Bordeaux, With A Little Extra Luxury This Year

It’s a bit of shame we chose the two hottest days for quite a while to take Caiti back to Bordeaux! But that’s life.

We’d seen Rors onto the school bus on the first day of term so it was time to get Caiti packed off too. She was due to inscrire on Friday (sign up for her course) so needed to get moved into her new residence before then. Wednesday was the best day for that as I could drive her down that day, return on Thursday and be recovered (I’m on the less popular side of 50 now, remember!) for a busy change-over day on Saturday.

We had a good trip down. Bitchin’ Betty, our bossy satnav that I’ve mentioned before, delivered us to where we’d programmed her to, and Caiti was able to navigate us to exactly where we needed to be. It was 34 degrees by now so we made our way across the sticky tarmac to the accueil for the halls of residence. It was a bit of a blow that we had to wait an hour. Caiti had been told to call by any time between 10 and 3, but obviously they were still observing their lunchtime strictly and nothing happened until after 2. We’d got there around half past one. Aggravating, but typical of bureaucracy. The small building was stiflingly hot but eventually Caiti got allocated her room.

Not so hot with the alphabet in Bordeaux…

She’s gone slightly upmarket since last year’s flat really was pretty dire. This year she has a recently renovated flat with its own tiny bathroom with shower, and a kitchen area with two hotplates, a fridge and a sink. It’s a little short on shelving for clothes but on Thursday we braved the heat and went shopping and got Caits some jolly stripy cardboard boxes to use as an underbed wardrobe extension.

We also bought her a fan and a dustbuster mini-vac. The concierge had called by on Wednesday and made it clear it was important, and expected, that she would keep the room clean and tidy. Since a) the students don’t have access to vacuum cleaners, floor mops etc which they really do need in order to stay on top of things properly and b) tidiness isn’t exactly Caiti’s middle name, I decided the latter piece of hardware was a wise and worthy investment.

Caiti’s up on the fifth floor which made our hearts sink when we first learnt that but, amazingly and luckily, her block has a lift. That made getting the stuff from the car to her new abode a doddle. Well, nearly. We still had a shortish hike to the flats from the car park but we needed the exercise after a five hour drive.

There was time for some sightseeing before I hit the road back home. But that’s for my next post.