Noël

Vermont, the real life version of a Norman Rockwell painting, is beautiful at Christmas. But since we couldn't easily be there, we settled on Paris instead. So on the 23rd, we hopped a train bound for the city and began a wonderful few days in the City of Love. Our first order of business was to get lost. Since we'd neglected to look up the address of the hotel before leaving, and I'm only useful for finding directions when I see familiar things, we ended up having to call a friend who could look it up for us. Thankfully, that worked, and we found our way to the same cute little hotel we'd stayed in during my April visit. We checked in, got cleaned up and changed, and went out to the best little restaurant in the world. It's called Le jardin d'en face and it's the size of your mother's closet. Seriously, it seats 26, but any time someone sitting against the wall wants to get up, all 5 tables have to slide one way or the other so there's enough space to get out. It' very cute and charming, it's run by two people at a time, and it's incredibly reasonably priced for Paris. We were the first people in, at 8:05. Shortly afterward, a large group (6 people) came in so it was a little noisier and more fun. The menu is written on a chalkboard on the wall, so we eventually ordered our dinners and waited. Lisa had a oeuf cocotte au foie gras, which I have had before. It's like an egg custard with foie gras and little toast sticks that you dip into it. Fantastic. I had a pumpkin and chestnut soup, with garlic croutons and creme fraiche. Delicious. We'd also purchased a bottle of cider, so we were drinking that throughout the meal. I had a wonderful meal of pork filet mignon, cut into small slices with the most amazing sauce. It's gooseberry-porto and I could eat it forever and ever and ever. It also came with salad and mashed potatoes. Lisa had tartiflette, which is cheese and potatoes and onions covered with smoked duck and walnuts on top. We had dessert as well, since you have to splurge every now and then. Lisa had wild strawberry and blueberry sorbet, while I had green apple sorbet drizzled with Calvados, which is apple brandy. Drizzled doesn't seem to translate well into French though, since I ended up with about two shots worth of brandy in a bowl with the sorbet. Tasted fine though, if a bit stronger than I was expecting. And after that, we had the requisite coffee. About 3 hours and 15 minutes after entering the jardin, we paid and left. Not bad for our first night there.

The next day was Christmas Eve, and quite a few places were open. As assistants, we are entitled to free entry at all French national museums, so we hit up the Louvre and Musee d'Orsay. After hours of art and sculptures and metal work, we decided to head off to Orsay; we figured we'd seen perhaps 10-15% of all the exhibits in the Louvre. It's a large museum. By my calculations, it's just under 15 acres. I did see the most famous bits, Mona Lisa, Winged Victory, stuff like that. Too much trouble to get good pictures of though, as they're always mobbed. Here are a few pictures though:

Inside the pyramid



Hammurabi's Code



Napoleon always wanted to eat when it was nice out, so he had the roof and walls painted to be a gorgeous day. Genius!



We marched on to the Musee d'Orsay for the last hour or so that they were open. Since Lisa has been to most of these, she could show me the more interesting works and we could get more for our 0 Euro entry fee. They had an awesome model of part of downtown Paris, and it was under a glass floor so you could walk around on it and look at it from above. I felt like I was in Wonka's glass elevator.



After we got kicked out, we stopped by the Christmas markets to get some food and then headed back to the hotel since it was raining. Around 10, we headed up to Sacré Cœur for the singing and midnight mass.



The singing was very beautiful, and the mass was nice despite not understanding quite a bit of it. I did learn some obscure French religious terms though, and I got to sing (badly) in French and Latin as well. All in all a very nice service, and we even managed to catch the last metro back to the hotel. Being sometime after 2AM, we crashed pretty soon after getting back.

CHRISTMAS! And there we were, with no presents or tree or family. But we did have each other, so we just went skating instead. The Hotel de Ville had a nice rink and skates to rent, so we did that for about an hour. Good fun.



We stopped by the Marais or Jewish district for lunch, since stores and food vendors were actually still open. We bought falafels from a world famous falafel vendor, and they are indeed tasty. Plus, you get this kind of face when you take pictures:



We poked around a few shops in the Marais, then headed towards the Petit Palais and Champs-Elysees. Quite a few shops were open there but we spent most of our time in car dealers. The Toyota store had the coolest stuff, including two race cars, a new super small model (the iQ), and a prototype chair/personal transportation device.



They also had buttons you could make, so we did. Unfortunately, the man operating the button device was incompetent and messed up Lisa's button. He messed mine up as well, but I demanded it back and fixed it once we got back to the hotel. On our way back to the hotel, we stopped to take pictures of the pretty sunset and silhouettes. It's really hard not to take lots of pictures in Paris, with the end result that over the course of 4 days I shot more than 400 photos. I'm leaving you with this one, as it's perhaps my favorite from the whole weekend. Everything just came out perfectly.



We also bought a delicious crepe and some cheap cider and champagne. After drinking the cider and eating the crepe and watching part of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights on TV, we headed out to our date with the Eiffel Tower. It was pretty busy, as expected, but the tower was open later than normal so we managed to get up to the top by around 10PM. The views are GORGEOUS at night, since you're nearly 1000 feet above Paris and everything is lit up.



It's not easy to take clear pictures since it's windy, cold, and my camera isn't good at night shots anyway.



So that's about as clear as they come. Just imagine looking around and seeing the rest of Paris. Lisa had brought bubbles to the top, though the wind did all the work of blowing and popping the bubbles. Thankfully, part of the top is enclosed so it's not all freezing. We enjoyed the views, looking for places we'd been and wanted to go. After about an hour, we took the elevator down and walked down the last part of the tower, perhaps 300 feet. Then it was back to the hotel for some champagne! Perhaps not the most traditional of Christmas celebrations, but we made do.

The 26th was our last day, so we went to a museum that we'd tried to go to in the spring. It was also free, so we had no problem with that. It's a museum about the middle ages, and for extra cool bonus points they had an exhibit on Asterix and Obelix! Lots of original drawings, idea storyboards, history, things like that. Plus, they had parodies of famous artwork using Asterix characters.



As a last hurrah for Paris, we got crepes and then headed to the hotel to pick up our stuff and go take the train home. And now for something completely different: