City of Whine

We arrived in France on Monday evening after nearly a full day of travel. Approximately 23 hours door-to-door from our home in Savannah to our hotel in Bordeaux, much of that time spent in decreasingly comfortable environments. The worst was when we arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, but then had to kill four hours hanging around with our luggage before our train to Bordeaux departed. It’s cold in France at the moment, and the boarding platforms are all exposed to the open air, so the station itself was not the most warming place after a fidgety all-nighter aboard an airplane.

Rather than freeze, we headed back up to the airport. There, we found a Sheraton with a warm lobby, in which we were able to kill a couple hours there before getting booted by a security person who seemed to be telling us that we weren’t allowed to camp out for an indeterminable length of time if we were not actually, you know, staying at the hotel. This attitude appeared to contradict the vaunted European socialism I had heard so much about, but I didn’t take to the barricades about it because, as an American, I have always been opposed to those who would seek warmth and kindness. Also, by that point we only had a little while to wait before our train, so we grudgingly headed back into the unforgiving French climate.

The train to Bordeaux was comfortable enough. Martha and I split a meal of café car pizza (feta cheese melted on a baguette???) and a lentil salad. We agreed it was unlikely we would find a pre-packaged lentil salad on Amtrak, but the terrible Amtrak pizza would have been a higher-level of terrible than what we found aboard the TGV train line. If I had to rank French train food, I would give it a solid merde.

Bordeaux is lovely, exactly what a French city is supposed to look like according to the French cities that populate my imagination. Yesterday, we took the tram to the Cite du Vin, a museum dedicated entirely to wine and wine production. The building itself looks like it was erected in the last ten years or so, and is shaped a bit like an abstracted overflowing wine bottle.

I have almost no interest in wine or wine production, but my dear Martha is a dedicated lush and so I dutifully strolled the exhibits recounting the region’s history, geography, and the ways in which wine has played a fascinating (to them) role in the development of global commerce. Although I found the museum sort of interesting, I would have enjoyed it more had I been drunk.

Cite du Vin (and yes, I know there’s supposed to be an accent mark over the word “cite” but I can’t be bothered to look up how to do that when I’m sitting in the freezing cold.)

Afterwards, we went to the tasting area where Martha quaffed a complimentary white and I leaned against the windows and wondered when I could go back to the hotel for a nap. I was very tired.

Plus, it was cold. Martha had told me before we left that I should pack some silk long johns but I ignored her advice because I always ignore her advice out of stubbornness and a sense that if I listen to her about one thing then I will have to listen to her about everything, which I refuse to do because I am a man. Neeedless to say, she was entirely correct about the silk long johns. Because she is smarter and better-prepared than I, she packed two pair, one of which I was wearing. Even so, after a few years thinning our blood in Savannah, a sunny day in the 30’s felt downright arctic.

What little I’ve seen of Bordeaux to this point is pretty good. The city is quiet and clean, and there are restaurants featuring every kind of cuisine. Last night, Martha and I had a competent sushi dinner, followed by a long walk back to the hotel in which I asked her to translate what the man screaming into the phone beside us was saying. “How should I know?” she answered, “He’s speaking Arabic.”

I had, incorrectly, assumed that because Martha speaks French, she understands all languages while in France. Apparently that is not the case. My own French is coming along, which is to say I know how to apologize for not speaking French.

Today we are going to wander a few neighborhoods and I am already cold thinking about it. Neither of us slept well last night and we are both fighting stubborn cases of crabbiness, a fug rooted in nothing more than jetlag. It sort of feels like our grand tour has yet to fully begin because we are not yet acclimated to the time and the climate and the annoying European habit of insisting that the second floor to any building is the first floor. The first floor is the “ground floor,” which is labled in the elevators with a “0”. It’s the Zero Floor, which also kind of describes my current mental state. Again, this is entirely due to jetlag and a sense that the French have specifically ordered this brisk weather as a lesson in marital listening skills.

Martha has now finished getting ready and so we are off to explore more of the city. If lunch today doesn’t feature a baguette, I will be furious. I have yet to eat a baguette that wasn’t produced on a train.