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.