Thanksgiving revelries, part 3 (The End)

On Friday, we pressed on for Strasbourg, and arrived in time for a late lunch at a good pizza/Italian place about five minutes from the hotel.  Then we spent the remainder of daylight wandering around the old part of town, which is easy to find, being a little island cut off from the rest of the city by a ring of canals.  Then we all went back to the hotel and took naps.  We emerged at 6:30ish and headed back into the old town.  (We spent little time elsewhere during the day and a half that we were in Strasbourg – it’s where the Christmas markets and the cathedral and other things like that were.)  After wandering around admiring the Christmas lights for an hour, we ended up eating at a place called Europ’Café.  The food was quite good, and we had fun trying to talk with a guy from the next table who was from the area.  Aunt Suse would have liked to really talk with him, but unfortunately he spoke only French, and very quiet French at that.  It was all I could do to hear them, although when I could hear him his French was relatively accent-free.  After dinner and two hot chocolates on my part, we went back to the hotel, where I watched “The Fellowship of the Ring” dubbed into French.  Oh, I just can’t WAIT for “The Return of the King”!!!!!!!!  Eeep!!! ::grin::

On Saturday, we hit the Christmas markets.  Or, rather, the Christmas markets (and the noise and pressure of thousands of people crammed into small spaces) hit us.  The markets were nice, by and large, although there were a lot of repetitious products.  Lots of hot wine (mostly red, but we found a couple of booths that sold white and burgundy), lots of gaufres (thick waffles spread with any of a number of sweeeeeeeet things), lots of ceramic houses, lots of spice cookies (a regional specialty), lots of… well, lots of lots of things.  Only two booths really stand out in my mind as having really different stuff – one, a booth that sold glass ornaments made by a glass blowing workshop in between Strasbourg and Metz, and the other a booth that had hand-carved wooden Santas with their wooden robes painted in different colors and patterns.  I really liked the Santas, but when the smallest (about five inches tall) cost 65 euros, I decided to pass. 

Aunt Suse did get me a marvelous pair of Christmas presents, though not from one of the booths.  Rather, there was a guy set up on a corner with a rack of engravings that he had made and printed.  I had noticed him but wasn’t going to go over, but Aunt Suse and Jill walked over, so I joined them.  I’m so glad that I did.  The artist – M. Addis – was really talented.  His engravings (and a few oil pastels, I think) were exquisite.  There were two that I was really taken with – one a detail of the door of the cathedral of Strasbourg, the other a detail of the grand organ inside the cathedral – and since I couldn’t decide and they make a nice pair, Aunt Suse bought them both for me.  The artist also did his own matting, and these two happened to be matted in the same way, with an simple embossed pattern on the cream matboard.  One of the first things I did when I got back to Laon was to go to Carrefour and buy two “floating” frames to put them in to protect them, and hang them up on my wall.  They look lovely, and so grown up!

We spent many hours in the various groups of stalls – you had to, since you couldn’t move more than a few feet a minute.  For those of you who have visited San Antonio during Fiesta, think Night in Old San Antonio, all day long.  I enjoyed it for a while, but there were just too many people for me.  So, I’m sorry to say, by the time we had gotten back to the hotel, freshened up and headed back out for dinner, I was in a bad mood.  I eventually grew less snappish, but for a while there I’m sure that I wasn’t any fun to be around.  Thank you, Aunt Suse and Jill, for putting up with me.

After breakfast on Sunday, we loaded up the car and headed out of town.  On the way out we stopped by the Orangerie, which had both been recommended to us by a friend and supposedly had a market of its own.  L’Orangerie is a large park with several little ponds and a small zoo and lots of pretty paths wandering through the trees and up and down hills.  There wasn’t a market that we could find, but it was still a nice, calm way to say goodbye to Strasbourg, and helped to balance my opinion of the city.

There is one opinion that I have of the city that I doubt will change, and that is that the cathedral is uuuuuuuuuugllllllllllyyyyyyyyyyy!  There is a local stone (I assume it’s local, because there’s a lot of it scattered across the city in roads and buildings) that looks like desert pattern camouflage.  You know, the pink and tan and black one.  I’ve never thought that desert pattern camouflage is particularly pretty, and I have to say that I think it gets downright hideous when spread over a mammoth, six-story-tall cathedral.  I just wanted to power-blast the stones clean, down to some nice grey or tan color.  (That’s why it looks so good in my two engravings – they’re in greyscale.)  Plus, the inside of the cathedral just seemed dark and claustophobic, especially after the airiness and space of the Metz cathedral.  So, yeah, I don’t like the Strasbourg cathedral.

