Thursday 21 June 2012

pau

A short drive across the border takes us to Pau.  Now this is a town with a fascinating history. Set on a high ridge with a huge panorama of the Pyrenees, 50km away (apparently - it was too cloudy for us to see!) this was a castle that was turned into a little jewel of a royal palace for the kings of Navarre, and by Henri IV who became king of France (a good king!).  It's on the turn between gothic and renaissance and now beautifully restored, a white limestone jewel still dominating the dense little streets. 
The city later, in the time of Napoleon III, became a fashionable resort with Europe's elite, especially the English, who no doubt came to inhale the clear mountain air when London got too much.  Or maybe the casino and the steeplechase course were more of a draw!  Well, Pau eventually lost out to Biarritz and has been on the slide ever since.  Faded grandeur is taking over the once grand Empire-style hotels along the Boulevard des Pyrénées.  This promenade, with te mountain view, stretches along the whole south side of the town, and was once filled with grandees in boaters and ladies in bustles.  Many of the hotels are now turned into apartments, and many shops in the old medieval streets are dying or empty. 
The funicular still rises as graceful as a grand duchess, from the station up to the promenade, but there are no belle epoque passengers now.  Instead, Pau seems to have more than its fair share of alternative yoof - think matted hair, tattoos and piercings in unusual places, and nervous looking dogs on lengths of rope.
It's still a beautiful town though, and well worth the visit.  We did find a great restaurant near the chateau - the Henri IV - with good regional specialties and a friendly waiter.  The days of surly service, with a refusal to understand your rusty French, are gone.  Nowadays waiters seem glad to practice their English, or indulge your attempts to dig up that O level phrasebook from some suppressed mental recess. 
Thunderous rain in the evening and quite cool.  But still better than arctic London over the jubilee weekend.

bilbao

And so we arrive in Bilbao.  This is a spectacular city, busily trying to reinvent itself.  It was once one of Spain's great manufacturing cities, but most of the industry has been swept away and replaced with modernist masterpieces - there seems to be a consensus to produce whacky and wonderful buildings, many a product of Spain's mad property boom.
Gehry's Guggenheim Museum, of course, has pride of place, beside the river. 
Bilbao is built in a gorge, steeply rising on both sides, with little level ground to build.  So it squeezes everything into a tight space along the valley bottom, with many bridges across the river.  There is a tight little medieval centre with one of the pilgrimage churches on the route to Santiago de Compostela, a grid of narrow, shady streets with high stone buildings, like Barcelona's old city. Most of the rest of the city is either from the late 19th century, the time of the industrial boom, or is very recent.  All around are the green slopes of the mountains on either side, rising up with terraces of villas.
We were lucky to arrive on an evening when there was a festival.  Somehow I always manage to do this in Spain - or maybe there are just a lot of festivals!  It was to celebrate the midsummer and buildings were specially illuminated.  The theatre had a projected son et lumiere that cleverly used the features of the building - a bit like the recent Buckingham Palace concert.  There were street performance all over the city.  We saw a local choir perform miscellanies of Beatles and Abba songs, rather well, in the porch of the medieval church.
Next day we walked and walked all over the town, taking in the very well looked after park and finishing at the Guggenheim.  Of course this has a spectacular presence within the town, but its interiors are also very spectacular, and good for large scale modern 3 dimensional art display.  With some exceptions, the permanent collection is not so interesting as the building, sadly.  Though we did take in a David Hockney exhibition (recently seen in London), which at first I thought was a bit banal. but grew on me as I went into it more.



bay of biscay, june 2012

I've been neglecting the blog lately, and now time for a catch up. I an and I are on a trip to the south of France by car.  Maybe I will add some notes on earlier trips this year, shortly.

We set off from a dreary, drizzly London, having arranged to take the car by ferry from Portsmouth to Bilbao, then driving across to our main destination in the Languedoc.  The Cap Normandie, run by Brittany Ferries, turned out to be much better than epected, and feels more like a cruise than a ferry crossing.  There were loading problems and we set out late, but as we pulled from port the sun broke out for a bit as we sat in an open deck watching the ship's wake unroll, rounding the Isle of Wight and off for open water.  A relaxing way to travel.
The menu was surprisingly adventurous and well prepared.  We had fairly low expectations based on shorter cross channel crossings, but they really seem to try here.  Even the self service food is a cut above average.  For dinner I had rack of pork slow-baked in hay, which I have vaguley heard of but never tried.  It was a revelation.  I am not normally a big fan of pork but this was meltingly delicious, served with a sage and onion sauce and wok fried vegetables.  Must get the recipe. 
The rooms on board are somewhat spartan but have everything you need, packed into a minimal space.  Soon after going to bed we hit the Bay of Biscay and things got pretty rough for a few hours. I was glad to be lyoing down because it felt like standing up would have been an effort.  The ship was pitching violently forward and back, and at times rolling too.  Sometimes it felt that the whole ship was being lifted and dropped into the next wave trough with a huge crash.  Eventually I got off to sleep and things seem to have calmed down.
By morning it was a lot easier, though still pitching up and down so that as you walked forward or aft you were alternately weightless and double weight, like some NASA astronaut training programme.
We pulled into Bilbao's port about 24 hours later having avoided a full day's driving. All in all a good way to get down there.