First Day in Bordeaux

Started the day here with a visit to the tourist office. Bought some city passes and headed out for the day. Of course it was sprinkling some, so we had to have umbrellas. Right outside the tourist office is the Place des Quinconces, a large park where Tour de France will end stage 7 on Friday. They are already set up and the city seems pretty eager and ready to go. Very unlike Pau, when we left on Tuesday, you would have never known that the next day they were hosting the start of stage 5. A couple of road block signs and a few tiny yellow jerseys sparsely hanging over two streets were all we saw. It's definitely a big deal here, though.
So we started checking out the town. While the city is old, it is dominated by buildings of the late 1700s/early 1800s. The city center is a huge shopping district with many high-end shops. We escaped the rain in the Medieval church, Église Saint-Pierre. It wasn't very ornate and was really dark, but the altar was modern. We also went inside the beautiful Église Saint-Louis des Chartrons, the church that was just around the corner from where we ate ladt night. Once the rain cleared, we strolled through the Jardin Public, a very popular city park.Read more