Nantes, France

The 's' in 'Nantes' is silent. I'm sure most of you already knew, but in the current climate it's extra important to avoid pronouncing it like 'nonce'.

Nantes makes a late but welcome entry as my favourite place that I've visited in France. There's nothing particularly spectacular on show here. It's just a really nice liveable city, clean and safe and spacious. Also it's a university town, so the streets teem with bright young French things, presumably all undergoing existential crises while studying Comparative Shrugging or Post-Colonial Gitanes-Smoking.

Pleasingly, there's a city-centre castle that still has an actual moat. You might think that a moat is a pointlessly archaic hangover from medieval times. But ask yourself: when the zombie apocalypse arrives, which side of the moat (and drawbridge) would you rather be on? Bet you hadn't thought about that. One person who might have benefitted from the drawbridge was King Louis XVI. He was deposed by the Revolution in 1789 and then beheaded in 1793. I mention this because somehow a statue to him got put up here in Nantes in 1790, and it remans there today. The French lefties are still talking about knocking it down, but they can never quite agree on how to go about it. Splitters.

This week's Edd vs Food is a bokit (fried sandwich), a traditional delicacy from Guadaloupe, which is a French overseas territory in the Caribbean. These residual colonies are hugged much closer to the homeland than their British equivalents: they have representation in the legislature and they're treated in exactly the same way as the mainland constituencies, albeit with rather more generous travel expenses. Whereas back in the UK we don't have MPs for the Falklands, or even for the Isle of Man. They have their own assemblies for minor internal matters, but that's it.

Similarly, France has a legal & cultural allergy to the kind of hyphenated identities popularised in the USA and to the lesser extent the UK. Eg 'Italian-American' and so forth. In present-day France, if you're French then you're French, and that's that. This is a noble and admirable idea. It's won them two World Cups. But under the Fifth Republic it extends so far that it's literally illegal for the government to collect statistics based on race, ethnicity or religion. The unfortunate fact is that some of those statistics, if collected, might make for uncomfortable but necessary reading, whichever end of the political spectrum you're coming from.

Not everyone who comes to France manages to integrate. Some of us just turn up and scoff the food for a couple of months and then go back home. One more blog to go.

The two Titan cranes of Nantes are among its most recognisable landmarks.
They're a permanent reminder of its shipbuilding past.
Shipbuilding pasts are important. 

Place Royale, containing Fontaine de la Loire. Basilique Saint-Nicolas in the background.

Interior of the Basilique Saint-Nicolas

Royal and slightly controversial statue (see above)

Cathedral and Porte-Saint-Pierre, both 15th century

Castle & moat

Even Beckham might have struggled with this one

Nantes apartment, via AirBnB.
Hotels for the same nightly price resemble prison cells with a TV.
That's why I don't stay in hotels.

Edd vs Food #175
'Jamaica' (jerk chicken and veg) bokit at Kbana Bokit, 57 Rue Jean Jaurès, Rezé, Nantes

La Rochelle, France

Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside. And so here I am, getting a dose of fresh sea air for the first and (spoiler alert) last time on this trip. 

Also, I've now travelled far enough north & west that I've reached the parts of France which used to be part of England, politically at least. We got booted out of La Rochelle by the French (assisted by the Spanish) in 1372 but at the time of writing there are no plans to take it over again.

I remember somebody telling me many years ago that in France they serve pizzas where the base is coated with crème fraïche rather than tomatoes. I finally got round to trying one here. See Edd vs Food below. It's not bad, and it's not as radical as it sounds, but I think I'll stick to old school pizzas in future. Perhaps the French are just trying to commit the same playful outrages on Italian cuisine that they've already perpetrated on Mexican cuisine (viz 'French tacos')? 

As for British cuisine -  I haven't tried the local attempts at fish & chips, and I don't think they even know what a sausage roll is. Most of our dishes tend not to travel well. Some years ago I ordered an 'authentic English cottage pie' in an 'authentic English pub' in Nashville, Tennessee. When the pie arrived, it was smeared all over with mozzarella.

