Sometime in early November, we took a day trip to Bordeaux as a class to check out a couple of buildings. Here are some pictures of the city, among France's top six biggest cities.

So here's that plaza that we seemed to keep on heading toward. It's on a main road leading from the train station, and it's got a weird twisting column and an arch.

Bordeaux has some of that Haussmannian architecture as well, except it looks more eroded, as though the citizens haven't really taken good care of it. To me, Bordeaux was a bit of a "poor man's Paris" in that it had some of the wide streets of France's capital, but there were also a lot of dungier, narrower streets with the medieval feel. So I guess what happens when you take Paris and Saintes and put them together.

I believe this is St. Andre's Cathedral, which was right next to one of our destinations, the Law Courts by Richard Rogers. The cathedral is quite pretty. I should mention that Bordeaux seems to have dozens of churches, and on this day, I'd actually visit about six of them. Pretty neat.

OK, here's the Law Courts by Richard Rogers. You have the wooden pods, which are the court chambers themselves, housed in a transparent building, which is supposed to symbolize the openness of the judicial system. The building's also supposed to have a lot of high tech environmental stuff too.

Building closeup photo.

Afterwards, we stopped in St. Andre's Cathedral. It's quite beautiful inside.

We wandered the Bordeaux streets, and at one point, we came upon a carnival near a landmark whose name I can't remember. So I'm going to call the tall column the Victory Icon.

And finally, I believe this is St Michel Cathedral. Not quite what I was expecting when I saw it from a distance, and I found it odd that the tower was disconnected from the rest of the church.

By the way, if I got the names of the churches wrong, I apologize. My memory would be better if I had posted this... you know... not two months after I went there. =D

Anyway, so this is a holdover until the MASSIVE (seriously... it's huge) Spain update, which has an utterly insane (even by my standards) 140+ photos in all, covering about eight days of travel in Barcelona and Valencia.

That's gonna be crazy.