We got to Paris on Sunday evening, checked into a hotel by Charles de Gaulle airport, and took the expensive (7.75 euros one-way) RER into the city center.  From there we went into the St-Germain district, which is probably my favorite area in all of Paris.  The weather was cold and drippy, but once we got to St-Germain, it all seemed better.  The narrow, winding streets were brightly lit and filled – but not unpleasantly – with people reading the menus in front of restaurants and generally enjoying an evening’s stroll.  We did likewise, and found ourselves at a homey restaurant that served raclettes, which is what I had decided I wanted for dinner.  I don’t know if I’ve described raclettes before, but they are roasted potatoes served with ham and a cheese that you melt and pour over them.  Yum.  The restaurant we chose had a bargain prix fix menu – choice of entrée, main course and dessert for 15 euros.  And these were big portions.  We all had a salad with a yummy mustard vinaigrette dressing for the entrée, and I had the raclette and a crème brulée. 

I went to the bathroom before we left the restaurant, which turned out to be a very good thing, since, thanks to a mistake of mine, we didn’t get back to the hotel for about two hours.  (Normally it should have taken about 45 minutes.)  You see, Julia couldn’t sort out the myriad directions for the RER, and so we ended up getting on the correct line – just headed in the wrong direction.  By the time Aunt Suse said, “Um, are we going in the right way?,” we’d already been riding for about fifteen minutes.  We got off at the next stop, only to find that there was no way of getting across to the platform for the trains going in the other direction, short of hopping down the four feet down onto the tracks and back up again.  (I was sorely tempted, let me tell you.)  Rather, looking at the map, I took a gamble that if we rode two stops further on, we would be able to catch the train going the other way, since that stop had correspondences with other trains.  It turned out, however, that the map only mentioned two out of about six stops between where we had gotten off and where we thought that we could turn around.  Lovely. 

We got to the correspondence-stop, and for a couple of minutes it looked like I had been wrong yet again and that we wouldn’t be able to catch the train going the other way, and would have to take a taxi from one end of Paris to the other – an expensive proposition.  But we explained to some very nice policemen our predicament, and they showed us how to reach the opposing platform.  We rode as far north as the train went – to the Gare du Nord – but when we got there, we still had about half an hour left by train, and the last shuttle from the RER station at the airport back to the hotel was to leave in fifteen minutes.  So, after all that, we STILL had to take a taxi.  GRRRRRRR!!!!!  I was/am so frustrated – I should have been able to sort out the maps!

Aunt Suse and Jill left early Monday morning – I woke up long enough to say goodbye and give Aunt Suse a big hug, then went back to sleep for another couple of hours.  I turned in the keys at about 10:15 a.m., then went outside to catch the shuttle to the RER station.  I was supposed to meet a friend in front of Notre Dame at 11:30 a.m., but my luck from the night before was still holding.  First the shuttle was late, then I couldn’t get change for the automatic ticket machines at the RER station and they wouldn’t take my bank card and the line at the windows was about fifteen people deep, then the train that I caught made a couple of long stops, then the metal detectors at the locker rental room in the Gare du Nord (I rented a locker for the day) were set at “tooth filling,” then all the automatic Metro ticket dispensers at the Gare du Nord were broken and the line at the single ticket window open was about twenty people deep… Just not my 24 hours for trains.  I got to Notre Dame at 12:15, and not surprisingly my friend had given up and left.  I spent a couple of hours wandering around Paris, mostly to get my money’s worth out of my locker rental, and then went back to the Gare du Nord, got my stuff out of the locker, and caught a train back to Laon.

Whew!  A lot happened during the four and a half days that Aunt Suse and Jill were here.  It was so, so good to see Aunt Suse – she’s a really cool and nice aunt, and having her come visit me seemed to validate, somehow, my living in France.  Rather than being the lost sheep, for that weekend at least I was the guide.  I was the one who spoke the language and knew my way around some of the customs of the country.  It did feel strange, however, to have them depart on Monday without me.  I’ve traveled before with Aunt Suse in France, and so after a few hours it almost seemed like this was another such trip.  So to say goodbye and realize that I technically am living here was a bit…hmmm, surreal, I guess.  All in all, though, the weekend was wonderful and comforting and a lot of fun.  ::happy smile::