School trip to Bordeaux
Our older daughter is getting excited because it will soon be time for her to take a school trip to Bordeaux, and compared with our local towns Bordeaux is a pretty big and exciting place. Unfortunately it is a geography ‘field trip’ rather than a holiday, so they have to do some boring school stuff first, she tells me.
The day will start with a couple of hours in museums and the like - she isn’t looking forward to that part, being surprisingly uninterested in the Roman Occupation of France and the Hundred Years War - although when I went to the big museum in Bordeaux a couple of years ago I thought it was pretty good.
Perhaps the teacher will come up with some Asterix stories to keep people interested. Anyway, that out of the way, their excitement begins.
Apparently the class will divide into groups of five and, each group accompanied by a teacher, they will be deposited in various Bordelais outposts and have to find their way back to a central point, using their enormous navigational skills. They have been told they are allowed to ask in tourist offices if they see one, and they are permitted to ask for help from people in the street, and they can use a compass to judge direction.
That’s when the fun start. One of the group announced that all that would be unnecessary, he had the internet on his portable phone and could very easily use google maps to find his way about, without troubling elderly folk trying to go about their business.
Not to be outdone, someone in a different group admitted that no, he didn’t have google maps, but his phone did have GPS built in, so he could move immediately to any given location by the shortest route possible.
So instead of testing those old-fashioned skills that the teacher had in mind it is actually going to test the ability of the various groups to get a good telephone signal in central Bordeaux - not too challenging I imagine.
The reason for all the rushing about is not because they care about being the first group back to base and the acclaim of winning, but because after this part of the day, if time permits, they will be allowed to go shopping.
I think we can be pretty sure that time will permit.
We’d to do something similar on our little jaunt to Santiago for the Spanish course. Unfortunately, the “little old dears” were far outnumbered by the tourists and it turned out to be more of a challenge to find a local than anything else!