Je ne sais pas lire... et maintenant, je ne sais plus compter?

Am I having a stroke? Nope!  Just the normal challenges of being in new place.

So this morning I woke up earlier than the last couple days and packed up for the train to Toulouse.

I walked down to the train station and arrived with enough time to stop along the way for pastries, and found a place that used the 'southern' appellation for it's pain au chocolate ("Chocolatine" - a regionalism which I only learned about earlier this year). I also ordered another item, a Feuilleté Lardon which I misread off the menu as Feuillette Lardon and pronounced the latter half with the hard "Let" sound I thought it required.

Feuilleté is the word for puff pastry (which honestly I should have learned by now), and the end is pronounced like "yehtay".

I was very confident in my order and the staff were appropriately bewildered by my confident request for an item they had never heard of. 

When they figured out what I wanted and related it back to me I looked back at the sign and realized what I had done, and I wish I had been quick enough to say "ah, désolé, je ne sais pas lire, j'imagine" (oh, sorry, I don't know how to read, I guess)  with the same casual confidence that I had ordered the pastry with. 😅

I would be catching the Intercity train instead of the TGV for this leg of the journey, for you Amtrak folks this is the equivalent of our "regional" service. Except that because France has the sort of train network that we associate with a proper country, the train still operates at something approaching a correct speed.

Even the regionals use mostly assigned seats now, and my seat was place quatre-vingt*-une in Voiture huit. (Seat 81 in car 8).

*(The French language still uses an equivalent of "score" for numbers above 70, so 81 is "four - twenties - one".)

So I swing breezily through the station, snagging a tiny coffee and a delicious canelle cake to enjoy on the train, and then wait until the track is assigned, and make my way to our train.

I wander down the length until I find car 8, and I get onboard. 

I walk down the aisle and ... I count right past 81.

As far as I can tell, there isn't one. 

Other people are climbing around me and my awkward giant backpack to try to make it to their seats (which definitely do exist! I have seen 62 and 90!  Mine should be somewhere around here.) and I'm feeling very Lost American In The Way, so I make my way to the end of the train and put my backpack in the luggage rack so I can be less bulky while I'm searching, and return to the aisle. After a second trip up the aisle without success, feeling like I'm losing everything because maybe the numbers... Maybe the numbers aren't in order?  Did I just? Was that 77 and then 65?  No way... The whole point of numbers is that they can be ordered, surely no one would... It isn't possible... Do I smell toast?

I briefly, step off the rain to make sure there aren't two voiture huits.

On my THIRD slow walk down the aisle, there is is! 81! As of it has been there the whole time, cheekily watching me plaintively wander the aisle and climb past sweet ancient crones and exasperated mothers with prams.

I dive into the seat before it can disappear again, and look up, half expecting the number to have changed as I was sitting and for me now to be in the wrong place.

No, it's still 81, I'm safe. It seems. 

So, having reassuring myself I won't be sitting pathetically in the baggage lock all the way to Toulouse, I start looking at the numbers of the seats in order.

In. Order. 

And it is at this point that I discover that these seat numbers, which are detachable and mobile for who knows what devilish purpose... Are. not. Ordered. 

I need to stop here and say it is my fervent hope that this is the result of hooligans. I need it to be that some Lycée's rugby team from Carcassonne , high on the adrenaline of clobbering Marseille in a David vs Goliath story for the ages, scrambled them all as a prank on the way home while left unattended by their coach.

I need to believe that because I need to be safe from idea that there is an employee of the SNCF who decided that the correct order of the seats was as follows.

(I recorded the ones I could read from my seat, because under no circumstances was I getting up, not on your life).

On my side, the seats went thusly (each is a pair, the first is the corridor, the second the window):

78

77

82!

81(My seat! My precious)

84!!

83

92!!!

93!?!

And on the other side of the car, where I could read more of them: 

98

97

96

95

88!

87

86

85

64!!!

63

61!

62!!?!!!

WHO WOULD DO SUCH A THING?!

Truly, a criminal act had been performed on this poor car.

I consoled myself with my coffee and petite cannelé de Bordeaux, which was exquisite.

The legend says that Cannellés are a pastry made by nuns in the region, which came into fashion in Bordeaux because a wine filtration method of the age used egg whites, resulting in an abundance of yolks that were given to the nuns.

