Bit more cheese

Jet lag today was worse than it should have been.  I can blame myself for part of this, because I forgot to take melatonin last night which would have helped.  But mainly I blame the mosquito that got into my room because I had the window open since the evening temperature was so nice last night.

I am pleased to report that around 5am she paid for her hubris with her life.

(Only female mosquitoes bite, if you were wondering how I'm so confident in her gender.  File under: trivia you learn when you date someone with a background in tropical diseases and public health.)

So my sleep was a wee bit disordered but eh, these things happen. 

Despite the disruptions, I forced myself to get moving around 10:30 so that I could start to adjust my internal clock. I figured I would do a moderate amount of walking today (and I did, something like 9 or 10 kilometers in total) so I don't think I'll have much trouble sleeping tonight.

I went to find a pastry which turned out to be a few more blocks than I expected and in the process I walked past the tram line and realized ... I didn't buy a transit pass yesterday when I was at the train station. 🤦

Here's the thing: I don't like the over-dependence we are building on transit apps and directly tapping our bank cards in transit infrastructure.

I realize they're useful to lots of people and trip planning is really helpful for people who don't love obsessing over maps and route planning but well... I DO love those things.

Plus an over dependence on transit apps is enabling a surveillance state which is gross. 

But-and-also-furthermore: it's regressive. It punishes the poor who don't have smart phones or consistent service, by reducing the prevalence of easily accessible alternatives like map kiosks and the purchase of transit cards to major points in the system. And it enables small scale oppressions and limits freedom - the woman who isn't permitted a smart phone by her controlling husband and the kid too young to have one are both now one step further away from being able to move freely around the city.

So I don't mind that the apps exist, mind you, it's fine that people have them. I just don't want them for myself and don't want the infrastructure that provides alternatives to diminish. 

Give me a paper map and a tap-able transit card I bought out of a vending machine please.  In a perfect world, go a step further and integrate card readers for that card into points of sale in the local convenience shops for small purchases and you've developed a fantastic alternative to small change.

Basically peak transit currency was Hong Kong's 'Octopus' card in 2009, is what I'm saying.

Anyway! 

Those machines are not generally scattered throughout the city anymore, so I knew I would have to go to a transit-hub to find what I was after, and I knew the train station would be one such hub. 

As a result I wandered haphazardly back across Bordeaux to the train station, hopeful I'd find a tourist transit system map while I was at it.

I was half right -- I acquired a 72 hour transit pass for €13.90 that will give me unlimited access to the tram, bus and Metro for the duration of my stay. 

More like this please 

...And then couldn't find a map kiosk anywhere. Google helpfully suggested that there was a tourist information center near downtown and that was near the co-working space I planned to visit after lunch, so I caught a tram headed that direction.

I found my map in the downtown customer service facility for the local transit authority.  

And more like this, also! 

The jet lag made it difficult to feel hungry, despite the fact that I had eaten very little, but after wandering for a while I settled on a place called Cosy Tacos and had the hit of French Tacos I had been craving since I landed. 

If you haven't heard me rant about French tacos yet and don't know what they are: don't worry. I'm sure I will give a detailed rundown later in this trip. For now, just know the thing I ate has almost no similarity to the thing your brain conjures when you read the word "Taco."

I finally settled into my co-working space in mid-afternoon (props to my Spaces membership. It's been such a valuable resource the last couple of years) and worked for a few hours, helping untangle a couple of work puzzles and answer some questions before heading to my hotel to drop some things off before heading out to dinner.

The weather was gorgeous and the walk was only 1.5 km or so, so I decided to walk it, and the route that Google suggested to me was great. 

First off, I was pleased to note that in this part of the city Bordeaux is making clever use of modal filters to separate and prioritize non-car traffic in ways the benefit the city and everyone else (bikes, scooters pedestrians).

"Not a car? Go right ahead!" (Utility, civil service, or emergency vehicle? The pillar can be lowered via signals that the city vehicles can broadcast.)

But the real treat lay a couple of blocks further into my walk, when I turned into Rue Sainte Catherine and realized that Bordeaux had pedestrianized almost the entire length of it (it's over a kilometer long), and with the beautiful weather that meant there were thousands of people walking and shopping and eating without a car to be seen. 

This is not a protest or a march or some sort of street fair.  This is just a Tuesday.

It was delightful.

More and more European cities have seen the value in this sort of pedestrianization, and it's really lovely.  Hopefully we can get more things like this in Pittsburgh over my time there.

Also there was a charming scrap metal man along the route! 

My walk took me down this excellent pathway and then spat me out onto the square I mentioned earlier with the neat Column, so I stepped by to take a daytime picture of the detail work on the base.

Behold, the story of Wine! (I guess) 

I also took a picture of the Tortoise that is just hanging out here, because how could I not?

I dropped my things at my room, took a quick work call, and then headed out for dinner to the Georgian place I had spotted the night before. 

There, I had a delicious eggplant starter before turning myself directly into the Find Chaffy "Bit more cheese" cartoon via their absolutely exquisite Khachapuri.

Eating Cheese

Still Eating Cheese

Ate Too Much Cheese

Bit more cheese

It was so good though.

I really need to go back to Tblisi and visit as a civilian.

Afterwards though, I realized I needed to head elsewhere for dessert because I had been in Bordeaux -- where most of my favorite red wines have seemed to originate -- for over 24 hours and I had not had any wine yet.

I wandered into the square and paused to marvel at the darkening sky first, and which point I heard a very strange set of noises.

This magical view was accompanied by. . .roaring?

So, as I'm taking this picture, I hear a sound from one side of the square that sounds like a unified shout of jubilation, and then, a second later, I hear it again from another spot nearby, and then, this time on a five or six second delay, I hear the same sound, from the other side of the square.

It turns out 

(1) UEFA Champions league semifinals are on.

(2) The teams are Paris Saint-Germaine and Bayern-Munich

(3) Bordeaux is a college town with a ton of youth in it that root for PSG even when they aren't playing notorious German rivals.

(4) There are maybe 7 bars within 200 meters of me that are showing this game on one or more televisions, all of them SLAMMED. 

(5) Each of the bars is using a slightly different method to stream the game, so in theory if you were a casual football fan, you could easily go to one of the bars that's further behind, and you could tell when you should look at the screen based on the screams of agony or triumph from across the square.

This was delightful, and I decided to try to catch the end of the game but it also meant the other non-sports bars were dead empty and happy to serve me, so first, dessert.  (I'm a staunch fan of the French national team but less enamored of PSG, generally speaking, though of course I'm still going to root for them over B-M, obviously).

After a very brusque interaction in English with a member of the waitstaff (who I think was trying desperately to get cut so he could catch the second half of the game, poor guy) I acquired the final jewels of my evening:

 A 2022 Château de Fontinelle and the first chocolate mousse I've had in a restaurant that gives Teresa's recipe a run for her money.  It was so good.

It was punctuated by a LOT of the roaring effect I was telling you about, because the game tonight has an absolutely insane scoreline.  (Spoiler, select/highlight to read: Bayern-Munich scored 4 goals! And LOST!)

Afterwards, I wandered over to one of the bars with a giant screen and a tiny seating area where I snagged the last 10 minutes of the game along with a line of like-minded college students, we all stood across the street and gawked over the heads of the paying customers.  The bars were all good sports about this, too busy with everyone still drinking to worry about a few hangers-on.

Now I'm back in my room, wrapping up this entry so that I can have a go at a full night's sleep.

Goodnight!