The Witty Traveller Blog: Bonjour Bordeaux!

Breaking the rhythm here and visiting two French towns instead of one. Although we have travelled almost 10 hours on a train, so it's almost a new country. Lille being practically on the border with Belgium, and Bordeaux being towards the south west part of France it's a long way to travel, especially when you have to slum it in second class.

We started this leg off right as well as we met up with (another) Dave and dumped our bags at the train station for the day. This was made rather difficult by us picking the only broken locker there and after the nice lady at the counter came over, tried it, kicked it a bit and set off the alarm, kicked it a bit more, then we just picked a different locker that worked instead.

We took in a fair bit of Bordeaux as we walked around the city and saw many of the sights but I think I'm getting a bit jaded with spectacular churches though, as there are several more that we saw throughout the city. We walked through a fair part of the main city, and saw not one, but two victory arches (think the Arc de Triomphe, but not as large) in the Place de la Victoire and Port de Bourgogne. We eventually ended up looking for a park to sit down and rest in since we had done so much walking and ended up in Jardin Public Park after a few false starts. Unfortunately the maps they give out at the airport don't rate the parks in towns on such factors as "has grass" or "likelihood of getting mugged". Jardin Public however was quite pretty and has such parkey related goodness such as ducks, small children running around, municipal police, people doing tai-chi, and lots of lovely grass for sitting.

We topped the day off with a beer and a visit to a local bar where we were treated to more lovely French cuisine by our French tour guide "par excellence" Steph.

We followed up our visit to the park the next day by heading to the nearby markets where we stocked up on a disgraceful amount of French food for a picnic. As Dave put it, we could have gone in there blindfolded and pointed at things and we would have been fine. Our feast included a pate, some terrine, several other meat dishes including some rabbit and pork, a few baguettes, and several fantastic cheeses. A quick stop at the local supermarket and a few cheap bottles of red wine later we headed off (it's quite hard to find bad wine in Bordeaux, and this was no exception. Our 3€ and 5€ wine was still awesome). We quickly realised that we hadn't brought any cutlery, or even a knife to cut things so we had to stop into a nearby 2€ store and grabbed a knife, a bottle opener and some plastic cups. After a few hours of sitting and eating in the park, followed by some more time sitting and digesting we pronounced our picnic a great success and wandered back home via the river bank of the La Garonne river.