In vino veritas: Or, life in Bordeaux

In the heart of Bordeaux
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Just letting the word Bordeaux roll off the tip of the tongue, and your taste buds long for the robust, generous taste of the eponymous wines which have made the region world famous. The irony, however, is rather bittersweet, since there are actually no wines made in Bordeaux.

We arrived one day after the end of the blistering heat wave, which had made Europe to bake under the sun for many weeks. This was unfortunately sort of a mixed blessing. Although we would have found it unbearable being tourists under a burning 38°C sun, there were more than a few days during our three-week stay in the South of France when we would have appreciated a little more heat. A few weeks later, as I was winding my way up through northern France, I would hear on the radio that the month of August 2006 had been the coldest during the last 20 years...

"Life in Bordeaux could not have been more solidly bourgeois." Wilfred Owen

While we were in Bordeaux, we stayed with some "unknown" friends... yes, I know this sounds quite mysterious, but we had made contact with these people through a site on the Internet called couchsurfing.com. Many moons ago, I'd been a member of a "travel for peace" organization called Servas (servas.org). I had a very delightful experiences as a traveler being hosted in the Netherlands as well as in California. A few days before departure, we saw a news report talking about couchsurfing.com, a nonprofit organization that started in Montréal. It seemed like a legitimate an interesting opportunity to meet interesting people during our trip. So I registered on their website and promptly started looking for couches to surf on in Bordeaux.

Passing through airports nowadays bears certain resemblances with running the gauntlet: you never know exactly how you will be treated, but you always brace for the worse. This time it was no different, and, despite having read all the information Air Transat had on their web site, as well as having called to doublecheck certain things, we encountered certain 'difficulties' during our check-in.