Welcome 2012

Happy New Year to all 2 readers of our blog! (Just kidding– I am pretty sure there are at least 15 of you out there.)

We spent Christmas in Paris and cooked up a storm, because what better way to spend the holidays when you can’t be with family? My only regret was that most of our new friends were out of town so we had no one with whom to share all our food-handiwork. For Christmas Eve supper we made Greg’s family’s traditional Polish meal, with pierogies, sauerkraut, and fish. There’s a store in Paris that sells nothing but Polish food, so we went there on Christmas Eve hoping they might still have some pierogies. Unsurprisingly, they had already sold out; but we got some kielbasa instead. It’s not part of the traditional Polish Christmas Eve dinner, but we enjoyed it anyway. And Greg saved the day by making pierogies from scratch.

On Christmas day, after opening presents, we decided to get out of the house for awhile, so we headed to Père Lachaise cemetery. This huge, ancient cemetery is one of Paris’s big tourist attractions, since so many famous people are buried there. I was mainly interested in seeing the graves of Francis Poulenc, Frederic Chopin, Edith Piaf, and other musicians. Abélard and Héloïse are also buried in Père Lachaise; they have a very fancy grave with a huge marble canopy over it and big statues on their tombs. Here’s a quick, oversimple summary of their story: Abélard was hired to be Héloïse’s tutor, but soon they fell in love (and presumably started getting it on). Héloïse’s family didn’t appreciate this, so they hired some thugs to forcibly castrate Abélard, and Héloïse ended up going to a nunnery. Of course, Abélard went on to continue his big academic career afterward, while Héloïse spent the rest of her days stuck in the convent. Their tomb sweetly says that they were “reunited in death.” Sure, that sounds romantic and all, but it seems sad to me that they couldn’t actually be together during their lives. Wait a second… this story sounds like the perfect subject for an opera. I wonder if it’s been done already. After returning from the cemetery, we braised a couple of lamb shanks in honey with herbs, drank some kirs and felt appropriately celebratory.

During the week between Christmas and New Year’s, we did some sightseeing around Paris. We bought an annual membership at the Louvre, which is quite affordable. If we go more than four times, the membership will pay for itself. With a membership, we can do many short visits instead of  feeling like we ought to do an exhausting day-long marathon that we won’t remember later because we tried to mash so much information into our brains at once. The problem with going to the Louvre during the holidays is that everyone else in the world apparently also had the same idea, so it was like walking through Penn Station New York during rush hour. But I decided to completely ignore all the people around me and try to enjoy as much as I could.

Over the New Year’s weekend, we went to stay with our friend Leslie’s family near Annecy in the Haute-Savoie region. Her parents live next to the Lac d’Annecy, with views of the foothills of the Alps. New Year’s Eve was a lot of fun. The house was bursting with guests and we played a jeu de societé (board game) in the early evening. It was sort of like Taboo, in that you had to get your partner to guess words without directly saying them. Of course, the game was in French. Greg’s and my teams got longer time limits for our turns since we’re still learning the language. Greg’s team won first place, and mine “won” last place. I think it’s because Greg’s game partner studies linguistics so she was good at intuiting what he was trying to say even when he was struggling with vocabulary.  We got a lot of French practice that weekend; Leslie’s family is used to having non-French speakers around, so people were good at talking slowly enough for us to understand.

We didn’t start eating dinner until around 10pm (I was dying of hunger by this time, since Greg and I usually eat around 7. But since the game was so much fun, I didn’t really notice my hunger until we were getting ready to sit down to eat). We finished dinner just a little while before midnight, and when the hour came we had a big toast. After that, most of the people with XY chromosomes trickled out to the back porch to smoke cigars and sip cognac. I went out there a couple of times to see what they were doing, but it seemed pretty boring– just a bunch of dudes standing around– so I went back inside where it was warm. We all stayed up until after 3am (even the kids that were there), just talking and hanging around. We played a game in which you melt a little lead figure and then dump it into water; the resulting shape is supposed to tell your fortune for the next year. But everyone’s object turned out more or less the same shape: cylindrical.

A couple of days after the New Year, Greg and Leslie and I went snowshoeing on a little mountain above the lake, from the top of which we could see Mont Blanc and another local peak, La Tournette. For most of the morning, Mont Blanc had a cloud covering its peak, but while we were eating lunch at the top of our climb, the cloud dissipated for a short time and we got some good views of Mont Blanc’s high peak. It is so much higher than anything around it it that it is quite striking, even at a great distance.

The whole weekend in Annecy was a really fun experience. Leslie’s family made us feel very welcome and it was nice to be with them for the New Year’s weekend instead of home alone in Paris. And we got a small taste of how French people celebrate holidays.

I can’t close this post without mentioning our recent cheese explorations. When we got back from Annecy we got some Reblochon, since it’s made in the region where Leslie’s family lives. This week we got some crottins d’Ambert because they were on sale. Crottins are little goat cheeses with individual rinds. The ones we got are fairly mild and have a drier texture than average goat cheese. We also got a small Mont d’Or, which is also called a Vacherin du Haut-Doubs, which might be my favorite cheese we’ve had in France. It came in a wooden box, because it’s so soft it wouldn’t keep its shape otherwise. It has a soft white rind and a runny inside with an interesting but not overpowering flavor. It’s very rich and creamy. Unlike Greg, I don’t judge a cheese based solely on how stinky it is. I did like the Munster we got recently, but I have other criteria for my cheese too. I think a mild cheese can also be delicious. The Vacherin is somewhere in the middle on the mild-stinky scale. It’s also made with raw milk, which gives it an extra layer of excitement.