I've been in Bordeaux for about a week now. I've met some fantastic people, seen some incredible things and drunk so much cheap vin rouge that if you cut me I'd probably bleed a zesty Cabernet Sauvignon. And considering where I'm staying in at the moment, I'll probably find out sooner rather than later if I do actually bleed wine... when I inevitably get stabbed.
I've touched on this before, but it's not a nice area. When I've told people that I'm living in Lormont, their reactions have ranged from mild distaste to wide-eyed looks of genuine fear. It's very near the school I'll be working at, but the tram network in Bordeaux does a very good job of making a massive city seem much smaller than it really is so living right next to your workplace is nice but largely insignificant.
The room I'm staying in isn't brilliant either. In what must be one of the most baffling interior design decisions in living memory, they've decided to build a wardrobe into the bathroom wall, right next to the (open-plan) shower. Given that the wardrobe door doesn't close properly, any clothes in there end up completely soaked in a matter of seconds. I've also been forced into a temporary diet of Nutella sandwiches and Chupa Chups by the useless kitchen facilities here (no fridge!?) so finding a nicer place to live is definitely my top priority for the next couple of weeks.
But while I may have been struggling with food, I've adapted pretty well to the Bordeaux-style liquid diet. As every British student knows all too well, student alcoholism is an exacting science; one that demands the careful measuring of the alcohol content of potential drinks against the financial battering a heavy night will leave on a flimsy student budget. For wine, I've personally adapted a system where you divide the alcohol content percentage by the value of the bottle in Pounds Sterling, which gives you an easy-to-understand indicator of inebriation value for money.
Back in the UK, my best find with this system was a £2.99 bottle of Australian red, which at 14% gave me an APS (Alcohol/Pounds Sterling) rating of 4.68. So I'm sure you can imagine my shock when the first shop I walked into in Bordeaux was offering local wines at around 2 or 3 euros per bottle, with one particularly suave-looking bottle at 13% selling for €1.34. At current exchange rates, that's an APS rating of 12.14. MIND BLOWN.
But unfortunately, there are occasional downsides to living in such an impressively wine-centric environment. A couple of days ago, a few of us decided to grab a few cheap bottles and have a cheeky apero (which is basically a less twattish word for 'prelash') in another assistant's apartment. However, as soon as we arrived, we realised we had all been thwarted by the same common enemy- the cork.
As someone who's never spent more than about £5 on a bottle of wine, it's quite easy to forget that corks even exist. If I'm being completely honest, I don't actually even know how to use a corkscrew. Unfortunately, I wasn't the only one in this situation- we had all completely forgotten to bring corkscrews along, meaning we had to go on a late-night hunt around the local corner shops looking for something to open our wine with. Predictably, as soon as we got more than a couple of minutes from the apartment it started tipping it down, so we had to run off and hide underneath the nearest tourist monument for a bit of shelter. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite heavy enough to wash away our corks in the flood, so despite our well-laid plans the bizarre sight of a large group of tourists huddled from the rain under l'Arche de Victoire staring bemusedly at our well-sealed bottles must have amused many a local resident.
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| Thankfully, memorial arches make great rain-blocks |
Thankfully we managed to eventually open them with the help of a sympathetic shopkeeper and his corkscrew, so the crisis was averted and we all went on to have a great time in a nearby salsa bar. Unfortunately, my only other night out over here didn't end up quite so well.
As I've already mentioned, Bordeaux's a pretty big place. But late at night, when the trams have stopped running completely, it's like a gigantic urban desert. Or at least it would be, if deserts were filled with drunk-drivers who all drive on the wrong side of the road... if you're lucky. From what I've seen so far, late at night they seem to quite like driving along tramways and pavements too.
ANYWAY. Having been used to clubbing in Exeter which is comparatively a bit of a country backwater, I got to 3:30am and decided to call it a night. Naturally, by that point all the trams had stopped for the night, leaving me stranded, drunk and several miles away from home. After about two hours stumbling the wrong way down a French motorway, I finally got home at about 5:00 only to check my phone and see a text telling me that if I'd stayed out for another hour or so the trams would have started again and I could have got home in less than ten minutes.
So, a couple of lessons learnt this week:
1) When you decide to go in France, either go out properly... or don't go out at all.
2) Even the British can learn something from the French about student drinking. Who knew?
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