Angers/Le Mans/Chartres, France

This morning I completed the Duolingo French course in its entirety. I conquered level 130, and I wept, for there were no more levels to conquer.

There's lots of unhelpful and ill-informed noise online about Duolingo. It tends to take the form of: is Duolingo completely useless, or can you become 100% fluent in a foreign language just by spending 10 minutes a day on an app? WHICH IS IT? As is so often the case in these debates, both sides are talking complete rot. The answer is somewhere in the middle. Language fluency can only ever come from language immersion, but daily rote learning helps. It's like asking if doing ball drills will make you a professional footballer. No, it won't. But you'll never meet a professional footballer who doesn't do ball drills.

The Duolingo app is, of course, achingly PC. I recently went through a lesson based on fairy tales, in which all the princes married other princes, while all the princesses married other princesses. There are seven diverse avatars in the app, and they all have their particular foibles, but only one of them is portrayed as being basically stupid. Inevitably, it's the white male. Just to add insult to injury, in the French version of the app, he's called Eddy.

Anyway, I have three places to report from: 

Angers. Home to the dynasty of the Plantagenets, who furnished England with 14 monarchs between 1154 and 1485. It's a name that thus features heavily in Shakespeare, despite being quite difficult to rhyme. In those days, the leaders of Christian nations would provoke foreign wars just for the sake of nurturing their own petulant, narcissistic little egos. Fortunately we're past all that now. Anyway Angers was only a day trip from Nantes before I moved on to...

Le Mans. Formula One bores me to tears, and I think I'd rather put my own neck under the guillotine than watch a race that lasts fully 24 hours. Still, when in Rome, and all that. See pictures. In fact it's quite a nice town and would easily have merited a blog by itself if I wasn't preoccupied with writing up Angers and also...

Chartres. (The 's' is silent, but you should always include the final 'r', in the guttural French manner, because otherwise you'll be saying 'shart'.) Famous, of course, for its cathedral. And blogged here because of its cathedral. See below for pictures of the cathedral. No insights here, just me being a tourist like all the others, at the cathedral.

France is officially the world's most visited country. A big chunk of this is due to millions of Germans streaming over the border (in a good way, for once). But people come here from all across the world, and with very good reason. For me personally, what I've enjoyed most here has been the food. They take it seriously, and they almost always get it right, and it's not too expensive either. You can see why Nando's haven't dared to try setting up shop on this side of the channel.

I'm heading home now. It'll be at least a year before my next big trip. In the meantime I'll turn fifty, God help me. In fact this blog itself turns eighteen in a couple of months. How much longer will it persist? All I know is that it'll retire when I do, which is to say, not any time soon. I hope you all have a splendid 2026.

Chateau d'Angers (9th-13th centuries)

Place Sainte-Croix, Angers

Le Mans, obviously

The Le Mans motorsport museum has lots of crazy superpowered modern F1 / 24h cars.
But this 1967 Brabham BT24 just looks like it'd be a lot more fun to drive.

North-west face of Chartres cathedral.
For scale, in the bottom-right-hand corner, I've included a nun.

Interior of Chartres cathedral

Elsewhere in Chartres: the river Eure.
In summer, I presume they get the odd midge...

Edd vs Food #176
Galette (crêpe, but with buckwheat flour instead of regular flour, savoury rather than sweet).
At Mamie Bigoude in Angers. This one is the Inimitable Bretonne:
Andouille sausage, onions in cider, and caramelised potatoes.

Edd vs Food #177
 Le Boeuf Tient Le Pavé, 55 Grande Rue, Le Mans.
Couldn't do two months of French travel blogging without including a steak frites!
Steak is cooked saignant (bloody). Roquefort sauce for added cholesterol.

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)