I'm not sure if this story is true, but the results, made with vanilla and rum, had a deep custard texture and they were delicious.

Madame Liberté, Wine from the earth, Views from on high

I rolled out of bed much more well rested, made some arrangements, and headed out to explore the city for a bit before work.

A thick storm system had passed over in the morning, but I had slept in and dodged that, so the sky was gray and mottled with clouds by the time I was out and about, a perfect sky, in my opinion, for exploring a city.

I snagged a lunch snack from the Carrefour Express near my hotel, and walked to the center of the city around 13:00 intending to climb the Tour Pey Berland -- a gothic bell tower that stretches high above the city, but found when I arrived that it was accessed via timed tickets, so I purchased a ticket for 16:00 and caught a tram north to the suburb of Chartrons, the heart of the Bordeaux wine industry, intending to come back in a couple of hours.

My first stop in Chartrons was a small park in the middle of the district, where I found the small replica of the Statue of Liberty that lives here, her flame held high.   

She was beautiful, her visage as proud as always, and I thought about my grandparents' view of her companion across the sea, as they crossed New York harbor in 1953, headed for Ellis Island to begin their life in the United States, one step in the eternal chain reaction that led to my birth, and specifically to it happening in the United States and not somewhere else in the world.

Then I went and drank three glasses of wine in the middle of the afternoon, and missed my timed ticket to the tower.

In my defense, I was in a museum, and the third glass was the guide's favorite.

A few steps from the Statue of Liberty is the Musée du Vin et du Negocé de Bordeaux.  In English we'd say "the Bordeaux museum of Wine and Trade" (the French word you see here is the root word for "Negotiation", in case you were wondering!)

For the price of 15 Euros I spent an excellent hour in the cellars of a trade house of a Bordeaux wine broker, and learned some really fascinating information.

First, you need to understand the shape of the region:

The Garonne river that flows across the face of Bordeaux comes down from the Pyrenees that are south of the city, and Bordeaux was built up slowly on Marshland on the western bank of that river.

The Garonne is wide, and deep, and so despite being a long way from the Ocean proper, Bordeaux is  effectively the port town of the region, and this means that Bordeaux had more connections to the Atlantic than it did to much of France for a very long time indeed.

Until Napoleon commanded the building of a stone bridge across the Garonne in 1821, it was easier to buy Bordeaux wines in London and Amsterdam than it was in Paris.

The British at one point were importing 45 million liters of wine a year from this region, and almost all of their Claret (a wine you hear about mostly in British literature and culture these days) was made in Bordeaux.   When England lost their access at La Rochelle, Bordeaux became the dominant source of Wine for England and remained that way for many years.

A second interesting thing I learned: Wine is a two stage process, and prior to the establishment of a complete Vine-to-Bottle system at the Chateaus themselves, the second stage (barreling and aging) used to be controlled by merchants.  And more than one merchant would have a contract with the same vineyard.  Since how the barrels are toasted, how long the wine is left in the barrels, and some other factors all impact the exact final taste of the wine, the merchants used to control a sort of secondary brand, and it was common for the wine snobs of that era to not just like certain regions or vineyards, but to say "oh, I prefer the wine of [such and such merchant] from that vineyard."

A third thing: Phylloxera nearly ruined wine. 

In the 1850s Victorian botany nerds brought American vines to England, as part of the British empire's two-pronged endeavour to take everything nice from all over the world to England and also just generally be the absolute worst. 

The vines brought with them a voracious aphid that was not well understood at the time, and American vines are partially resistant to it.

European grape vines are not.

After ravaging England, the Phylloxera plague spread across mainland Europe.  In the span of 20 years, European wine production dropped by something like 70%.

This map gives me a great sadness and also an idea for a new Pandemic game

All functioning vineyards in Europe are now growing a cross-bred vine that's at least partially American because the American vines are resistant to the Aphid when compared to the European ones, and there are only a handful of places left in the world that are still able to grow genetically distinct original European-style grape vines as a result.

I learned a lot more about wine production and history and highly recommend the museum, it was an excellent time even without the great wine-tasting-for-amateurs provided at the end.

I realized as I was finishing up my time in the museum that I would absolutely miss my timed entry to the tower if I stayed for the tasting, but I knew there was also a ticket opportunity half an hour after I had purchased mine, and so decided to gamble on the kindness of the tower staff and stick around, and simply eat the 9 Euro cost of the tower ticket if they decided to be strict.