Here in La Rochelle I encountered an outrageous 'Le British' supermarket sandwich. Made with vegetarian bacon! We've fought wars for less. My favourite bit was a little asterisk & footnote clarifying to the locals that 'British' means 'britannique'. Also, Heinz beaked beans are on sale here, but they're ridiculously expensive and you can get the same product in a different (French) tin for less than half the price. 

Finally, throughout this trip I've been collecting photos of the eye-rollingly unoriginal names that they give to 'British-style' pubs. On all three counts - sandwiches, beans, and pubs - see pictures below. Back to proper French food next time round.

Port des Minimes

The Old Port by day, from the inside

The Old Port by night, from the outside

Quai Duperré

What they think we eat (see above)

What they think our pubs are called (see above)

Bean branding (see above)

Edd vs Food #174
Pizza San Gennaro at Pizza e Basta, 41 Boulevard Joffre, La Rochelle
Tomato-free (see above)

Bordeaux, France

Bordeaux is the world capital of wine. According to the French. If they do say so themselves. I'm not a wine expert, but I enjoyed my trundles through both the Yarra and Napa valleys in 2013 and 2015 respectively, and I wonder if perhaps the French are getting a bit complacent on this point. Arguably they've been so for half a century now. For 'twas in 1976 that a group of French wine judges, to their own subsequent mortification, accidentally blind-tasted California wines into the global top spot. That event is known today as the Judgement of Paris, a witty pun on the Trojan wars (as in Orlando Bloom playing Paris in the film "Troy").

There is a bit of dispute about the origins of the name 'Bordeaux'. Some will tell you that it derives from the French au bord de l'eau, ie "by the water". Others think it comes from the original Latin name given by the Romans: Burdigala. I'm inclined to side with the latter, if only because the former would have been spectacularly unoriginal. All of these French cities sit on rivers. Actually, in recent days, it's been more a case of rivers sitting on cities. There has been record rainfall and riverbanks are being burst everywhere. 

One consequence of which was my train here being cancelled, and then my replacement train being delayed, giving me an unexpected aggregate wait of roughly 8 hours in Toulouse. First world problems, of course. It just meant a very long lunch and then a few slow beers in dodgy French dive bars. Even the dodgiest and diviest of dodgy French dive bars still feels safer and more bohemian than their equivalents back in the UK. Perhaps this is partly because beer is so ruinously expensive in France - €3.50 for 250ml (not even half a pint) of generic fizzy bathwater - that the average nutter simply can't afford it.

As well as transport disruption, Storm Nils and Storm Pedro have caused widespread damage across France and Spain. But worst of all, this kind of weather makes for very dull photos, as you'll see below. There hasn't been even a peek of blue sky during my whole time in Bordeaux. A separate issue is that I always leave my camera flash turned off, out of consideration for others, and so my evening dinner photos are never as good as my daytime lunch photos, as you'll also see below.

Not that I'm eating out twice a day every day. Even if I could afford it, my long-suffering guts wouldn't tolerate that amount of rich, fatty, creamy, buttery food. Most of my diet is home cooking. I'm now out of illicitly smuggled post-Brexit Bisto, but thankfully I've gained sufficient familiarity with the powdered sauce offerings of French supermarkets that I can manage without it. I hope you're all as proud of me as I am of myself. 

Monument to the Girondins in the distance, National Opera to the right

Another angle of the National Opera

Place de la Bourse

Cathédrale Saint-André

Rue Condillac

Edd vs Food #172
Shredded duck & feta on dauphinoise potatoes
At Samos Greek Food, 2 Pl. du Séminaire, Bordeaux

Edd vs Food #173
€35 for a 3-course set menu, which is about as pricey as I'm ever likely to go.
Onion soup, pork knuckle, and raspberry tart.
Poor photography from me, but first-rate food from...
Clochette et Fourchette, 7 Rue des Faures, Bordeaux.