The local fishmonger was as full as I’ve ever seen it on Christmas Eve morning. Shellfish is a major holiday staple across Spain. The lobsters, tagged as having come from Canada, were still sluggishly moving about on the ice.

Langostinos a la plancha = grilled jumbo shrimp

Eggs stuffed with crab meat.

Gilda = 1 hot pepper + 1 anchovy + 1 olive. They are named after the 1946 Rita Hayworth film because their shape resembles her hourglass figure. If there was ever a word coined by an inebriated man at a bar, this is it.

Mmmm.. Flan!

After the meal, I helped polish off a bottle of Wild Turkey that my parents gave my grandfather-in-law a few years back. Among the bottles that get taken out every year is a bottle of patxaran from 1993.

We had only light flurries of snow on Christmas day, but the mountains around us were covered. This is Udalaitz, the largest mountain overlooking the town of Mondragón.

Nora enjoyed a ride on a carousel set up in town for the holidays. This time she was in a Ferarri. I was there with her and very nearly got dizzy.

We sang traditional Spanish Christmas carols. Since I only ever hear them one night a year, and the lyrics vary from family to family (and thus cannot be found on the internet), I have yet to learn the lyrics, except to the most repetitive songs. The bizarre percussion instrument is called a zambomba, or friction drum, and must be played with a wet hand, which vibrates on a cane shaft and is magnified by a drum head. Nora had a delightful time with all the music.

Personally, I found the people who walk through the pool to be much more interesting subjects.

A tourist just got the obligatory shot. I took this from our tour bus.

Strolling family leaves a wake.

Reflected kid.

He was dashing back and forth puddle-stomping.

Running left.

Examining one of the sprinklers in the pool.

If only his face had been there when this happened…

I had no idea that every so often things got all misty.

Erik in the mist.

Misty reflected Marga.

Refreshing bicycle ride.

Running fast.

Reflected redhead.

The truth is that we ate way more than we usually do and came back feeling bloated. In the week since we’ve been back, we’ve been nearly fasting, and feeling much better.

On the night of our arrival, Friday, we were tired from a week of work, so we just walked down to the closest restaurant to our hotel, a pizzeria. I had a “4 Fromage” pizza, and Marga made do with just a side salad.

For lunch on Saturday, our travel agent had booked us at Chez Fernand, right on the river in the center of Bordeaux. We sat outside on the street. Marga ordered the foie gras, the wild sea bass, and the chocolate cake. I had oysters, a goose leg, and a fig-based dessert.

Marga’s foie gras. The presentation was impeccable. Those two lines that look like cocaine ready for snorting are salt and pepper. Foie gras is not the prettiest food in the world, but this plate is gorgeous!

The red berries on the red and white napkin was a clever touch, I thought.

My plate of nine raw oysters on a bed of ice. The tower in the middle was a spiced butter that I couldn’t figure out what to do with since it was so hard. I didn’t eat the seaweed.

Slurping down raw oysters in southern France.

Marga’s grilled wild sea bass, which the waitress claimed was fished locally. I was unable to get a photo of it before Marga attacked and took a big chunk out of the middle. The spices and taste were delicious.

My leg o’ goose. Wonderful taste. The mixture of cooked vegetables in the upper right was surprisingly delicious.

Look at that, I didn’t even make a French fry joke!

Marga’s chocolate cake with a side scoop of ice cream. Also with a strawberry and passion fruit with a chocolate sauce to dip them in.

Figs on a bed of ice cream and port sauce. The caramel hood ornament on top was a nice touch.

We enjoyed a 2005 Château d’Eck.

We finished with a black coffee and a cookie.

On Saturday afternoon, our travel agent had booked us a complimentary (already paid for) canelé, a specialty pastry of the Bordeaux region.

It was very nice with the coffee. Better than your average muffin, that’s for sure.

On Saturday night we were too exhausted from the tourism and still full from this wonderful meal, so we skipped dinner entirely.

On Sunday, in Saint Émilion, we had lunch at L’envers du Décor, a nice restaurant in the touristy center of the medieval village. Unfortunately, I only got a shot of my seared tuna starter, the wine bottle, and the cheese course at the end. And I already can’t remember the rest. Sigh…

It was completely raw in the middle, and the spices were amazing. It was sort of like semi-sushi.

