Anniversary excursion
It was our 21st wedding anniversary on Thursday. Knowing how much Pat itches to just get away sometimes, and believing that getting away is a state of mind rather than a number of kilometers, I booked a Friday night overnight stay in the new Philippe Starck hotel in the centre of Bordeaux. It's not horrifically expensive, though the restaurant and the breakfasts were outside our budget and anyway, why eat there when Bordeaux has more restaurants than you can shake a stick at.
So we high-tailed it into town for the Maison de la Bible prayer gathering at close of day on Friday, then shambled through the streets of Bordeaux looking for a restaurant that took our fancy. We ended up in a crêperie that was very cute. Then off to the MamaShelter. That's what the Philippe Starck chain is called.
It was jolly nice. A step up from the Etaps we used to stay in on our journeys to the UK. We had a nice view out over the rooftops of the city.
For breakfast, Pain et cie. They're a chain and the one in Bordeaux is quite popular for breakfast as they give you a basket of bread with lots of different spreads, and the lady who was working there alone was in the finest tradition of surly waitresses.
Then a concert - the auditorium runs occasional one-hour concerts for young people on Saturday mornings and this one was a show done by the Ensemble Intercontemporain (that's Pierre Boulez' bunch up in Paris) on the Wind Quintet through the (2) centuries of its existence. It was a nice mix of Danzi, Haydn, Berio, Ligeti, Cage etc... and all with a narrator, Clément Lebrun, to stick it all together. The whole ensemble were, of course, excellent, but the clarinettist really stood out.
Off to Auchan for supplies for Sunday, then home.
So we high-tailed it into town for the Maison de la Bible prayer gathering at close of day on Friday, then shambled through the streets of Bordeaux looking for a restaurant that took our fancy. We ended up in a crêperie that was very cute. Then off to the MamaShelter. That's what the Philippe Starck chain is called.
It was jolly nice. A step up from the Etaps we used to stay in on our journeys to the UK. We had a nice view out over the rooftops of the city.
For breakfast, Pain et cie. They're a chain and the one in Bordeaux is quite popular for breakfast as they give you a basket of bread with lots of different spreads, and the lady who was working there alone was in the finest tradition of surly waitresses.
Then a concert - the auditorium runs occasional one-hour concerts for young people on Saturday mornings and this one was a show done by the Ensemble Intercontemporain (that's Pierre Boulez' bunch up in Paris) on the Wind Quintet through the (2) centuries of its existence. It was a nice mix of Danzi, Haydn, Berio, Ligeti, Cage etc... and all with a narrator, Clément Lebrun, to stick it all together. The whole ensemble were, of course, excellent, but the clarinettist really stood out.
Off to Auchan for supplies for Sunday, then home.
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