On my lovely husband's birthday this year, we stayed in for an Italian dinner feast - transforming our French apartment into Little Italy. We poured the obvious drink of choice, the Aperol Spritz (cheers, Casey!) and ended with a tub of pistachio/tiramisu gelato from the local favorite Amorino (cheers, Neha!). To celebrate with the amici, we hit up Korean resto Songsang in the 15th. The food was fantastic, and a few of us even mastered the rare-known art of "backward peanut chopstick," thanks to the guidance of sensei Michael.
And the gift that will keep on giving is Michael's new fondue set, accompanied by an Asterix in Switzerland book, which we apparently need to read if we are going to spend any more time in Europe with Europeans who are all familiar with the story of Asterix and fondue. I feel a fondue party coming on soon!
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Halloween. That perfect time of year to take a trip to the local cemetery to enjoy a beautiful autumn afternoon. On Saturday, we paid a visit to Père Lachaise cemetery, the largest and most famous in Paris. The timing was purely coincidental, as we've been wanting to visit Père Lachaise for a while now, but hadn't had the chance. Père Lachaise was opened for business by Napoleon in 1804, and is now the final resting place of many famous people who either lived or died in Paris, including Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Molière, Balzac, Edith Piaf, Gertrude Stein, and many more. Apparently there are now over 1 million people buried there, and it is still an active cemetery accepting new burials - unlike the permanence we have after death in our cemeteries in the United States, Père Lachaise has a practice of issuing standard 30-year leases on grave sites (although they can also be purchased for 10 or 50 years, or if you're flush with cash, in perpetuity). If the lease is not renewed by the family, the remains can be removed, leaving space for a new grave. Abandoned remains are boxed, tagged and moved to Aux Morts ossuary in Père Lachaise cemetery. Practical, if not a bit unsettling.
Our most recent European mini-adventure started with a list of tour dates posted by Ryan Bingham on his website over the summer; he's the American singer we went to see in Dublin in February. Since his European tour dates never seem to include a stop through Paris, we take advantage of the opportunity to find a show in a city we haven't yet visited, and build a trip around it. So this time... off the beautiful city of Zurich in Switzerland! After a four-hour train from Paris to Zurich on Thursday night, we checked in to the Boutique Townhouse Hotel, which was a 5 minute walk from the train station. Everything is ridiculously expensive in Zurich, but we'd recommend this hotel as not too pricey and a fantastic location if you ever go - just be sure to ask for a room on an upper floor. We got up dark and early the next day for a day trip to the Bernese Alps, which I had been looking forward to since I booked the tour a few months ago. We boarded the largest bus I have ever seen and headed out with our Swiss guide, Pedro (seriously) four our first stop, Interlaken. It always helps when the weather is awesome, but this town is seriously amazing, and worth a longer visit. Next stop... Grindelwald! The names of some of these little towns just sound like they should be filled with nothing but log cabins and steaming mugs of hot chocolate all year round. To get up to our ultimate destination - Jungfraujoch - we had to take a number of cogwheel trains that winded steeply up, up up to the mountain, which you can see in the distance: Jungfraujoch has been quite brilliantly branded the "Top of Europe", for the fact that it is home to the highest railway station in Europe at over 11,000 feet above sea level, and is nestled among three famous mountains - the Jungfrau (virgin), the Mönch (monk), and the Eiger, which is known for the treacherous climb of its North Face wall. The station was opened in 1912, and allows visitors to gain access to the Sphinx, one of the highest astronomical observatories in the world, and take in some pretty spectacular views of the Aletsch Glacier. Back in Zurich, we spent the next few days exploring the city itself, and of course attending the concert that took us there in the first place. It turns out that if you've going to go full groupie, getting to the venue early and standing in the front row is definitely the way to go! Best concert yet.
The weather wasn't quite as good the rest of the weekend as what we had in the Alps - go figure - but the city's autumn charm worked its magic on us nevertheless. You can find more photos from our trip in the album here. I grew up a bit obsessed with the Phantom of the Opera, thanks to my Mom and Sue. So it was literally a dream come true last night when Michael and I went to see a performance at the Palais Garnier (the Paris Opera House), which was the inspiration for the Phantom. When you visit the opera house as a tourist, you enter through the side and somewhat from underneath of the building. As a spectator, you enter at the main entrance in all its glory, with an incredible view of the grand staircase. It is a seriously special place, and an occasion to put on your best cocktail dress with your sexiest, most impractical heels. And then there's the inside of the theater. Ohmygod, it's crimson and gold and spectacular. With a ceiling painted by Chagall... The show itself was a comic French opera from 1745 called Platée. Our seats were in the stalls on orchestra level, which is fantastic until anything happened on the upper right of the stage, when we missed everything but the music and voices. Which it turns out didn't matter so much for us because we were utterly confused and bewildered the entire first half of the show anyway! The main character of the opera was an ugly water nymph called Platée (female character played by a male), who falls in love with basically every man who comes to her pond, including the king of the gods, Jupiter. She is sadly taken advantage of by Mercury and Love, who convince her that Jupiter is going to marry her, all in a ploy to cure Jupiter's wife Juno of jealousy. Happy ending for Jupiter and Juno; not so much for poor Platée. There are also some singing, dancing frogs along the way. Check out a clip here if you want to see some of the magic.
It also didn't help that the performers were singing in French with Italian "r"s. Any illusions we may have harbored about understanding more than two words at a time had gone out of the window in the first 10 minutes of the show. At the intermission, we decided to google the synopsis so that we could at least know what was going on. The second half turned out to be much better than the first, and we both ended up actually liking the performance. But honestly, we weren't really there for the show anyway. It was always about just being lucky enough to spend a few hours inside the hallowed building, experiencing whatever Paris decided to throw our way. This time of year, I dream relentlessly of the beautiful autumn colors that I took for granted when living on the East Coast of the United States... This has always been my favorite time of year, but it's just not the same in Paris. We do go a bit over the top with pumpkin-flavored everything in the US, but dammit if we don't all love it! There is absolutely no substitute for driving to Butler's Orchard to pick apples, maybe enjoy a hay ride, warm up with fresh apple cider, and leaving with a nice fat pumpkin or two. So desperate times call for desperate measures: my only solace while pining for the autumn pleasures I love so dearly is Starbucks' Pumpkin Spice Latte... Don't judge - you've been there too. In life, we have take what we can get.
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AuthorBecause why not get married and move to Paris to really kick off your thirties? Archives
December 2016
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