I went for my yearly dental checkup first thing on Monday morning.
“All good,” the dentist assessed fifteen minutes later. “Enjoy the summer! I’m off in a couple of hours as well,” he added, pointing to the shorts he was wearing under his lab coat.
I checked my watch—11:15 a.m. and it was already 35⁰C. I stopped by the supermarket on the way back to my mum’s apartment but Super U was out of Coke Zero, out of most soft drinks actually. Even the massive stock of Evian water bottles had been depleted.
The latest heat wave in France started just when we arrived, and last Monday was supposed to be the hottest day with a high of 42⁰C in Nantes. I’m that person who is always cold so I’m not complaining about hot days, but it does get stuffy in cities.
“Let’s go to the beach,” I announced. “I can get tickets to… La Baule again, I guess. There’s a 1 p.m. train, we can make it. And the last train back is at 8 p.m.”
We went to La Baule once last week, after our Bastille Day in Saint-Gilles. It’s not my favourite beach town but it was still better than sweating in Nantes.
La Baule is a 50-minute train ride from Nantes and it’s one of the longest beaches in Europe. It’s also a posh seaside resort, so not exactly my kind of crowd.
We just don’t fit in.
Typical La Baule vacationers have been coming here for at least 70 years and own a lovely million-euro cottage in one of the shady avenues a couple of blocks from the waterfront. The entire family—four of five kids minimum, all dressed the same, usually in blue and white—plays tennis, golf and goes horse riding. Teens and twentysomethings drive Porsche and Lamborghini sports cars, drink expensive booze, and can’t even imagine living on a budget. Do I need to add that most of them live in a wealthy white world where visible minorities, social issues and different lifestyles simply don’t exist?
So yeah, La Baule is weird. It’s a bit soulless but the beach is amazing and it’s an interesting sociological adventure.
Plus it’s close to Nantes and when it’s fucking hot, it’s the easiest last-minute day trip option.
Half of the city had the same idea. The train was packed with “the masses,” people who don’t have a million-euro family cottage, who live in small apartments, who don’t have the money for fancy holidays, who make minimum wage, who were probably dodging the train fare—my kind of crowd, basically.
La Baule was way more lively than usual.
I’m pretty sure a few bourgeois are still talking about the day half of the beach was—gasp!—the multicultural and diverse side of France they had never seen.
It was still 40⁰C when we came back to Nantes at night.
I’m not complaining. I wasn’t cold, not even once!
