So good they named it I visited it twice.
The campsite was great, offered live music for two nights, the first being great musicians playing Django Reinhart-style French jazz, in a setting on Bordeaux Lac, only about 8-9 kilometres or so via well-designed cycle routes into the centre.
More often than not, live music is a surprise and a gift for me; I even got up and danced due to the insistence of a Belgian couple
But Bordeaux – I’ll just bullet-point what I observed, as it rises to the top of my city list alongside the likes of San Sebastian, Porto, Copenhagen
- Well-designed cycling city which the residents of all ages and types, with all manner of cargo/child-carrying bikes use
- Shared public spaces, with walkers, bike and scooter riders, tramways, all co-mingling without hostility; the car is definitely not king and in fact I experienced courtesy from car drivers both here and generally in Spain
- Absolutely beautiful, yet somehow understated public spaces and buildings being lived in, rather than museum pieces, and enjoyed by all; my favourite was the Jardin Public
- Smaller, more personal scale than the likes of Madrid, with 1 million inhabitants according to Google, twice as many as Montpellier, similar to Toulouse, less than Porto or Copehagen
- Sigificantly fewer canine family members in evidence – down to more apartment living for the suburbs I cycled through and the centre?
- Cycled past camps under underpasses of what looked like groups of immigrants from Africa, and did see other people who I would describe as having fallen through gaps in society
- Murky brown/sandy river water results from the meeting of the sediment-laden fresh water of the Garonne with the salty sea water of the Gironde estuary, according to Google
My phone camera is not as good as I would like to record what I love to see and be part of.