We ordered the cheapest wine on the menu and got a No. 19, which was quite good to our peasant tastes. The golfing joke with the name and label is referring the golfing slang, “the nineteenth hole” (there are 18 holes on a golf course), which refers to the bar at the club house after the round. The tables were covered with wine boxes from local chateaus.

The cheese course would have been better if we weren’t so stuffed already. It was delicious, though.

For dinner on Sunday, we weren’t too hungry so we tried to find a cheap restaurant, which turned out to be a fairly American-styled joint with musical instruments and sporting equipment nailed to the ceiling. I started eying the pizzas on the menu when I noticed something called flammekueche. I had never seen that word before in my life, but from the context of the menu it looked similar to a pizza, given the toppings available. For some reason I had my eye on the “4 Fromage” flammekueche. We asked the waiter what the heck a flammekueche was, and he said “It’s like pizza, but with cream instead of tomato sauce.” Without thinking this new information over, I went ahead and ordered the four cheese flammekueche. This turned out to be a big mistake as it was like a big fromagey overdose and I could only eat less than half. Still, though, I am very intrigued by the tomato-less pizza concept.

On Monday, in St. Jean de Luz, I had a fish soup and some chiperones, which are little squid. In Spain, I’m used to eating them in their own ink, but these were in a nice mixture of fried peppers and potatoes.

Marga had a steak, as you can see over there.

The French gastronomy was one of the aspects of the trip that I was most looking forward to and that I most enjoyed.

The Power of Suggestion

The most significant factor in how much you will enjoy a glass of wine is how good you are told it is before you drink it. During our wine tour in Saint Émilion, we were given several wines to try. On some, tour guide told us, “This wine is not yet ready. It will be ready to drink in five years. But if you wanted to really drink it now, you would have to decant it for an hour before drinking.” We took a sip. “See how it’s too aggressive up front? And then the taste disappears so quickly?” the guide continued. And sure enough, we all totally agreed. Then, he gave us a similar wine from ten years ago that “was ready for drinking now.” He added, “See how the bouquet is evenly balanced and the aggressiveness comes at the end, lingers, and then fades very slowly.” What do you know? That’s exactly what I experienced! The ten year old glass of Saint Émilion wine I had during the tasting was some of the best wine I’ve ever drunk. But it’s not worth 50€ for a bottle.

I recall an early episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit where they debunked the entire bottled water industry. They set up a fancy California restaurant with a special Menu d’Eau with various exotic waters from all over the world. One was named, exotically, Agua de Culo, which is Spanish for “Butt Water”. Meanwhile, out back, they were filling up the bottles of water with the garden hose. The waiter presented each bottle to the customers, describing each one using words like crisp, fresh, alpine, glacial, pure, etc. And the customers, after drinking the water from the garden hose, completely agreed with the waiter about the description of the water. It was some of the best water they’d ever drunk. The human senses of taste and smell are extremely vulnerable to suggestion.

Blind Taste Tests

Just like the only scientific way to run a clinical trial is with a double-blind trial, the only way to scientifically evaluate taste is with a blind taste test. Someone recently suggested to me that most people couldn’t even tell the difference, when blindfolded, between red and white wine, but I find that hard to believe. However, the results of blind taste tests are often surprising.

One of the wine tasting guides we had in Bordeaux told us that there was recently a scandal when they had a blind taste test amongst the owners of the Chateaus that make the most expensive wines in the Bordeaux region. The results weren’t surprising to me. Apparently a cheap 20€ table wine came in second place amongst ten multi-thousand-euro bottles that were competing. It was the owners that were doing the tasting, too! They couldn’t tell their 2000€ bottle from a 20€ bottle of regular wine! It just goes to show the arrogance that comes from feeding clients so much bullshit that you actually start to believe it yourself. I’m sure that there are many Chateau owners that understand that the wine business is all about marketing and subliminal suggestion, and they would never compete in a scientific test like that.

Conclusion

My point is that drinking wine is a hugely subjective experience, and that for 99.99999% of us, a 10€ bottle of wine is no different from a 500€ bottle. So unless you are looking for a way to get rid of excess money (see Donate link at top of this blog!), there’s never a reason to pay more for the wine than for the meal it accompanies.

