About three hours into our recovery time, drums boomed, as the \u201cYellow Jacket\u201d protest parade filed by.\u00a0 Bordeaux is a large enough city to have had them, and some violence as a result.\u00a0 They\u2019re against a variety of French\/European changes, and angry enough to have burned some shops.\u00a0 Stay inside, we were told; and the opera that night had been canceled.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The city remains, like many European cities, on the site chosen by the Romans originally.\u00a0 The Romans also brought one of their best known and still important contributions\u2014Bordeaux wine\u2014to the area.\u00a0 While only These prehistoric relics are why we came to Bordeaux, the closest major airport to the Caves at Lascaux, where in the 1940s, some boys discovered a cave with art dating back over 30,000 years\u2014art done by homo\u00a0 sapiens. That\u2019s tomorrow\u2019s story, however.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Today\u2019s was the Bordelaise, the name for residents of Bordeaux, now a city of around 750,000, 20% of whom still owe their living to the wine that has made Bordeaux world-renown.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The city, on an estuary off the Atlantic Coast, was, until recently, France\u2019s major port, and that too has shaped its history.\u00a0 At its height, over 3000 ships anchored in the muddy waters offshore, many of them involved in the slave trade.\u00a0 The long connection with England owes to more than the wine trade, however; Eleanor of Aquitaine married two kings.\u00a0 The first was English, and her sons (she was fecund) included the infamous King John, and the very famous Richard the Lionhearted.\u00a0 She also married a man who became the King of France.\u00a0 Not sure I have the order right, but eventually she returned to Aquitaine and married her talents to the arts.\u00a0 The result of her marriage to kings was that this area was by marriage part of England, and the French contested that claim for over 100\u00a0 years (during the Hundred Years\u2019 War of course). The city seal still includes three lions, symbolic of the English connection.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Like most medieval cities, it had a wall\u2014Europeans tended to fight frequently, so it was best to keep riff-raff out, and charge tourists (some things don\u2019t change)\u2014and several gates still remain, including the gross cloche—the big clock tower that is still the symbol of the city.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n And again, like most Catholic cities, it has a number of churches, including 2 basilica and one cathedral.\u00a0 We spent some time in the cathedral, home to the local bishop, and marveled its combination of architectural styles\u2014starting with its 12th<\/sup> century Romanesque origins and continuing through the Gothic and Neo Gothic\u2014parts of it were not completed or rebuilt until the 19th<\/sup> century. The intellectual life of the Renaissance here made famous This area prospered too as a result of the slave trade\u2014it was France\u2019s major port on the Atlantic\u2014and some of the money went into building the\u00a0 mansions along the riverfront that are still impressive, even if no longer single-family dwellings. Bordelaise consequently chafed under Napoleon\u2019s continental system (that forbid trade with the outside world) and of course, had to find other sources of income until the restoration of the Monarchy.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n One of the industries that took over for the slave trade was shipbuilding, an industry that existed into World War II, when Vichy serviced and built German submarines. Today, the estuary is not maintained well, and the maritime trade has been replaced with aerospace and high tech and tourism; it\u2019s close to the beaches of the Atlantic, where there is the highest sand dune in Europe.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Happily for me, the area is also know for its duck, and magret de canard, (duck breast) and risotto con truffles with foie gras (goose liver) are two of the dishes now off my to-do-list<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n As one of the chamber of commerce documents described it, \u201cCharming Bordeaux.\u201d\u00a0 I thought that was an apt description.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" March 10, 2019 I knew I wouldn\u2019t be bored in Bordeaux as soon as we stepped off the plane at the airport.\u00a0 Our guide met us and offered to take our bags to the car.\u00a0 When he got there, he said, \u201cCarolyn\u2019s wheelchair is in the front trunk, so I\u2019ll put your bags in the … Continue reading “Bored in Bordeaux? No way!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe-2019"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1701"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8408,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1701\/revisions\/8408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/files\/2019\/03\/53545914_10157106268782938_9159892738047475712_n-1.jpg\")
<\/a>We got to our hotel around 10:30 am, only to learn that our room would not be ready until 3.\u00a0 A jet-lagged Carolyn insisted we get a room; the only one available, the attendant intoned, was the Marie Antoinette suite, a considerable upgrade.\u00a0 \u201cTake it,\u201d I was ordered, and I obeyed.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/a>vestiges of one Coliseum remain above ground, every time something is built, Greco-Roman artifacts get sent to the Aquitaine Museum (another name for the region), which now houses an impressive collection beginning with prehistoric man.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/a>Montaigne and Montesquieu, two local philosophes and writers, one of whose sarcophagi is in the Aquitaine museum.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n