The wine tasting was excellent -- we got to try a Claret (which is barely exported anymore, only something like 0.05% of all Claret made is exported from the region, the locals drink it for themselves).  It was so bright -- I would rarely use the word "Fresh" in a complimentary sense about wine, but that's how this Claret tasted, and it seemed like it would be perfectly suited to a hot summer afternoon alongside a good gazpacho topped with buttery croutons.

Then we had a conventional red Bordeaux, the kind I'm familiar with.  This one was warm and very dry indeed, with a smoky taste.  Not a bottle I'd buy myself I don't think, but very good as a tasting example, and as part of the tasting they shared with us a local raisin that is made from the grapes of the region where the wine is grown, then coated in dark chocolate -- and tasting the wine again afterwards had such a profound impact on the flavor.  It was really fascinating.  (also, those Raisins were wild.  I would swear they were preserved in apricot or peach juice before drying, they had such a strong peach flavor.)

And lastly there was a sweet white dessert wine, which was added as an option for an extra 3 euro, and was delicious, but very sweet.  The grapes with the peach flavor that I just mentioned made up only 30% of the bottle, with Savignon Blanc being the other 70%, and it was still a very sweet wine indeed.  It needed a strong cheese or an anchovy or foie gras, something rich and salty to offset the sweetness.

So, three glasses of wine later, I careened down the street back to the tram, and jumped off at exactly 16:30 at the tower.

Thankfully the man running the tower was a delightful character who tutted and said very sarcastically "oh no... you are much too late!" as I apologized, before cheerfully directing me to the stairs so I could ascend and finally see the city laid out before me.

Something I have noticed now that I've been living in Pittsburgh for some time -- I have become very fond of how well I understand the "shape" of the city -- the rivers both define the city and also create such strong elevation changes that from around every corner you get some excellent vista view that helps you re-orient yourself and understand how Pittsburgh is laid out and where you are.

Bordeaux, as a patch of reclaimed marshland that is all basically at a single elevation, is . . . exactly not that, and after a couple of days of wandering the streets and feeling like I was somewhere in a labyrinth the whole time with only occasional glimpses of distant church towers to orient myself, I was yearning for a sense of place in the layout of the old city.

The tower provided exactly that, by being so tall that you got to see across basically the entire city in one fell swoop.

It's very tall.

And the views from the top are spectacular.

One of the things I had noticed on the river is the way the bridges north of town had to be built in a way that didn't cripple the city's ability to let tall ships and cruise ships into the harbor of the town, as Bordeaux is still a consistent stop for European cruises.  

That's hopefully easy to understand here, as you can see the lift bridge and tall suspension bridge north of town in the background, and one of the cruise ships that has been permitted through in the foreground.  (This was a moment I really wished I had brought my Serious Camera and lens with me)

My tourism for the day accomplished, I headed over to the local Spaces office to sync up with my team for the day, and then, having realized they'd benefit from a little more help in the evening, I grabbed the makings of a simple dinner from the local grocery and then caught a tram back to my hotel room and spent the evening helping diagnose an interesting software problem.

I had a good companion though, who was 5.40 Euro and worth every centime.

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!

Arrival in Bordeaux and the Super Krousty

I arrived in Bordeaux and was greeted by the platonic ideal of Train Station. Say hello to Gare St. Jean.

Beautiful ceiling? Check. 

Gorgeous facade on which all the clocks were actually working and keeping time? Check! 

Incredibly massive and beautifully stylized map of the region on one interior wall. Checkmate.

It was less than 2km to my little apart hotel, and the weather was gorgeous, so I decided to walk it and arrived just around sunset.

This part of Bordeaux feels like such a pure collection of French building styles it's almost startling.  It seems pretty clear that this part of Bordeaux wasn't shelled much in either world war, (or this stone is just very durable).

This last picture has an Easter egg. One of my favorite weird things about English is that because of its ubiquity, it sort of represents the monoculture in the minds of a lot of non-English speakers.  This means that sometimes other languages decide to use English words as loaner words to describe a thing, but not the same words that English people use to describe that thing. Take, for example, foosball. 

I'm sorry, your bar has a what now? 

So I have a very nice walk to the hotel.

I drop my stuff, and then go out for another small walk because it was 20:30 and if I sat down I was going to fall asleep instantly and also I wanted food (traveling + sleep deprivation = always being hungrier than is warranted considering how much of your day was just sitting).

