of Bordeaux wine to take home as a souvenir, and some chips and juice to snack on as we drove.
The landscape became very flat again south of Bordeaux. We passed farmland and then entered a forest preserve. The woods here looked planted; the trees grew in too straight of rows to be natural. It made for a pretty drive, though.
The background music on this page is the old French drinking song "Chevaliers de La Table Ronde" (Knights of the round table, let us taste to see if the wine is good!) It seemed appropriate for the wine and castle country of the Loire Valley.