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Bordeaux ramblings
If you come to MarginalRevolution for the economics, or even for coherent paragraphs, skip this post...
Bordeaux is one of the loveliest and most architecturally consistent 18th century towns in Europe. There is otherwise little to see here. The restaurants you find are amazingly good, but there are fewer than one might expect. Only the immigrants keep their shops open on Sunday. The town feels oddlly empty on all days. The professors give the graduate assistants knives and expect them to peel the white asparagus for dinner. That is how it should be. Michel Houllebecq's Possibility of an Island is available here (but not yet in the U.S.) in English; he is France's most vital current author. The wines are wasted on me but the raw oysters are not. I saw Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinettte in the local multiplex. You would not expect a mix of Kirsten Dunst, indie rock, and the Versailles Palace to be a winner, but this is a beautiful and quite fantastic film; a must-see on the big screen. Imagine a combination of Clueless, Peter Greenaway, and Lost in Translation. The city of Bordeaux would be wonderful and charming as France's ninth largest city. But it is the fifth largest, which makes me wonder where all this is headed.
And now for something completely different, here is Bryan Caplan's class autobiography. Mine would involve lots of sports, a mother who brought me to chess tournaments, a father who didn't believe in college, and a grandmother who loved Victor Hugo and Shakespeare.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 29, 2006 at 02:16 AM in Travels | Permalink
Comments
Nice and accurate description of Bordeaux.
The Bryan Kaplan autobiography is pretty nauseating.
Posted by: Commenterlein at May 29, 2006 10:41:04 AM
Hah! Well, I am just back from running around in Aix en Provence,
Trento, and Amsterdam. I was struck in France by a) the much
greater obsession with the Cannes film festival than one observes
here (not surprising I suppose) and b) "le declin," the depressed
views of even conservative commentators in Le Figaro, the center
right newspaper, who even quote post modernist French philosophes
like Lacan and Foucault. Funny how all that stuff has been
assimilated. The French intellectuals can be annoying, but they
have a lot more depth than the usual drivel one reads in US
newspapers of whatever ideology.
Regarding Bordeaux, it is several years since I was last there.
The description seems about right. I do remember that even the
most mediocre of restaurants tended to have quite lengthy (and
excellent) wine lists, if a bit too oriented to the local stuff.
But then, hey, if you've got it, you might as well flaunt it.
Presumably you got to do a little tasting in the area around
the city as well, at least one would wish this for you ...
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at May 29, 2006 5:58:39 PM
Well, Marie-antoinette received a very cold welcome over here (Bonjour à vous Professeur Cowen :-) ), having more "boo boo" in Cannes than the "Da Vinci Code" (quite a performance from a certain point of view)
Even if we beheaded our Royal family, we don't like "strangers" to be disrespectful of it. Well, I guess this is another "french paradox"...
Moreover Sofia Coppola is considered as an "indie" director over here. I think people were disappointed with this "too much money" movie: we just prefered her "cheap" and minimalist "lost in translation". Don't ask me why but that is...
Well, I know you are a connoisseur of french cinema, so I don't think it will surprise you ;-).
PS: did you taste Château Montrose?
Posted by: Alex at May 30, 2006 4:52:23 AM
Very apt description of Bordeaux, a typically bourgeois city.
The joke goes: "What do you call someone who's dressed well, and whose grandparents were smart?" "An inhabitant of Bordeaux."
The reason why Bordeaux is so high on the list of French cities is simply because Paris is so big, it sucks the energies of all the other big French cities. Not a lot has changed since the 1960's landmark book "Paris and the French Desert."
The French system, for better or for worse, is highly centralized, and France has an alpha world city for a capital only at the expense of the mainland (compare with a country like Germany, which has several important cities (Cologne, Berlin, Hamburg), but none of them with the influence of Paris).
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Posted by: at Oct 14, 2008 1:34:07 AM
