Visiting Bordeaux (France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
Laurent and I planned a trip to Bordeaux over a three-hour meal in a Vietnamese restaurant in the Luxembourg neighborhood of Paris (France).
We
toured the gardens and loved Marie de Medici for creating a park in this spot
inspired by the Boboli Gardens at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence (Italy).
We
took a week’s vacation to Bordeaux that included a side trip to visit Laurent’s
paternal grandmother. Mamie had just
returned from a trip to Algeria with her seniors’ touring group.
She
showed me how to eat with the thumb of my right hand and first two fingers of
my right hand. When you eat mechoui,
North African roast lamb, you are supposed to use a flat bread to pick up
slices of lamb and side salads.
As
we walked by the port on the way to eat a seafood platter of raw oysters,
mussels, shrimp, and large boiled snails with a bottle of chilled, white Graves
from Bordeaux, mamie sort of preached to the choir when she explained why to
eat food from all over the world to me.
“Seafood
and fish can be unreliable sources of food, so it is good to be able to eat
Moroccan food like mechoui and orange and walnut salads,” she said.
She
quizzed me about my Bordeaux wine knowledge over lunch.
“Everyone
in France has to know how to sell wine to ward off economic depressions and get
money to buy food,” she said.
Both
Laurent and I wanted to hone our knowledge of wine in Bordeaux after mamie’s
lecture. There were wine salesmen,
caterers, master pastry chefs, and corporate dining room managers in Laurent’s
immediate family, so we did know the importance of understanding the food,
wine, and restaurant trade and law.
Laurent
arrived early on Friday morning from Rouen, where he was finishing up his MBA
degree with a rental car for the long trip to Bordeaux. I had our bags packed, snacks ready, and our
lunch sandwiches ready with bottles of water stored in a cooler.
I
put on a floppy, straw hat and sunglasses and felt like a movie star headed to
Bordeaux for wine shopping and seafood platter meals.
I
wanted to stop at so many places as we sped down the freeway particularly in
the Charentes region where I knew there were many Romanesque churches with
frenzied façades galore.
We
arrived late in Bordeaux and walked from our hotel to the rue Sainte-Catherine
and the Porte d’Aquitaine. We ate dinner
in one of the expensive, touristy spots, because we were so tired.
Saturday
we started our day with a trip outside Bordeaux to an air base at
Merignac. We went there, because that
was where Laurent did his mandatory military service as a teenager.
We
then followed National Route 2 along the Gironde Estuary. We stopped at several châteaux along the way
and took pictures of me in front of the vineyards and châteaux.
“Our
vacation homes, honey,” I said to Laurent.
We
giggled and looked at all the famous châteaux as we drove through the Haut-Médoc.
We
then retraced our steps and went to the other side of the Gironde. We stopped at the resort town of Arcachon to
eat a seafood platter. We sat outside on the terrace and ate. The salty, sea air made everything taste like we were eating it just caught on a boat.
We
ordered an Entre-Deux-Mers, a Bordeaux white, to go with the seafood. The two seas in the wine’s name refer to the
Dordogne River and the Gironde Estuary on either side of the peninsula where
the Entre-Deux-Mers winery juts out into the Gironde.
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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