We spent our last few days in Paris-not in Paris.  We took a three-hour, high-speed train ride to Aix-les-Bains, a beautiful town in the Alps region of southeast France, to visit our friend Aurelie and her new husband Jeremy.  I was Aurelie’s counselor when she was in the Rotary Youth Exchange program.  We were so sad to miss her wedding but delighted that we were able to get together just two months after her big day.

Aix-les-Bains is on Lac du Bourget and has beautiful mountains on either side.

On Saturday morning Aurelie walked to the boulangerie for all kinds of wonderful croissants and French breads for breakfast.  She, Paul and I went to the market for fish, cheese, meat and vegetables for dinner.  Everything we got was grown or made within a few miles of her town.  Aurelie chose a wonderful variety of cheese.

Paul was especially impressed with all of the different kinds of sausage.

When we got back, Aurelie and Jeremy made a five-course lunch for us.

We started with an appetizer of sausage, pesto biscuits and champagne.  This was followed by the entree (what we call an appetizer) of vegetables and two kinds of homemade bread, alpine and country.  Jeremy chose wine from the region for both lunch and dinner that evening.

The plat (main course) was a baked pasta dish made with Les Crozets pasta from Savoie.  Then we had the beautifully presented cheese course and we ended with dessert.  That really wasn’t the end of lunch because we then went to visit Aurelie’s parents for coffee. So, really it was a six-course lunch.  Paul and I are still trying to figure out the French paradox-how the French stay so thin.   It was great to see Cathy and Serge again.  A friend and I had stayed with them nine years ago when we combined a trip to see Aurelie with a visit to Samantha who was doing a study abroad in Spain.

This is the beautiful view of the Alps from their back yard.

From there we went to Chambery, a town about the size of Aix-les-Bains.  Once again, we were so impressed with how old structures are valued and maintained.

After exploring Chambery, we did a little hiking on Lac du Bourget.  We ended the day with another lovely meal prepared by Aurelie and Jeremy.  Jeremy shared a special drink with us that he and his father prepared together.  Gnole is a liqueur  made with various fruits.  The one we had was made with mirabelles, the little plum-like fruit we discovered at the market when we first got to Paris.

The next morning we left to come back for our last day in Paris.  Our visit with Aurelie and Jeremy was a wonderful way to end our wonderful month living in Paris.

Tomorrow morning we head home and are looking forward to seeing family and friends.

One of my favorite images of Parisians is of them walking down the street eating a baguette fresh from the boulangerie.  So after a great day of seeing beautiful art and city scenes, we got a baguette and ate a bite on the way home. I felt so French.

At lunch today we had our first crabby French waiter, at least at first he was crabby.  By the time we left, he was making jokes and exaggerated gestures.  We are not sure what changed, but he ended up being quite enjoyable.

We have been discussing why the Parisians have a reputation for being unfriendly.  Our encounters with Parisian people have been positive.  Sometimes they smile when I speak French, but I have never felt it was critical, just amused.  And I can understand why my French attempts are amusing.  They are reserved and speak very softly which may make them seem less friendly than people in other countries.  I wonder if they don’t make eye contact on the street because they keep their eyes on the sidewalk so they don’t step in dog poop-something I have done twice since I am always looking around when I walk.

After a beautiful walk,, we went to the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, a wonderful art museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art of the 20th and 21st centuries.  I wasn’t familiar with many of the artists but fell in love with some of the paintings.

Raoul Dufy:

Robert Delaunay:

Albert Gleizes:

After dinner, we got off the Metro a stop early so we could walk home across the Seine.  For five minutes at the top of each hour at night, the lights on the Eiffel Tower twinkle.  It was a beautiful sight.

As our wonderful month in Paris nears its end, we find ourselves wanting to revisit some of our favorite places as well as see one more thing on our list.  (Really, its my list; Paul’s list was much shorter.)  Today we walked some of our favorite streets.

We ate lunch and dinner at two of our favorite restaurants, Le Reminet and Evi Evaine.

While Paul was working, I visited Saint Chapelle, one more place on my list.  This beautiful church, known for its stained-glass windows, was built in the 13th century to house the Crown of Thorns.  The huge stain-glass windows are amazing.  Window restoration work begun in the 1970s is almost complete.

 

We traveled outside Paris today to tour the Loire Valley and Burgundy wine regions.  Our first stop was a goat farm and cheese factory where Crottin de Chauvignol, the most famous goat cheese of the Loire Valley, is made.

We learned how they made the cheese and sampled cheese at different stages of ripeness.  It was amazing how much the cheese changed.  It went from “young and soft” to “bluish with a savory character” and finally to “mature with a strong flavor.”

Baby goats were born just a few days before we got there.  With a caution from our guide to watch our step, we visited the barn and saw the baby goats.

Our guide gave us a heartfelt explanation of the importance of “terroir”, the way geography, geology and climate contribute to the unique characteristics of the wine from each region.  He kept saying, “In France we don’t care what kind of grape is used; we only care where the grape grew up.”  In the Coteaux du Giennois region, the wine maker we visited demonstrated the different components of the soil and then pointed out how they affected the wine when we tasted it.

After a traditional French lunch we traveled to Sancerre and tasted white, red, and rose Sancerre wine.  Sancerre is my favorite white wine, but I didn’t know until our tour that there were also red and rose wines from this region.  The tiny town of Sancerre has a wine museum with a beautiful view from the terrace.

Our final stop was the Roland Fissier et Fils winery where our tour guide, Jean Barnard, conducted another tasting for us.

The wine makers signed the labels on the bottles we bought to bring home.