Very recently I took a five-day holiday by train from Sheffield to the city of Bordeaux in southwestern France. Don’t ask why; it was just a bit of a whim, as I had some annual leave I needed to use and I wanted to get out of the country. I know Paris pretty well, and I’ve visited Nice for a couple of days, but I haven’t had the opportunity to see anything else in France. So Bordeaux sounded like a good place to go. And I was right: it’s a great city, especially if you’re travelling on your own. A port city in the Gironde department, Bordeaux is the capital of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. Although the city itself has a population of a quarter million people, the metropolitan area is over a million, making it the sixth most populated city in France. It’s also the world capital of wine, a global centre of gastronomy and business tourism, and it’s home to Dassault Aviation, a company with which I tried to get a job as a CAD/CAM femili programmer/analyst back when I was in my early thirties. (They had no openings at the time.) It also boasts more than 362 historic monuments, making it a great place to just wander around aimlessly, stopping here and there to eat and drink. | ![]() |