The day was a considerable letdown for us. Not only was the weather a little drizzly, but we had just been to the beautiful medieval Saint Émilion the day before, and St. Jean de Luz was quite lackluster in comparison. Also, we live in a fishing village right next to a beach a hundred times better than that of St. Jean de Luz, so why would we want to spend a day in a similar town filled with Spaniards when we could be at home doing the same thing? We had lunch, went to the tourism office, realized there weren’t any sights we wanted to see, and headed home.


This is St. Jean de Luz’s semi-circular beach as seen from the air.

Cloudy beach panorama.

Later the sun came out so I had to take another panoramic shot.

We really wanted to buy this über-French hat for Nora, but the shop was closed when we walked by it, and after lunch we forgot to go back for it.

St. Jean de Luz Harbor

A thirty-one year old in St. Jean de Luz.

A grape in the hand is worth two on the vine. But still not as valuable as a grape in…

…your mouth! I love this photo. I dedicate it to Marga’s orthodontist.

This is the kind of countryside we walked through to get to the Clos La Madeleine. Worth viewing large.

I loved walking by the rows of vines, having them line up so you could see down them every couple steps.

No, this isn’t at all confusing having the Château Magdelaine right next to the Clos La Madeleine! We may have wandered around the empty Château Magdelaine before finding our way next door to where our tour group was already finishing.

We arrived at roughly 15:30, an hour late. The tour of the little museum had finished, and the group was doing the wine tasting. The tour guide was an obese man in his sixties who was not at all pleased with our tardiness. “Two thirty means two thirty!” he told us. But we had prepaid with the agency, so he brought out two more wine glasses. We’d only missed the first of four wines to be tasted. I was quite surprised at the demographic make-up of our tour group. Everyone was within three years of thirty years old. There were two Australians, one Brit, two French, one Austrian, and us. Some were open about their ignorance, and others were not. The Brit, when asked by someone what he did for a living, responded, “I’m a scientist,” which caused Marga and me, who were eavesdropping, to burst out laughing, as no real scientist would give that answer.

The wine tasting involved one of the best wines I’ve ever tasted. It also sowed a seed for a wine industry rant that will need a post of its own.

With even more wine in our bellies, we wandered back to town…

The Clos La Madeleine people had the brilliant idea to plant roses at the end of their vines.

The term Clos implies that the vineyard is walled off.

I couldn’t come up with a reasonable sequence of events that would explain this tree growing out of this wall.

Resting on the outskirts of town.

While we were resting, I noticed that we had yet another wine tasting tour thing that we were hopelessly late for. It would have been impossible to arrive there even if we’d been on time at the previous place and gone sprinting to the following one. Plus, all the wine was making us considerably more laid back about the schedules.

When we got to the Les Cordeliers monastery, the woman there was rather surprised that we’d arrived at 17:30 for the 16:00 tour and tasting. We assumed we’d missed that and were just there to see if they’d give us the included box of twelve macaroons. A colleague of hers suggested that we could still have the wine as well, so she let us choose from a menu of five sparkling wines (called crémant). As we didn’t know anything about them, she gave us the two axes of red-white and sweet-dry to choose from. Marga went with a sweet red, and I with a dry white. The woman pointed back to the little garden patio out back and suggested we have our wine out there. The garden was marvelous! The setting sun, the cool bubbling wine, the tables just the right distance apart (about 5 meters) so that you could hear other people but not what they were saying…it was wonderful.

Chilling in France.

We didn’t open the macaroons, since we were still stuffed from lunch.

These bubbles were way prettier in motion.

The ruins of the old monastery.

I loved the design of these bottle deposits for when customers were done with their bottles.

On the way to the car and out of town we stopped again to take a photo of this church ruin, doing our best to replicate the image on the postcard that I sent to my grandfather.

Saint Émilion was a very delightful place. A big merci beaucoup to Michael for recommending it to us. We enjoyed it very much.

This is a very photo-heavy post, so I have split it into two posts. Let’s begin, shall we?

The ruin of an old church on the edge of town where we parked. Notice the grapevines. Just about every square meter of space around the town is used to grow grapes.

A church. (not the monolithic one)

Inside the church, mass is going on. It was Sunday morning, after all!

A 180º turn from the previous photo.

The church courtyard, which we later discovered was connected via a door to the Saint Émilion Tourism Office.

