Free wine and fake Baileys

So after two weeks in the UK, I'm back in Bordeaux... and I'm suffering from a huge case of culture shock.

Not just because I've had to go back to work after two weeks off, although having to explain to a class of giggling adolescents exactly what the words 'inbreeding,' 'bestiality' and 'cougar' meant certainly bordered on the surreal. It's not just the weather either, even if the locals in their thick-knit coats and scarves seem slightly baffled by my continued reliance on short-sleeved shirts and suncream well into November. Nope, what's thrown me most since coming back is the way people socialise back here in Bordeaux- it's a completely different world.

I've been back for less than a week, and in that time I've already found myself at two of the sorts of formal wine evenings that you'll feel painfully out of place at without both a dinner jacket and a well-groomed moustache. As a scummy English tourist in possession of neither of these things, it was difficult to shake the feeling that people were judging me for actually drinking the wine on show. Given that most of the black-tie wearing Frenchmen around me were spending more time gazing thoughtfully at their glasses, only occasionally stopping to stick their nose in, take a sniff and nod approvingly, I can only assume I didn't get the memo.

That said, considering that my enduring memory of being back in England was being peer-pressured into downing a beer which my utterly hilarious friends had contaminated with vast quantities of congealed home-brand fake Baileys, the fact that I don't really fit in at classy wine-tasting evenings in le capital du vin du monde probably isn't a massive surprise. As a result, the transition back to Bordeaux life has definitely been a little jarring, a situation we tried to remedy by visiting a local tourist hotspot... L'Entrecôte.

Take everything you know about French restaurants. The long and varied menus, the complex yet perfectly-prepared dishes and that certain je ne sais quoi that comes from their beautifully stubborn French pride in their own culinary identity. All that... forget it. L'Entrecôte takes these traditions and stamps all over them like freshly-picked Merlot grapes. Having clearly realised that for many people ordering food in a restaurant comes down to 'how fast can I find a steak in this unnecessarily long list of meals,' they've decided to shorten their menu... to one item.

Which was an undeniable masterstroke, because it's now easily the most popular restaurant in the whole city. Whether it's purely down to the novelty of the one-item menu, or because their steaks are such works of culinary beauty, I don't know- I couldn't get in. When we tried to go and see for ourselves, there were people queueing to be seated all the way along the street in a line that looked well over an hour long. It's clear that their atypical business logic is working for them, which means that I'm not really in any position to point out that branding your house wine with Comic Sans isn't the most logical way to consolidate your position as Bordeaux's most exclusive eatery. But I'll point it out anyway.

Whatever works for them, I guess

Perhaps the most unusual evening of the week however came on Thursday, when I went out for a meal with the other teachers at my school. Despite the fact that all the other English teachers are young, friendly and really easy to get on with, I was still a little bit nervous beforehand. Mostly because it's always a bit unnerving trying to relax around your working superiors, but there was still a little voice in the back of my head left over from school days gone by reminding me that teachers are all terrifying and scary and that they cannot possibly have actual lives outside of the classroom.

Thankfully, I was quickly proved wrong and had a fantastic evening over sangria and tapas. The food was pretty good- we got through multiple plates of calamari and some sort of delicious olive paste, while all trying to avoid an ominous-looking plate of potato chips in the middle of the table which had been drowned in the sort of spicy sauce that would probably blow your face off the rest of your head if you dared to try it without a large glass of water to hand. The best bit though was just relaxing and sharing stories of classroom nightmares and anecdotes from abroad- my personal favourite being someone who'd had so much difficulty understanding a student from Newcastle that she genuinely believed that 'Geordie' was a different language.

The evening also shed some light on one of the mysteries that has confused me every time I've ever come to France- why they feel the need to use such stupidly small glasses all the time. I've spent the last two months shopping around for pint glasses to no avail, and in this tapas bar we were presented with the most ridiculously-shaped glasses I have ever seen. They were about four times wider than they were tall, and looked far more like petri-dishes stolen from a school science lab somewhere than something you were actually meant to drink from. I eventually asked why exactly the French felt they needed such small glasses and why they didn't even fill them up properly, to which I got the response;

"Avoir peu dans le verre plus grand- c'est vraiment la classe, non?"  
(Having a little bit in a bigger glass- that's true class, isn't it?)

Considering that he said this just as I finally dared to try one of the terrifying spicy potato chips and had to clumsily refill my stupid petri-dish four times to get enough water to stop my throat burning up into an agonising chili-scented crisp, I'd say that no. No, it really, really isn't.

The last of the moderate innuendos

Innuendo on the internet is a dangerous game.

