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)

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.

Toulouse, France

On my very first trip back in 2008, I carried a naff second-hand backpack that went in the bin as soon as I got home. I then bought a new Berghaus backpack in 2011, and that's what I've travelled with ever since. It's a bit worn, but everything still works. Even now that I'm way too old for youth hostels, I still cling to the idea that I'm a backpacker rather than a tourist. I feel that buying a wheeled suitcase would be a kind of surrender to old age, an acceptance that I'm essentially giving up on life, rather like getting married or taking up golf.

My backpack isn't huge but it's too big for airline cabins so it always goes in the hold. I have a much smaller secondary backpack for the cabin. It's a soft bag, which means it never gets pulled over for weighing or measuring; it just goes under the seat in front. Both my bags generally weigh under 10kg so weight restrictions are never a problem. 

I used to take a slightly masochistic pleasure in walking long distances with one bag over each shoulder, and of course it's always nice to stretch one's legs after a long flight. But nowadays - with my 50th birthday coming at me like one of these high-speed French SNCF trains - that kind of thing does more harm than good, especially where my back is concerned.

Toulouse is probably my favourite French city so far. There's nothing particularly spectacular to see here. It's just a very nice place and I like strolling around it. I've been here a full week and you'd think that would have been long enough for me to think of something interesting to write in my blog. As you see above, it wasn't. I'll try harder next time.

Place du Capitole

Le Capitole itself

Rue de Metz

Along the banks of the Garonne

Basilique Notre-Dame de la Daurade

Basilique Saint-Sernin

Pont Neuf
('new bridge', though it is in fact nearly 400 years old) 

Edd vs Food #170
A croque monsieur for the ages at Mam Street Food, 11 Ave de la Gloire, Toulouse

Edd vs Food #171
Vietnamese-themed set menu at Zig Zag, 9 Pl. du Pont Neuf, Toulouse
L: Rouleau de printemps (spring roll) containing chicken & veg
R: Beef & onions with pilau rice
I don't think Vietnamese curry sauces are normally laced with red wine, but I'm not complaining.

Narbonne/Perpignan, France

"Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French."

― P.G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins

I'm far from Cannes, and even further from being young, but basically the above still applies. Learning French at school and via Duolingo, and then going to France and trying it out? Well, that's a bit like learning English from 'Downton Abbey' and Bond films, and then rocking up in Glasgow. It's a journey, and one with a very long way to go yet.

One thing that helps is the huge number of words that are spelled the same in both French and English. You just have to tweak the pronunciation a bit. Not only words where you can clearly see and hear the French influence (debris, omelette, reservoir, genre, ballet) but also some others that aren't quite so obvious (rectangle, apostrophe, occasion, parachute, machine).

Admittedly there are still a few foodstuffs on restaurant menus that I don't recognise. But in fairness the same applies back home. I was into my late twenties before I learned what a shallot was. Here they call it an échalote. 

People who are genuinely bilingual have a kind of unconscious 'switch' in their brains that lets them move between languages instantaneously. My own 'switch' is more like a big rusty lever that I've spent years laboriously hammering into place. Now I'm trying to make the lever go three ways, and at times the lever crumbles and my brain just shuts down altogether. It almost makes me miss the days of travelling in South-East Asia and happily using amateur sign language for 'chicken' (flappy side-arms) or 'beef' (finger-horns above head).

That said, I think I'm still doing better than most of the other foreigners here. In McDonalds I saw an Eastern European family clutching ticket number 97 and they were left utterly perplexed when the store manager yelled out "Quatre! Vingts! Dix! Sept!" ('four twenties ten seven', that's how they say 'ninety-seven' in French.)

Anyway I don't have much to report from Narbonne, or from my day trip on the train to Perpignan. Hence the waffle above, and the double dose of Edd vs Food below. Til next time.

Palais-Musée des Archevêques, Narbonne

Outside my front door in Narbonne

Weird statue of Salvador Dali in Perpignan.
He once proclaimed Perpignan train station to be 'the centre of the universe'.
If you look at his Wikipedia entry, whatever you do, don't scroll down to the part subtitled 'Sexuality'.

Looking west over Perpignan from the Palace of the Kings of Majorca.
The mountain in the distance is Cañigo (9,134ft), about 30 miles away as the crow flies.

Perpignan again

Edd vs Food #168
Set menu at Au GousTous in Perpignan
Paté for starters, pork cheek with mashed potato for main course.
('Mashed potato' sounds much less sophisticated than écrasé de pommes de terre.)

Edd vs Food #169
Taco/fries/drink combo at Enjoy Tacos. Kind of like the French version of Taco Bell.
Special offer: 10 free chicken nuggets!
Felt a bit sick afterwards TBH.

Nîmes/Avignon/Montpellier/Arles, France

I've been quite busy on these French trains recently. You can get special offers as low as €1 for a single fare if you look hard enough. Also there's a French app called BlaBlaCar for car ride-sharing (as opposed to car ride-hailing) which can get you from place to place cheaply if you're travelling flexibly and solo, which I always am.  

Anyway, I have four places to report from:

• Nîmes is where I've been staying and it has a remarkably well-preserved Roman amphitheatre, at which Metallica filmed a feature-length concert movie in 2009.
• Arles is chiefly famous these days because Vincent Van Gogh lived there. There's a signposted walk that takes you round some of the scenes he painted.
• Avignon was where one of the Popes lived, back in the days when there were two Popes. (This has nothing to do with the 2019 film "The Two Popes". See here for details.)
• Montpellier, well, I can't think of anything to make your eyebrows go up. But it's very nice.

Wandering around places like these, or their equivalents in Spain or Italy, makes me feel a bit bashful about just how much wilful ugliness we put up with in our towns and cities in the UK. I know it's not fair to compare everywhere with Seville or Florence, but even so, it sometimes feels like even the most obscure and run-down continental towns have nicer architecture and more greenery and less litter than almost anywhere back in Blighty. 

In my own home town there's been a lot of redevelopment recently, and it's very welcome, but must it always be limited to glass & steel & concrete? Couldn't it involve water or grass or trees? And must 'regeneration' always mean just adding another street full of vape shops and bookmakers? 

It must however be said that France isn't immune to municipal ugliness. In Paris, the modernist area of La Défense is like some kind of huge dystopian sci-fi fantasy; basically it's Milton Keynes on steroids. Also, our beer is better & cheaper than theirs. So on the whole it's looking like a draw. Until the World Cup, at least.

Place de la République, Arles

Alyscamps, Arles

A sidestreet in Avignon. Painter at centre, painting.

Palace of the Popes, Avignon

In Montpellier:
an apartment building where balconies are taken very seriously indeed.

Hôtel de Région Occitanie, Montpellier

Place de la Comédie, Montpellier

Nîmes
L-R: Roman amphitheatre, Court of Appeal, and Pradier fountain

Les Jardins de la Fontaine, Nîmes

Edd vs Food #167
Chicken supreme at Le Bistrot de Tatie Agnès, Nîmes