Bordeaux

Bordeaux, "la belle endormie" (the sleeping beauty) is a really beautiful city. It's a little more than 2 hours far from Toulouse by train (and you can leverage a deal and get a return ticket for 30 euros, les samedis de intercité), so I have gone there in a good bunch of occasions. An easy an effective way to describe the city is to label it as a small Paris. I pretty enjoy the architectural change between Toulouse and Bordeaux. Toulouse architecture is amazing, but it does not follow the archetypical French style (the same happens with Marseille), on the contrary, Bordeaux is right what you would expect of a French city (in architectural terms) if your reference is Paris (indeed, Hausmann used Bordeaux as a model for transforming Paris). By the way, Lyon and Nantes are other 2 "very French" cities (well, Lyon is just incredible).

In my last day trip there I came across a few "different" images of the city that have prompted this post, so here they go:

Bordeaux will be connected to Paris by high speed train (LGV) in 2017, which means a travel time of 2 hours (meaning that Toulouse will be little more than 4 hours far from Paris! as we wait for the not yet confirmed LGV extension between Bordeaux and Toulouse). As a consequence the St Jean station is undergoing some important renovation and expansion works. The renovation of the beautiful and classy ceilings involves this astonishing scaffolding:

Le Garonne river flows really, really wide through Bordeaux (it's already pretty wide in Toulouse), and there are 2 modern bridges (Pont d'Aquitaine and the vertical lift bridge Pont Jacques Chaban-Delmas) that seemed to be worth a visit. In the end I didn't find them particularly remarkable, but on my path there by tram I spotted a couple of places that deserved a short stop. In the docklands area (area where the Italian fascist regime set up a submarine base) I came across this astonishing piece of Street Art:

Walking north from there I found quite a few painted walls, this piece quite caught my eye, as it is reminiscent of the amazing ROA

And from there I got to an amazing area that seemed a bit like copy-pasted from Berlin, Les vivres de l'art (beautiful memories of the courtyard of the sadly extinct Tachelles):