The Saint Émilion bell tower. Little did I know that we would later in the day be entrusted with the key to the bell tower and climb up the 192 steps to the top.

This restaurant seemed very, very French to me. From out here on the street, anyway.

Wine shop.

Another wine shop, with a facade of wine box covers from various chateaus.

Some of the streets were incredibly steep.

It doesn’t look as steep when photographed. Check out the timbered house on the left.

The first place our tour guide took us was up onto a hill to look over the city. View large. You can clearly see the homogeneousness of the town. The tower on the left was built by English occupiers to keep an eye on stuff. Now it’s used for the head wine honchos to get together and decide when to harvest.

Gorgeous ivy growth.

What I loved about Saint Émilion was how you could be walking down the street, minding your own business, and then pass a view like this:

Wow!

Flowers under the only remaining medieval gate into the old fortified city. Inside the walls, the population of Saint Émilion is 200. A lot of the houses, unfortunately, are falling into disrepair because French law requires that all owners of a house agree for renovations to take place and, after two or three generations since a house’s original owner, inheritance law has resulted in some of the houses being jointly owned by over 40 distant cousins. If you’ve ever been to a family reunion, you know how tough it is to get even five cousins to agree on something as trivial as pizza toppings, so imagine forty on renovating a medieval house!

There are still some old rotting wooden doors hinged to the side of the gate.

Brings new meaning to the term “wallflowers”.

This is the monolithic church. Worth viewing large. My observant wife asked if the faces and heads of the figures over the arch had eroded over the years. The tour guide informed us that, no, actually the figures were destroyed by a bunch of angry Protestants that apparently didn’t like the head of the Catholic Jesus. Religion can make people do mean things.

I wasn’t allowed to take photos inside the church, but it was very cool, figuratively and literally. When we got out of the church, the tour ended. But our tour guide asked if we would like to go up in the bell tower. We said sure, so she took a skeleton key off her keyring and asked us to return it to the tourism office in an hour when it opened again at 13:30. And off we went to climb the tower!

Stopping halfway up to look out a window.

Looking off into the grape-covered horizon.

Up at the top, looking down to the square below. Another good one to view large.

A knight guards a tourist shop.

Decorations up at the top of the bell tower.

Lovely house down below. This one’s getting tilt shifted eventually, I’m certain. Heck, it already looks miniature.

A panorama from the bell tower. A must for large viewing. The row of cars to the top left in front of the roofless monastery is where the tour guide took us to overlook the town and where the panorama above was taken.

DSLR camera sitting on ledge over a seven story drop. Yikes!

Marga on the other side of the bell tower.

Keymaster locking up the door to the bell tower.

Then we had lunch at a great restaurant in the center of Saint Émilion called L’envers du Décor. After that, we had to rush to get to a local chateau for a tour and wine tasting.

We’ll pick up there in the next post.

Do you think this pub is British?

Luckily we didn’t have Nora, so we could enter this “No Parenting!” zone. After seeing this sign in several places, I came to the conclusion that it really means “end of pedestrian zone”.

Anthropomorphic candy…never a good thing.

“Please win me this big white gorilla!” “No.”

I loved this ball fountain. I’d never seen anything similar. This kid was pretty good at catching them in the air.

I was never any good at these carnival games.

Gah! A manifestation of my Sponge Bob nightmare.

Montesquieu wasn’t amused by the carnival activities in the square in front of him.

When you view this large, how many copyrighted images can you spot?

Worst. Claw game. Ever.

On the way to the wine museum, Marga asked me to move this potted plant. No problem.

Wine barrels in the cellar-turned-wine-museum.

I wonder if you could just park yourself in the dungeons of the wine museum and pull out a cork screw…

Wine museum Engrish.

Cool staircase we couldn’t go up in the wine museum.

This is my kind of bottle!

Pensive Marga on the bridge in the park.

French geese.

Marga’s keen eye spotted this wonderful display of neighborly boundaries that would make Robert Frost proud. The owner of the house on the left paid to clean its facade, and the cleaners followed the property line right up the chimney. Might need to view large if you don’t see it.

While in the park, we saw this parade of cyclists, each with a musician in the front basket playing a different instrument. Seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do in the park on a Saturday!

The Bordeaux Cathedral.

