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| From Bordeaux |
Bonjour, my friends! After 5 weeks of roaming around Spain, we finally got enough courage to make the jump over the border and into France. It was a hard change to make... we were just starting to get used to the Spanish lifestyle: the 2 to 3 hour siestas during midday just to chill out... the beautiful beaches... the cheap boxes of juice... the beautiful beaches... man, we're really going to miss those.
But now it's on to bigger and more mysterious things. It's literally like we're throwing ourselves in freezing cold water and seeing if we can survive again. We were quite hesitant on coming to France, because everyone we've met along the way has only had negative things to say about this country. Across the board, everyone mentions how rude the French are to Americans and how they just go off on us for not being experts at their language. But so far, I haven't seen any of that. Where I'm at, the French have been anything but rude. They've actually been quite pleasant.
We're in the city of Bordeaux right now, home of the wine by the same name. The hostel we've been staying in—Auberge de la Barbey—is a pleasant change from our Camping Igeldo experience in San Sebastian. Anytime I go from camping to a hostel, I feel like Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer awakening to a strange new world. "You mean, there's something called a MATTRESS that doesn't force me to sleep on the hard ground? And I can now keep my food cold in something called a REFRIGERATOR? Wow... these new fangled conveniences of your civilized world amaze me! Next thing you'll be telling me is that I can communicate instantly with the world through big tubes linking everyone together. It's almost too much for my puny Cro-Magnon brain to process!"
This hostel feels like it used to be a residence hall for university students at one time. It doesn't have much character aesthetically, but it does provide a lot of food for breakfast in the morning, which is a major plus in my book. As I mentioned before, good breakfast equals good hostel. The location of this hostel is in a seedy part of town where all the illegal immigrants have set up shop. When we first walked around the neighborhood here, I had that cheesy opening song from Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" going through my head, where everyone is so darn happy, bursting open windows and saying "Bonjour!" to each other. So when I paired that with what I was actually seeing around me—the young lady pushing her mom in a wheelchair and getting urinated on by a dog in an overhead balcony... the tourists stepping in piles of dog crap on the sidewalks and cussing... the French "gangsta" rappers bumming around with their shirts off, their pants dragging off of their asses and bottles of hard liquor dangling from their hands—it just seemed like such a disconnect. That's what I get for Disney handing me such a sanitized version of France.
I think the most bizarre sight we saw was late one night after returning from an Irish pub. We had been drinking some store-bought Bordeaux earlier, then had gone to the pub for a half pint of beer to drink (French prices on beer are insane... it's better to stick with the wine.) As we were walking back to the hostel, we happened to see this angry-looking midget on the sidewalk, with his shirt ripped off, showing off his rock-hard muscles and tattoos while walking a giant great dane. We both thought we were hallucinating. I mean, this guy could've just jumped on this dog and used it as a mode of transportation. We also realized that, despite the size of this guy, he could probably kick both of our asses. So we quickly walked away to avoid any chance of pissing off a French midget.
Here in Bordeaux, we've tried to have the ultimate Bordeaux experience. This morning, we stopped by a local market and I picked up some Camembert cheese, because I've read from multiple sources that this is the thing I'm supposed to do. The lady opened the cheese container for me and let me "squeeze the cheese" to check its quality. We then set off on a mission to have an official wine tasting at a chateau on the outskirts of Bordeaux. Like two bumbleheads, we didn't know what we were doing. They had prearranged winery tours and tasting for 22 Euros and above, but we didn't want to pay that much, so we decided to cobble together our own winery tour. After two hours of trying to figure out how the public transportation worked here, we jumped on a bus for Medoc, which is on the northwestern outskirts of Bordeaux. Medoc is supposed to have a lot of wineries to check out, and you're supposed to reserve tours and tastings well in advance. But we decided we'd take our chances and just sneak into a wine tasting and see what happened.
The bus eventually dropped us off in a suburban area where we didn't see any wineries at all. So, after trying to read the confusing maps, we just started walking east, hoping that something would appear. Meanwhile, I started smelling something funky coming from something near me. At first I thought it was Eric, because that kid can sweat a lot and sure smell rank in a hurry. So I distanced myself from Eric as much as possible, but that putrid stench kept following me. Frustrated, I looked at the bottoms of my sandals, thinking that maybe I had stepped into a pile of French dog crap. Nope... my sandals were clean. Then I thought that I was the one stinking really bad, which concerned me because I had just taken a shower earlier that day. I smelled under my armpits, but they were clean. Where the hell could that smell be coming from?
