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.
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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. |
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| Place Royale, containing Fontaine de la Loire. Basilique Saint-Nicolas in the background. |
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| Interior of the Basilique Saint-Nicolas |
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Royal and slightly controversial statue (see above)
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| Cathedral and Porte-Saint-Pierre, both 15th century |