Prayer candles provided an interesting photographic subject.

Focus on the back.

Focus on the front.

This shop window made my mouth water. Strawberry and raspberry pies! Mmm!!!

Our general conclusion about Bordeaux is that it is a very beautiful city with quite a lot of character, much more character than either of our two neighboring cities of Santander and Bilbao. After living in England for several years, and then in Spain for several years, when I visit France, I find it shockingly British, when compared to Spain, in the style of shops and houses and the way people act, etc. I mean that both in a positive and negative way. Several times during our visit, I said, “Bordeaux would really be very nice…if it wasn’t for all the French people.” While that sounds offensive, it’s really entirely a reflection on my frustrations with the language and understanding of the culture. Both Marga and I left France with a desire to learn French…not that we have any time to do so…

In the next post, we travel to Saint Émilion, the quaintest medieval wine village ever!

I took so many pictures that I’m splitting up the events of Saturday in Bordeaux into two blog posts. Once you’ve trained yourself as a photographer to find interesting scenes in the ordinary landscape of your neighborhood, when you travel to a foreign country, everything is begging to have its picture taken!

Let’s travel, shall we?


Our hotel, Le Chantry Hotel. With the exception of the crepe-sized blood-and/or-semen stain on the carpet of our room, this two-star hotel was very satisfactory, a mere ten minute walk to the center of Bordeaux. How disappointing, though, to look up the word chantry and discover that it’s English and not French.

This father and son rode by as we were waiting in front of the Bordeaux tourism office for our guided bus tour to begin.

Bordeaux street corner. Also by the Tourism Office.

This wooded park was absolutely lovely. I think it will be even prettier next week as the colors of the leaves change.

Another velocipede-enabled French family riding by the Garonne river.

Our tour guide was absolutely terrible. It was difficult to tell when she switched from French to English, and the English parts we did pick up were fantastically uninteresting, often about road construction newly completed or begun. There were, however, a few pearls in the stinking pile of oysters that was her tour. Once she drove us out to this abandoned dock area and the bus stopped. She spoke for about five minutes in French and then for about two minutes in English. This was the view:

That horribly ugly concrete structure in the background is a Third Reich submarine bunker. Apparently the British did their best to destroy it, but were unable to. After the war, French demolition crews also tried to demolish it, but failed as well, declaring it indestructible. So they have decided to use it for concerts (don’t ask me how) and other social events, adopting it into the culture of the city.

Interestingly, the tour guide never once used the term “second world war”, a war which featured prominently in shaping the city of Bordeaux. She always called it “the 1940 war”. I found this fascinating. They’ve named it after the year of their invasion. Can anyone confirm if this is common nomenclature in the French language?

Some nice flowery windows. The entire city of Bordeax is made of limestone – there is almost no brick – so all the buildings are a shade between this color and the black sooty color that it turns over time.

This house used to belong to one of the wealthy wine-making families. Now it’s a fancy hotel.

A flower shop, as seen from the tour bus.

Many of the houses have these cool enormous wooden doors.

The gate to the city park.

On top of the gate is the city coat of arms. The guide told us what the five towers and crescent moon symbolized, but I’ve forgotten.

Our bus driver. I hope he was just blinking rather than driving with his eyes closed.

We took the Pont-de-Pierre over the wide Garonne River which runs through Bordeaux. The tour guide told us that the river is always a brown muddy color, even on sunny days, because of the high volume of suspended silt in the water.

The clouds part on our way back over the bridge. These lamp posts were very nice.

Statue on a pillar.

A ferris wheel for the carnival that was in town.

A truly bizarre set of statues in the fountain under the pillar.

This kid is riding a big fish and clearly getting the better of the two adults around him.

A bronze hand in a mist of fountain water.

This freaky beasts were half sea serpent and half horse. Marga called the mermaid horses.

These guys are supposed to represent undesirable human qualities (I’ve forgotten which, as there are so many) and the water from the noble statues above is tormenting them.

Nobody does copyright infringement like European carnies.

I call this The WTF Bus. All aboard!

This is the longest pedestrian street in Bordeaux.

Of course no photo-journey to France would be complete without a little gratuitous baguette porn.

This concludes part one of this two-part post. Please eject the tape, flip it over, insert it again, and press play to continue…I’ll wait.