Having not posted anything on here in far too long, I'd just logged into my account to start writing another update when I noticed that the view count of my blog had rocketed over the past few days. Blogspot tells you exactly where people have found links to your page, which I'd completely dismissed until recently as the only sites on there had been Facebook and a few hits from Bloglovin.

Not any more. For the last week, my Facebook page has been overtaken on the 'hit list' by several obscure (and for the record, never seen before) porn sites. As I haven't ever posted my blog anywhere online apart from Facebook, I'm still not entirely sure how this has happened. After asking someone who understands technology and the like far better than me, I was told that it probably has something to do with keywords- use enough words and phrases associated with certain topics and the relevant portions of the cyber-masses will flock to your page like moths to a night-light.

Which is obviously great when you're looking to get new readers. But it's slightly less great when a seemingly innocuous pun on 'birds and bees' leaves your blog victim to a digital inquisition by the surplus web traffic from Redtube. All publicity is good publicity I guess...?

Incidental porn-based anecdotes aside, I'm currently relaxing a few days into my two-week half-term. Not that I'd really noticed, given the paltry amount of actual work I've done over the past few weeks. I'm only meant to be working twelve hours a week, which is already insignificant enough to have largely alienated myself from any third-year university friends working on actual degrees, let alone the people who have (god forbid) real jobs to go to. But in reality, I haven't worked close to that... I've somehow ended up working about four hours a week.

I'm not quite sure how I've ended up working so little. I've got two theories at the moment; the first being that the awful reputation of British students as perenially bed-bound, lecture-skiving alcoholics has preceded me and that my employers are trying to rehabilitate me slowly but surely into the real world. The second and equally plausible explanation is that the French are just a bit more laid-back about this whole working malarkey and by giving me so much extra time off they're just trying to make me feel welcome.

I've had one set of classes cancelled throughout the last few weeks because apparently there was no point starting to teach the kids anything before half term. Another set of lessons on my timetable never materialised because the students had decided weren't coming in any more before the holidays. My personal favourite, however, was being told I could have a day off because "they've been absolutely horrible... they just don't deserve you!" While this does sound far more like some kind of post break-up grief counselling than a genuine justification for a four-day weekend, I wasn't about to complain.

What this does mean is that I've had far more time to apprécier la culture, which when you're living in Bordeaux can be loosely translated to 'lounge around drinking wine.' Recently the weather has been oddly reminiscent of the UK (which is to say it hasn't stopped pissing it down for a couple of weeks) meaning that we've been forced into many of the excruciatingly expensive local pubs in a desperate attempt to stay dry. Not that you'd know they were local, seeing as all the pubs in the city are named after such iconic French institutions as The Houses of Parliament, The HMS Victory and The Sherlock Holmes.

While it would be easy to take this as a flattering continental acceptance of the superiority of the Great British Pub and move on, it would be negligent not to mention the attempts of one chain of pubs to try and stamp a more Gallic identity on French pubs across the nation. Behold:

Oh, France

So, yeah. Frogpubs. That slogan in the picture translates roughly to 'Shame on he who drinks little' which meant we all felt right at home pretty quickly. The one in Bordeaux is called The Frog and Rosbif and if it wasn't for the over-animated tipsy French conversations going on at every table you'd think you'd been teleported back to the UK to Generic Wetherspoons #217- it looks so similar it's almost lawsuit-inducing.

That said, there's a few neat flourishes which make it stand out, not least a decibel meter fitted above the bar which is used at regular intervals on Pub Quiz evenings to see how loud the entire bar can shout at once. The quiz also had a round where a member of your team had to throw a hoop at the beer taps for points, earning a free pint for every successful shot which I definitely enjoyed.

Which serves as a painful reminder that while you're in France, the things that you'd expect to be the most similar to how they are back home are usually the things that are most different. Having recently decided I needed a bigger contract package on my French phone, I popped into the shop last week to discuss the possibility of an upgrade only for the man behind the counter to start smirking at me every time I mentioned anything to do with data.

Turns out the issue was the word 'megabyte.' As with most technical phrases, I'd assumed that if I said the same word with a French accent and waved my arms around a bit I'd probably be near enough the correct word to be understood. Apparently the actual word is 'mégaoctet' which is probably one you'll want to remember. Because what I hadn't accounted for was that saying 'byte' in a French accent sounds very similar to something slightly different, and that the man in the phone shop hadn't been laughing at my paltry data allowance but had instead been amused by my claim that one hundred mega-penises a month wasn't even close to being enough for me. Oops.

And before you say anything, I have realised that using the phrase 'mega-penises' isn't about to help my problem with visitors from porn sites. Pfft. See if I care.