Aligned & Awake: A Very French Easter

Easter Sunday in Bordeaux, where the city celebrates, spring shows off, and I learn the rhythm of being one.

Aligned & Awake
My reflections on life through travel, human design, energy, astrology, and emotional clarity. Not as a guru. Just one person figuring it out in real time.

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The sun showed up like it had plans and Bordeaux answered.

The river is lined with movement. Runners, cyclists, couples walking in that slow Sunday way, like time has been gently negotiated down. I join the general drift with a baguette under my arm and a book I will absolutely pretend to read.

Rue Sainte-Catherine has committed to Easter in a very serious way.

There are children everywhere, scanning the ground like tiny detectives. Chocolate is involved. Stakes are high. One small girl just sprinted past me with the focus of an Olympic athlete and a Kinder egg in her sights.

Respect. Genuinely. I’ve never moved that fast for anything.

Park. Patch of grass. Claimed.

This is how I’m spending Easter Sunday. Very French of me. I’m leaning all the way in.

Bread first, obviously. Then the book, open to a page I’ll read three times without retaining a single word because the sun is doing something unreasonable to the light on the river and I keep looking up.

Time loosens.

Around me, people gather in circles. Wine appears. Someone has brought proper glassware, which feels ambitious for a park, but I fully support it. There’s laughter that doesn’t ask permission. Conversations overlapping, hands moving, shoulders relaxed.

I watch all of this with crumbs on my lap and the satisfaction of someone who has made excellent choices today.

It’s always fascinated me how different places hold the same day.

Bordeaux stretches it out. Long lunches. Slow walks. A full cultural commitment to being exactly where you are, doing exactly what you’re doing, at exactly the pace that suits you. The French didn’t invent the Sunday, but they’ve certainly perfected it.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here Irish, which means I was raised Catholic, which means Easter Sunday comes loaded. Mass. Good clothes. The general implication that suffering is somewhere in the schedule.

Instead, I’m in a park in France, tearing into a baguette in the sun.

Jardin Public, Bordeaux | Photo: Tanya Fraser

In fairness, I am consuming the body of Christ. Just the carb version. I think He’d understand.

Horizontal ambitions. No plans. Not a trace of guilt.

Growth.

Spring is fully showing off.

Trees that looked half-asleep a few weeks ago are now putting in serious effort. Blossoms everywhere. The air smells like flowers and fresh bread and, underneath it all, a truly heroic level of cigarette smoke.

Honestly, if France ever stopped smoking, I’d worry about them. It’s load-bearing at this point.

There’s a lightness to the day you can feel in people. Faces lifted. Shoulders down. That first real exhale after winter, when everyone collectively remembers that the sun exists and decides to take it personally.

I’m on my own today, which is different from being lonely, and I mean that in the most bodily way. It’s something you feel rather than think your way into understanding.

There’s space around me. Clean and uncomplicated. No one is negotiating the next move. I can stay here until the sun shifts or get up in five minutes and follow the smell of something buttery down a side street. Both feel equally correct. Both are entirely my call.

This is the thing about solo travel that doesn’t make it into the brochure. Not the freedom in the abstract, more like the freedom in the specific. The baguette. The patch of grass. The afternoon with no agenda and no one to consult about it.

The sun moves. The wine circles get louder.

A dog makes a serious and committed attempt on someone’s cheese. Full sprint. Zero hesitation. The kind of focus that deserves acknowledgment, even if the outcome is a small scandal.

He doesn’t get away with it, but only barely, and he leaves with his dignity intact, which is more than can be said for the cheese.

The small girl with the Kinder egg reappears at the far end of the park, victorious, already working on a second. The energy she has after what I can only assume has been hours of competitive chocolate hunting is frankly offensive, given how the baguette has affected my ability to move.

I stay a while longer.

Slightly sun-dazed. Crumbs everywhere. Book still open to the same page.

Bordeaux is doing exactly what it does…making you feel like staying was always the right decision, and leaving is something you can figure out later.

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Tell me…

How are you spending today, and what does it look like when you make the day fully yours?

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