I am staying pretty near Place de la Victoire, which includes this beautiful column that is apparently carved with the details and history of vines and wine, which are really central to Bordeaux's culture.

It's also gorgeous and a little mind-bending (at least to my jet-lagged brain) because it twists 45 degrees over the course of its climb, taking an otherwise "normal" tower and making it feel organic and almost grapevine like.

Have experienced a small culture, I set my mind to food.

I had walked past a few French Tacos places on my way in, and was considering going back for one of those, but then I also saw some signs for a thing called a "crousty" or "krousty" and it looked unhinged so once I found out that Bordeaux claims to have invented it and that it's sortof a modern French fad food like French Tacos were a few years ago . . . I decided that would be dinner (in part because the Armenian/Georgian restaurant I wanted to go grab Katchapuri at was done serving food when I rocked up.  I'll try there tomorrow I think).

Anyway, I went to a Krousty place near the bars that ring the aforementioned Place d l V, which were all slameed with students (Bordeaux is a college town and has a huge student population.)

I got to practice my French a little, in the bargain, which was nice.  One of the difficult things about trying to speak French in France, especially in Paris, is that most French people in Paris speak English better than you speak French when you're learning, and want to practice their English and also don't love hearing their language mangled, so they tend to transition to English as soon as you start to struggle. 

But tonight even as I was floundering and mangling it, the fellow taking my order kept defaulting back to French before struggling to recall English words, (I got the vague impression that English might be his 4th language) -- which was delightful because it forced me to try to use what's left of my French vocabulary as the 22 hour travel day comes to a close.

And in the end, 10 euros got me this monstrosity and an Orangina.

A Crousty is apparently perfectly fried chicken tender bits, chopped up and tossed in a wok with some seasoning and a f-ckload of something panko-esque, plus some sriracha on top, which are all layered over rice and a sort of . . . creme-fraiche . . . slash . . .uhh, ranch-like. . . sauce.

Stupid. Irresponsible. Delicious.

10/10.  Would devour again.  And getting served fast food in a beautiful wooden bowl with a real metal spoon was such a treat.  

Stay weird, French Fast Food culture.


Meta-content-note:

I generally won't be posting 3x per day throughout this trip, but for today I had plenty of writing opportunities on the train and plane, so you got a lot of content.

We'll see what cadence I can sustain once the trip starts in earnest tomorrow.

For now, goodnight!

Paris to Bordeaux by train(s)

So, over the past three or four times I've flown into Paris, since 2019, I've developed a sort of routine.

I (1) collect my bags, get through customs and immigration (which was a little wonky this time because CDG airport is putting in new passport automation and doesn't have the queue signage figured out yet) and I go to the train station.

At the train station, I (2) find a shopette / bodega / convenience store and purchase an Orangina, which I pound immediately to help stave off the air travel induced dehydration and give me that jolt of "oh yeah, you're back in France!"

  

Hell yeah. Que la fête commence!

Then I (3) start to doubt that I have ever learned ANY French, because generally at this point I've been traveling for 12+ hours and have only had a fitful nap in the last day and a half, and so my brain interprets the mental fog of jetlag as a complete lack of language function, and there are lots of people around me speaking variations of French in this train station and I am understanding exactly 0% of it and my brain is going "huh, that's funny we thought we knew some of those words but nope, you get nothing.  We're in a foreign land are you're doomed to ignorance."

This always makes purchasing a ticket into Paris slow and painful and kind of funny, because the vending machines that sell tickets cannot, for any amount of touchscreen navigation, love, money, or pleading, be induced to sell you a digital one-way ticket which is added to your Navigo card, even if you HAVE a permanent one like I do, (which I highly recommend because the weekly pass you can load onto those things is by far the best deal in Transit-passes anywhere, of all time).

So if you just want one ticket, you have to buy a 2 Euro Navigo basic tappable card just for this one stupid purpose, which is incredibly wasteful and silly and doesn't SEEM like it would be a limitation.

So I (4) always kindof mash buttons in a baffled manner for a while, eventually getting partial assistance from the SNCF employees and remembering that I simply cannot do the thing I want to do, before 

(5) boarding an RER B into Paris, which is absolutely the way to get to Paris and if you get in a Taxi (unless you have like 6 bags and a pet in tow) you are insane.

