Nine reasons not to go to Pau (and one reason why you should!)

Two weeks ago, I celebrated my last day in Pau. After finishing two oral exams (both delayed), moving out of my flat (again, delayed) and finally getting to the train station (luckily not delayed), I’d bought my ticket and was on my way to Bordeaux, ready to chill out for a few days before my job as an au pair started. For me, the train journey was the escape from three months of what can only be described as extreme, mind-numbing tedium in Pau.

For those of you who don’t know, Pau is a smallish town (population 80,000) in the Pyrenees, sandwiched between the French Basque country and Spain. I was there for a 10-week language course which would allegedly improve my French and give me the chance to immerse myself in French culture. All very well, but unfortunately not much of that happened. What follows is a slightly exaggerated and tongue-in-cheek list of reasons why you really should never go to Pau (and one reason why you should), which should help you understand to some extent why I ended up spending a lot of my time in my room, with my roommate, eating a copious number of hard-boiled eggs and walking around the room in circles making funny noises.

Reason 1: Lack of tourist attractions
Pau’s main tourist attraction is its castle, birthplace of Henri IV and one-time holiday home of Napoleon. However, it is also Pau’s only tourist attraction, unless you count Pau’s main square which, while having some rather funky fountains, usually shows about as much human activity as I imagine the surface of Jupiter would. Either way, once you’ve done the one-hour guided tour (given only in French bien sûr) and seen the famous turtle’s shell berceau (cradle) that old Henri slept in as a wee bairn, you’ll be left with the distinct impression that there really should be something else to see in this pretty Pyrenean town. There really isn’t though; the only option left is to leave. However…

Reason 2: Little to no public transport between Pau and the rest of the world
For a town perfectly situated between numerous places of interest – the Pyrenees, the Atlantic coast, Spain – Pau’s transport connections are remarkably poor. When you first arrive in Pau at the airport, the first thing that everyone has to do is get into town. In other cities, a bus or train service would be provided. Not in Pau! It seems that one used to exist – there are weathered bus stops around town – but the navette is now unfortunately deceased. Well, never mind, you’ve paid your 25€ to get to the town centre by taxi, you’ve seen the castle and now you’ve decided to take a day trip to the seaside resort of Biarritz. This plan is somewhat hampered by the fact that a) you’re a student and 30€ return is quite pricey for one day away, and b) the last train home leaves at 16:45. Convenient at all? Instead you decide to visit the Pyrenees but, as you have no car and there’s no bus service, this plan fails too.

Reason 3: Sundays redefine the meaning of the word ‘dead’
You wake up the next day, slightly énervé but determined to make the most of those £30 Ryanair flights you’ve paid for. Looking out of the window you notice that everything is eerily quiet. Indeed, it could be the set of the next blockbuster zombie film. Bewildered, you try to work out why everyone in the town has disappeared. And then it dawns on you: today is SUNDAY. It’s a well-known fact that the whole of France shuts down on a Sunday, but Pau really takes this to the extreme. I once sat on my balcony on a Sunday, next to what is usually a noisy and busy road. In a 30-minute period, one car drove past. One! Maybe it was because none of the shops are open, none of the cafés either, and the only place you can eat at is a crappy restaurant in the multiplex cinema (which actually is open). Time passes so slowly in Pau on a Sunday that it can often feel like several years have gone by in only the space of only one day. Needless to say, this was the day when my roommate and I were most likely to pace incessantly around the room or make various animal noises over and over again.

Reason 4: The bus network is utterly shoddy
To make things even less tolerable, there are no buses in Pau on a Sunday, so even if there was anything even remotely interesting going on, you wouldn’t be able to get there. But, given that the weekday bus service finishes at 8pm sharp, the lack of Sunday buses is hardly a surprise. I’ve heard rumours of a night bus, and in fact I even saw it once, but one really must question the usefulness of a night bus which leaves the town centre at 9pm. In short, the moral of the story here is that you should never expect that the public transport system in Pau will be efficient or indeed useful, because it rarely is. I won’t even go into detail about the bus drivers’ driving – suffice it to say that you do fear for your life every time you board a bus.

