Bordeaux!

Rick Steves: "'Bordeaux' must mean 'boredom' in some ancient language. If I were offered a free trip to that town, I'd stay home and clean the fridge."

He might be right. Not gonna lie. I went to Bordeaux this weekend to visit my penpal (p.s. hate that word). Heloise and I have been corresponding since 5th grade! It's really crazy. So anyway, I thought I would pay her a visit, and it was really great to finally meet her! But Bordeaux was kind of boring. On Saturday, we walked around for a really long time to see the city. And it's different than Toulouse, because there are less inhabitants than Toulouse, but the size in physical area is bigger. So we pretty much drove everywhere in an old mini cooper (it was great! I miss driving around!), even though it looks like Heloise just lives right in the city (not in the suburbs or anything). So we saw a lot of Bordeaux, including everyone who was shopping on this nice pedestrian shopping road. It looked like someone was giving away candy at the other end, because you look down this road and it's literally a sea of people. We kind of avoided that. But Bordeaux did have some nice things, such as this turtle. Which I was in love with. And kids played on it! Too cute. Then Saturday night, we went out for a (loooong) dinner for the birthday of a friend of Heloise. The food was marginal, but the waiter was from L.A., so I enjoyed that. But I was sooo tired (stupid medicine for my cough has codeine in it), so I think I was fairly boring. And also, I could not follow the conversation whatsoever.

Anyway, on Sunday we did the museum thing. I didn't really like the first museum. It had an exhibit from this one photographer who did a lot of erotica weird stuff. And then the second museum was cool, it was housed in an old German submarine building thing from WWII. And it was an exhibit of Rene Bouilly, who did these really cool sketches, and used a lot of perspective and shadows and stuff: Look at the one at the very bottom, it's my favorite! The ones on top are awesome, they looked like you could pick the cloth up right from the canvas! It was cool. And then the third museum was like the Centre Pompidou, with contemporary art, which I just find hilarious, for the most part. I mean, I think it's really ugly and I don't understand how it's considered art, but it's pretty cool anyway. I especially liked the piece that was two blow up wading pools with all different size bowls and glasses floating in it, and then they would bang together and make really these really beautiful sounds. And it was continuous, so it sounded kind of like a windchime always played.

Then Sunday that night, Heloise and I went to a modern dance/theater thing at this big arena that ended up being really interesting. It was singing, and speaking (some in english!), and dancing. I couldn't really follow the story, and I don't actually know if there was a story, but then all of a sudden it was over. So it was definitely weird, but very cool nonetheless. Then today I came home today! And it was the first time that I rode the train by myself, and I did it successfully and felt pretty awesome!