Then, as I was taking off my backpack, it suddenly occurred to me: IT'S THE CHEESE! It's the cheese inside my backpack that's stinking! Oh, thank the Lord it's not me! So we sat down at a bus stop, made some sandwiches and tried out the Camembert. Let me tell you... despite the rancid smell, that is one great cheese! No wonder why these French folks love it so much. It's a little on the runny side like Brie, but it's dang tasty. And I had somehow bought the real deal and not one of the cheap knockoffs found throughout France. I think I found my new love... and her name is Camembert.
After having our lunch, we then wandered down the street some more. It looked like a hopeless cause... we didn't see any wineries in sight. Then, over the horizon, the clouds suddenly parted and before our eyes, we saw a giant field of grapes appear, with a sign pointing the way to the Chateau du Taillan... a winery! It was a wine tasting miracle! So we approached the winery and wandered around inside its giant mansion, but we couldn't seem to find anyone. We then wandered over to an adjacent building where it appeared they might conduct their tastings, and we waited for someone to appear.
After 15 minutes, a group of people being led on a tour suddenly appeared, with a camera crew in tow. As we inquired about the wine tastings, the camera crew pointed their cameras straight at us, making me feel a little uncomfortable and wondering what the hell was going on. At first, the lady leading the tour was hesitant, but then said, "Well, all right. Come and join us with the tasting." So we joined the group at a table above the chateau, and for two hours, while the camera crew was filming us, we were wine tasting. The two ladies in charge were speaking completely in French, so like clueless Americans, we just smiled and tried to mimic what everyone else was doing... swirling their wine in glasses, smelling the wine, sipping it, then spitting into these plastic spittoons. Every once and awhile, they'd say something in English to us so we weren't totally clueless. Luckily, there was a German couple in the group who also couldn't speak French, so we weren't the only morons present.
I have been to wine tastings before in Napa Valley and Amador County, California, and at those, there was none of this spitting out your wine into buckets and just tasting it. People actually drank the wine. So I applied my experiences in California to my wine tasting here in France, and within about 10 minutes, my glasses of wine were completely bone dry. The lady talking to the camera noticed this and proceeded to come right over to me, point at my empty glasses and say, "Oh, it looks like your friend came here for the tasting, but YOU just came here to DRINK!" So everyone was laughing at me, the cameras were all recording this, and I was just sitting there, looking like a complete schmuck. It made me feel like Thomas Haden Church's character Jack from the movie "Sideways" who couldn't seem to get wine tasting right, either. Way to go, Brian. Here I am, an ambassador for my country, and now the French are going to perceive all us Americans as a bunch of uncivilized drunks.
So after being filmed for two hours, we were finally allowed to go. The lady didn't charge us anything for the tasting, which was extremely nice. We later found out that the camera crew was there to make a documentary for French television on this winery and 3 others, all of which were run by women, which is not common in France. It's going to be a 2 hour documentary which will air in March 2008 in France. More than likely, we'll make a small appearance in it as the two grubby Americans just stumbling upon a winery and wanting to drink. Great... just how I wanted to use my 15 minutes of fame.
After walking around the grounds of the winery, we headed down the road to a convenience store and bought a 5 Euro bottle of red wine that was made by the chateau we just visited. The man at the checkout counter looked at the bottle and started glowing, saying such wonderful things about my smart purchase. I've never been complimented before for buying a wine... and coming from a Frenchman, it meant that much more. He and an elderly women at the store then wanted to know where we were from. We told them America, and they couldn't believe it. I guess Americans never come to their neck of the woods, so they found it so odd that two clueless Americans would just wander in randomly off the street and buy a great local wine. Fortunately, the two French people didn't say anything bad about America... at least not to our faces. As we left the store, we could hear them laughing. If the French were indeed rude as people say, at least they had the decency to badmouth me behind my back, and that is OK in my book.
Overall, I can't believe the good fortune we had in actually making it to a wine tasting. The wine gods were definitely smiling down upon us today. I just love it when a plan comes together... especially when you're as clueless as we are.
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