Reason 5: Everyone and everything is on strike
This is not specific to Pau, as everyone knows that the French love to strike, but it nevertheless had a great effect on our time there: for example, the bus strike in Pau stopped us from getting to the train station and thus leaving the godforsaken town. Mainly though it was the three-month strike at the university which affected us the most. Again, one comes to study at a university with the preconception that they might meet some French students and make some French friends. Wrong encore une fois! Most university departments had been barricaded with tables and chairs, stopping us from even entering the buildings when we arrived. The campus was deader than Michael Jackson. (On a side note, this is also the campus where a female student last year was gang-raped on her way back to the on-campus university residences. Makes you feel safe, doesn’t it?) Even when the strike was over, most French students went home at the weekends because Pau was so boring, and it seemed that everyone had left by the time we got to the summer exam period. Sociable it certainly wasn’t.

Reason 6: Halls of residence – just say no!
Another thing that the university excels at is its halls of residence. The majority of foreign students are placed in a compound of three foul buildings in the Saragosse quartier of Pau (nicknamed Saraghetto because of the constant police presence and the many criminal deeds ceaselessly committed there). Not only was it an unsafe area where many of us were harassed in the street, the buildings themselves were truly foetid. Cockroaches? Check. Bedbugs? I’ll take the lot. A kitchen for 30 people containing only a mini-fridge, two hotplates and absolutely no storage space? Why yes sir, we have it here just for you! It was so vile that I moved as soon as possible. The new place was undoubtedly better (we had a one-room apartment between two, with awesome views of the Pyrenees from our two balconies), but unfortunately the nearest washing machine was a 15-minute walk away, which is not great when you’re carrying two large bags of wet clothes. Furthermore, the one machine was shared between… 700 people! You had to book the machine to use it, and if you hadn’t booked by 9:30am on a Monday morning, well then you were going to be doing a lot of hand-washing that week. It was, quite clearly, an excellent set up.

Reason 7: Everything is excruciatingly expensive
Another bad point about Pau, although really this is a France-wide problem, is the prices. Of everything. A taxi from the town centre to our flat was in the region of 10-12€. Two loads of washing using the crappy washing machine was over 5€. An orange juice in a bar or café was 3€. Entry to any club, no matter how bad, was 10€, and then you were forced to pay extra for the obligatory cloakroom. A quick shop in the local ‘cheap’ supermarket was the equivalent of a visit to Waitrose, but without all the organic, fair-trade middle class-ness. The only thing for which you didn’t have to sell half your liver was the uni accommodation, which luckily was much cheaper than in the UK. Even so, I still left Pau with a suicidal bank account.

Reason 8: The Pau people have a reputation for unfriendliness
None of us left Pau with any French friends. Of course, the fact that the uni was on strike didn’t help matters, but even with the French people I did meet, no friendship developed despite my best efforts. It is always hard to break out of the English-speaking foreigner group when you’re abroad; after talking to several people though, both French and not, I discovered that the people of Pau (les Palois) have a reputation in the area for being closed and unwelcoming to most people – foreign or otherwise. Of course, I did meet a couple of cool Frenchies (the Fête de la Musique being a good example, when our Spanish/Portuguese/French/English group all got down and threw some funky shapes together), but on the whole, the Palois kept up their unfriendly reputation rather well.

Reason 9: You’ll need protective clothing when you visit
I’ll keep the final reason short but sweet: the streets of Pau are covered in dog poo and they smell of piss. I know the French have a reputation for this but seriously, in Pau it’s worse than anywhere else I’ve ever seen in my life.

And finally, one reason why you should visit Pau:
Anywhere you go afterwards, you will appreciate a million times more once you’ve spent three months in Pau-gatory. I should know, I’m having an awesome time here in Bordeaux now.