So once I get through the traditional gauntlet de la gare, it's off to Paris.

Then it's the RER B to the M4 Metro line, then a long wander through the underground passageways to Montparnasse, where I can board the Grandes Lignes to get out of the city and into the countryside.

(I'm headed to Bordeaux, a city I've never visited, for the first couple of days of my trip.)

Since I've been forced to give myself a bit of padding in case anything went horribly wrong, and nothing did, as per usual, I reach the station with almost 2 hours to spare, which gives me time to pop out of the station and across the street, to Café Jeannette which turns out to be an ideally French corner café, where I am sold key armament in the war against jetlag -- an Iced Coffee and a snack.

 

The proof of life photo that I snapped to let folks know I'd reached France successfully.

A perfectly reasonable iced coffee and a delicious fish and carrot tartinette, which is translated as "a sausage for spreading" I guess, but y'all Americans interpreting this should probably think of as a sort of firm pudding / moist loaf. . . Thing.

Think meatloaf, but with fish.  A fishloaf, if you will.

. . . Anyway, my fishloaf was freaking great, after a whole day of perfectly reasonable* airplane food.

So I faffed about on my phone and composed that last entry about Heathrow in the delightful spring weather and basked in the Frenchness of just being diligently ignored by the staff while I took an hour to finish a treat that I could have polished off in 90 seconds, less with the right motivation.

With 30 minutes to go, I popped back into the station's Paul (a pastry shop chain that is e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e.) and got an espresso to act as reinforcement for  the iced coffee, and an apple pastry (not pictured, perfectly servicable) and then wandered around in the station until I found my line and boarded my TGV for Bordeaux.  Since France is a Real Country With Actual Transit, I'll be in Bordeaux in a couple of hours because I'm currently watching the gorgeous countryside flit by at roughly 300km/hr.

*British Airways isn't trying to kill anyone with their cuisine these days but they're not winning any Goodyear** stars either, let alone Michelin ones

**I don't know any English tire brands, sorry y'all.

Heathrow, are you ok? (PIT✈️ London✈️)

So I'm back on the road.  This time it's a month, mostly in France with a weekend in London snuck in the middle. 

I departed from PIT last night after a final day spent frantically trying to prepare the house for a guest and document its various eccentricities (as a friend will be house/cat/car sitting for me while I'm gone).  Marisa was an incredible help throughout the day and dropped me at the airport at the end.

The PIT to Heathrow flight is a

red eye, (as is proper for East coast>Europe travel), and due to our location in Appalachia, PIT has very few evening flights aside from European red eyes, and only three of those (British Air, Iceland Air, and Aer Lingus).  The airport is a ghost town by 20:00, and my flight was at 21:45.

So fifteen minutes after I was dropped off, my bags were checked, I was through security, and I was sitting comfortably near my gate. As usual, I Am Very Good At Airport still applies.

Heathrow, in the other hand, seems to be actively getting worse at Airport?

We had been delayed taking off because somebody saw an animal "the size of a dog" on the runway (as our captain cheerfully put it. My money is on the absolutely idiotic assholes that are Pennsylvanian deer.) so airport ops had to drive around in the dark in a search pattern before we could depart.  The captain used the ominous phrase "resolved" to describe the situation when we got going, which I'm hoping means somebody who works for PIT has 60+ lbs of Venison in their trunk and a big dent in an airport ops vehicle's front bumper.

And since that meant we arrived at the same time to the Heathrow airspaces as all the other red eyes from further back in the country, we got to do a little racetracking before we were permitted to land.

That left me with about 55 minutes to make my connection at Heathrow.

I was thankful I had checked my backpack, as the slog through Heathrow involves another security checkpoint and lots of walking between gates and a passport processing queue when you're changing flights to make an international connection. 

It's a huge hub airport for Europe, but nobody seems to have told it's designers that, so none of these things are especially elegant or well connected.

A polite BA employee has been stationed at our arriving gate to instill an appropriate amount of panic in the inexperienced travels about trying to make their connection, and thankfully she also reminded us how the train worked and which stop to use because the wayfinding signage in Heathrow is not even trying to be helpful at directing traffic elegantly anymore. It genuinely seems to have given up.

