in which i prepare to depart bordeaux.

Today, a visit to the Musee d'Aquitaine (I just can't figure out an easy way to do accented characters on my computer, so just imagine they're there), spanning the time from Bordeaux's prehistory to now. It was interesting, but I must admit my attention wavered at about hour 612 or so. I did stay through the whole tour; that's more than I can say for some people.

Not many photos, and those I have are fairly poor, but: a mockup of Eleanor of Aquitaine's sarcophagus, I think.

A rose window (this was really cool. It's huge).
A 1:32 scale model of a French 64-gun ship. Cool.
A fresco from 1924, representing Bordeaux, as far as I could gather.
And completely unrelatedly, look how long my fingernails are! Just look!
Tomorrow we leave Bordeaux and head for Paris on the 3:00 plane. I feel like it would be a lot easier to just get on the train, but oh well. I guess we would have had to take the train from Paris originally, which means we would have had to pick up our bags in Paris. Which we didn't, they were sent all the way through to Bordeaux. And didn't really go through customs. It was extremely odd; we walked through a perfunctory visa check (they spent five seconds on the visa that so much work went into!) and got on our next plane. I don't really understand. We are probably all illegals and are going to get deported next time there's a random ID check on the street.

So this means that tonight is my last night in Bordeaux with my host family, who I like a lot. My host mom washed all my clothes last night, but she has no dryer, so they've been hanging dry all day over the radiator. Given how poorly the apartment is heated, though, they are still rather damp and I keep putting off packing.

Last night we went to see a stage adaptation of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, which name in French is Dix Petits Negres, from the original title of the book, one of the less-PC names I've come across. Oddly enough, in the play, they changed the lyrics of the children's song that the name comes from, to "dix petits diables." And if they're going to change the song lyrics, why not change the title? But that wasn't the big problem; that honor goes to the ending, which was drastically altered. As in, not everybody died. Travesty! Treason!

Afterward there were strange orange-juice-and-rum concoctions on the bar. I milled around with other students for a while and then went home to sleep for twelve hours.