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.

Vignettes of Edinburgh - Street scenes

It is my sincere hope that the interior decorator's choice to use Venetian blinds (literally the only place I saw them in all of Scotland) was viciously intentional.

Just a few moments that I found the view interesting enough to take a quick picture.

 

Vignettes of Edinburgh: Wojtek retired here!

 So, this is one of those delightful pieces of nonsense trivia that I love.

Soldiers are nonsense creatures that shouldn't be left unsupervised.

This has been proven many times over, certainly my own soldiers when I was a sergeant managed to remind me of this universal truth every day we were together (and some days we weren't).

But my 'Joes', as unruly as they got . . . well, at least they never bought a bear.

The Polish II Corp, which fought under British command during WW2 (the story of how that happened is wild and I highly recommend the wikipedia page for Ander's Army if you want the weird details) on their way through Iran en route to Italy, bought a bear.

His name was Wojtek.

They brought him to the war with them.

He traveled with them throughout the campaign, was enlisted to help pay for his rations (as a Private, but promoted to Corporal eventually!) and he even helped carry ammunition crates in at least one key battle!

I have known about Wojtek for a long time, but I had forgotten this bit about what happened after:

And when the war was over and the Polish II corps was being dissolved, his company was brought to Scotland, and he retired as a resident of the Edinburgh zoo, where he lived to the ripe old age of 21. 

And for that reason, he has a memorial in the park here!

So of course we had to visit that.

Thanks Wojtek.  Any artillery aimed at Nazis deserves all the help it can get.

Vignettes of Edinburgh: Ermagerd, it's an Ambulance.

So, Gaelic is a language with a lot of similarity to English, and because of how Scottish public signage policy works, Gaelic is generally required to be printed alongside English (or in some cases the signs are only in Gaelic).

And much of Gaelic is beautiful and elegant and graceful but. . .not all of it.

Which is why I could not stop giggling whenever I saw an Ambulance in Scotland.

Behold. The Majestic

AMBAILEANS

 

The Falkirk Wheel

On our way back to Edinburgh airport to return Nell, we went on a small nature walk, and then stopped by the Falkirk wheel for a boat-tour of a marvel of modern engineering.

The Falkirk wheel is . . . well, it's basically a boat elevator.

It replaces something like 9 traditional locks that were once required to move passenger and cargo boats across Scotland via series of inland canals. 

All those locks existed to to help move boats through a roughly 30 meter elevation change.

Navigating those locks used to take most of a day.

Now there are just two, one above, and one below, the Falkirk wheel.

The wheel itself cycles in just 5 minutes, and it runs on the energy required to boil about 8 kettles of tea.  The rest of the energy required is potential energy provided by the water flowing into the system, and the offset weight between each of the wheel's two gondolas.  It's pretty ingenious.

These people are starting to feel better after their ordeal.

It really is a very precise piece of machinery.

We grabbed a snack at the tourism information center and then hopped aboard a small diesel motored tourboat for a quick ride up the wheel, through a small tunnel (where we learned a bit about the Antonine wall, which I didn't know anything about prior to this tour), and then back through the tunnel and down again.

 

There was some delightfully weird statuary on hand. 

It was a really neat tour, and the views from the top of the wheel were pretty incredible, as it was a fairly clear day -- we could see almost all the way to Edinburgh proper.

It was also nice to be on a boat that didn't do anything too exciting.

 

Tour of an engineering marvel behind us, we zipped onward to the airport, returned Nell, and boarded a tram headed into Edinburgh.