So we get through security (where you have to take off any shoes that cover the ankle, even if they contain no metal to speak of, which ALSO gets no signage and therefore involves lots of exasperated instructions from tired employees and people going back to put their shoes in a bin after their bags are deep in the bowels of the machine) and at this point despite the fact that our flight departs 45 minutes from now the rare departure screens that we can glimpse hidden around the terminal are flashing the airport language equivalent of "Run, you'll never make it" about our flight?

Which is at Gate A10. 

Ok. A Gates aren't that big so I'm not worried, so I follow the signage that directs me to a lift (or a secret escalator tucked behind it), which I ride down into the depthsl of Terminal 5 A gates to find ... a small bus terminal?

Because gate A10 is actually GATES A10a through A10e. That's right. Five gates in a trenchcoat! All loaded by bus!  How whimsical!

And the sign at the bottom of the escalator tells me (despite the fact that it's 11:05) ominously, in red, that the doors for the Paris flight at 11:45 flight are Closing? And lists 11:25?

Wild.

So I pick up my place and find almost a hundred people still waiting to be loaded into the buses so phew, the pressure is off. 

But then we get into the bus and we drive... An entirely unreasonable distance?  It's probably 10 or 15 minutes but it feels like 20.  

The route involves two tunnels, at least one gate that make it feel like we're Leaving Heathrow, several roundabouts, and what felt like at least one highway. Adding to the comedy, the bus driver is clearly aware we are late, and also it might be his first day, so acceleration and deceleration are both... Dynamic, and the bus has these absolutely geeeeenius straps for stability which can free slide in the direction of travel, which causes some truly comical careening of less braced passengers during our, uh, road trip.

lol what is this? Who was allowed to invent these?!  Jail. Jail for a thousand years. 

So anyway...by the time we finally got to our aircraft some of the passengers were concerned we were driving to Paris, and one guy asked if our departing flight was out of Gatwick. 

It was a time.

We get loaded up by 11:50 (no wonder they close the gate so viciously early) and it's off to Paris, which is also struggling with some new technology but not doing nearly so badly at it.

A New Skirt in Edinburgh.

Over the weeks leading up to our trip, Rachel had been making a new skirt, which she finished by hand while we were in Skye.

It’s made of wool, woven at Locharron of Scotland in the MacEwan tartan.

Our last evening in Edinburgh, we decided to wander the city with my camera and see if we couldn't find a few places where the skirt and the environment suited one another.

Rachel is a lovely model, and we found some places in the quieter streets just north of the Royal Mile that worked really well.

Being charmed by Edinburgh, Land of Disappointment

So. . . uhhh, Edinburgh.
.

The view from the front of a double-decker will never disappoint me.

This is the point where I'm going to depart from the one-to-two-posts-per-day-about-specific-things format.  For a couple reasons:

1) I'm home now (Editor's note from an airport lounge: [bitter, psychotic laughter]), and writing these is time consuming.  Often in past trips the last few days have always languished in unwritten-purgatory.  It's quite sad.  So I'm trying to make this easy to finish up rather than just making it seem like I'm still in Scotland until whenever I travel next.

2) There was a theme throughout my time in Edinburgh with Rachel that became so consistent, it was almost funny, despite starting out pretty heartbreaking.

The theme was "You can't have that.  Sorry.  Here's something else you never would have found if not for the failure of your Plan A."

The "something else" was delightful and charming in its own way.

And this happened again.

And again.

And again.

These people intend to ask Edinburgh public servants to act as their pallbearers, so the city can let them down one last time.

Allow me to list the things we'd planned for Edinburgh.

- Dance! Go to a specific Scottish dance (a Ceilidh, pronounced "Kaylee") on Tuesday night that Rachel had been to in the before-times on her last trip and was very excited to revisit.

- Gin and Tonic Sommelier! Visit a specific bar Rachel remembers doing incredible things with Gin and Tonics by interviewing you and then making you custom drinks based on your answers.

- Gin! Buy a bottle of a particular Gin (Daffie's) for Rachel's sister, who had grown very fond of it while living in Scotland and who had not been able to find it in the states.

- Ice Cream! Visit Mary's Milk Bar, an Ice Cream restaurant my partner Karen had sung the praises of for its remarkable flavors.

Beyond these, we figured we'd wing it.

Every one of these proved impossible.  

- Dancing is full: The Ceilidh, it turns out, has become wildly popular since 2019, and is now SOLD OUT, weeks in advance, despite just being a weekly dance?  Absolutely wild. We'd never seen anything like it, and since it was a weekly it didn't occur to us at any point to buy tickets in advance.  I mean, who does that?

- Sommelier gone: The Hermitage bar's brilliant custom Gin and Tonic nerd has moved on, and their bartender now recommends Bombay Sapphire when asked for a gin recommendation.

It's still a very pretty bar though.

- Sorry Mario, your gin no longer exists: Daffie's is no longer being produced and it is suspected that there isn't a bottle for sale left in the city.

- Ice Cream has Melted. Mary's Milk Bar experienced a random Freezer failure in the past few weeks and was closed until literally the moment we left the country (This is not hyperbole -- they re-opened at 11AM Friday, our flight out for Heathrow was scheduled to begin boarding at 11:05).

In addition, we attempted to make a couple of plans of our own throughout the two days we were there.

- Japanese dinner!  We tried to make plans at "Aki", a restaurant that was supposed to have pretty good Udon soups.  When we arrived we found the restaurant in perfect condition but mysteriously closed,  without explanation.
- French Lunch. We tried to have lunch at "Chez Jules" a French restaurant with good reviews (comically packed at 13:20 on a Thursday, would have been an hour wait for a table).

It was as if Edinburgh had decided that if we made ANY plan, it was ordained that the plan must fail.

However--and this was truly wild-- everywhere we turned when plans went awry, we found another thing, different, remarkably pleasant, sometimes event better than what we'd planned.

So,

Dance: After having our Ceilidh hopes dashed, a bit of frantic sidewalk facebooking turned up a Blues Dance Edinburgh group, which had a post from mere hours earlier announcing a very last minute dance in a cellar bar just south of the Meadows, which proved to be warm and welcoming and we had some lovely dances there.  We would never have known it existed if we'd tried to plan it earlier because it was announced that very morning.

What's this?

 

 It's a tiny basement bar full of my people!

 

Gin Sommelier: The Hermitage had a Gin I had been hoping to try, and we felt no hesitation ordering it since we were on our own recognizance.

 

Glaswegin's bottle design is maybe my favorite bottle design I've seen in recent memory, gutsy and simple and aggressively pandering to a hipster design aesthetic I can't help but appreciate. It reminded me of this excellent XKCD.

Where has all the Gin gone? : Stopping by a local Gin store not only helped us find an alternative to Daffie's, it also meant I could find a small bottle of Glaswegin, as well as a bottle of the delicious Hills and Harbour, which I found very pleasant and brought home with me.

Ice Cream: Ok, here technically we struck out.  The alternative whiskey-infused ice cream we found also had raspberry in it, and the ripple they used was much, much too sweet.  Technically I can't chalk this up as a victory for Edinburgh.  But after a couple of weeks chock-full of indulgent food, it served as a good reminder that "More isn't always better, Linus, sometimes it's just more."

Aki closure: Aki being closed led us to discover that Edinburgh has an Izakaya restaurant that specializes in Omurisu ("Home rice")?!  Which is a bit like having a restaurant that specializes in easy comfort food exclusively.  In my family it would be like finding "Garbage Eggs" as a the house special on the menu.

The food was incredible.  We were pretty hungry by the time we got there, but . . . damn.

Best okra I've ever had in a restaurant.  Full stop.

(They also had a really good cocktail called an "Iwakura Accomplishment" with Gin, Plum Sake, Green Chartreuse, and Vanilla.  Definitely might spend some time trying to replicate it).

The house Specialty was delicious.

And Chez Jules having an hour-wait sent us wandering down the street, where we stumbled past a deafening jackhammer on Thistle Street directly into Cafe Marlayne, which seemed to have a total of three women working (one front of house, one sous chef, and the owner), they served us the best French meal I've had since Bistro De Voraces in Lyon in 2019.  Absolutely divine.

 Still open for business, and had (blessedly) thick walls and window glass.

Wild Garlic Soup

Sea Bream -- Incredible and on a perfect bed of greens

Almond Frangipane with Rhubarb.  So, so, good.

And along the way we had several lovely little unplanned moments as well -- I've posted pictures of some of them.

And on the last night, we had a lovely dinner of Mussels in a restaurant near our hotel, and decided that despite the million setbacks, Edinburgh had been a lovely experience, and we were glad to have had it.

We still clean up nice.