Barb & Baden’s Excellent French Adventure ver 2.0 – Final

Note: this email was originally composed on Oct. 11, 2004

Shopping as an art form

Some of you may have picked up from previous Excellent Adventures that Barb and I have a liking for shopping when we travel to Europe. This is pretty much true and we often come back on the return trip home laden down with the bounties of the places we visit. Its not just that we have nothing better to do than spend countless hours in the great department stores that are available here but we consider it somewhat of an art form to only get what is the best of a city and none more. Just today I picked up 5 cans of fois gras to sustain us in the days and weeks ahead. Only the necessities, you know.

Day 12:

Its Sunday morning and we slept in a bit longer as many things are closed today. We opened the window to our hotel room and were presented with the church bells of Notre Dame cathedral that is only a few blocks away.

We have been travelling everywhere in Paris either on foot or mostly in the metro subways. The metro is a great way to get around and it fast and quite cheap and goes virtually everywhere in the city. One of the side benefits of going through the metro is that there are often many musicians in the tunnels or even on the trains themselves. It so happens that the tunnels have excellent acoustics so we have been treated to soloists and up to six piece bands all with concert hall like sounds.

One of the things that I had on my to-do list while in Paris was to check out this site called Les Catacombes. The catacombes are these dark, low tunnels beneath the streets of Paris that contains the bones of some people who during the 1700s and 1800s were moved out of local cemeteries for reasons that are not clear to me. To say that a few bones were there is somewhat of an understatement. There are millions of them and they are literally piled up like cord wood for hundreds of meters.

Bar declined to join me on this particular adventure and I think that shes the worse off. Many of you remember our last trip to Paris where I took in the tour of the Paris sewer systems. This tour is somewhat along that vein but with more skeletons and less raw sewage.

While I was walking through the catacombs, I passed by a family of some teenagers and their parents. The two teenagers were posing next to this skull and basically having a good time of it. The mother summed up the entire trip with her comments “if this isnt a sacrilege, I dont know what is”. I think that maybe you need to see the pictures to get the real feel for the place before making judgement. Overall I’d judge Les Catacombes to be better than the sewer tour but not as good as the Louvre.

Day 13:

Today is our last day in Paris and tomorrow we head back home. Today I did some shopping for some cooking items in a supermarket that I felt that I might need when trying to make some of the recipes that we learned. You probably should know that Nutella (which we religiously have bought in Europe on every one of our last trips here) is officially off the list as we have not finished the last jar that we bought in Madrid last year.

Final notes

On this trip to Europe I have had lots of problems getting reliable Internet access and I need to look into possible solutions for future trips. As with many of life’s problems, this one will likely be solved by buying more technology.

My new digital camera has turned out to be quite good purely from a portability perspective. As it is much smaller and lighter than my old one it was much easier to carry around on a daily basis. The big question is whether it will deliver pictures as good as my other film camera. I wont know about this aspect until I get home.

As we have done on most of our previous Excellent Adventures journals, I present to you our Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down for this trip:

Thumbs Up

-Cordon Bleu cooking. They definitely deserve their world famous reputation for cooking excellence. I suspect that the Cordon Bleu in Paris has not seen the last of me.

-Cooking with Patrick in Provence. Patricks easygoing style and hospitality made our 5 days with him quite memorable.

-French food and wine. Fois gras and croissants. What else can you say?

-Paris life. Barb and I would love to live here permanently but we would need to have millions in order to enjoy ourselves. I guess for now a week at a time will have to suffice.

-Wine country in Burgundy. This part of the trip lived up to all expectations and definitely a must see for any wine lover (especially during harvest time).

Thumbs Down

-Smoking. OK, I know I always complain about this and youre probably thinking get over it already. As non-smokers, its just such a downer in such an therwise enjoyable part of the world.

-Too much driving in Burgundy and Provence. Next time we travel we have to reduce the amount of driving and increase the train travel. Travelling the towns and cities by car is just so much less pleasurable and European cities are really not the place to drive if you want to have a stress free holiday.

I should mention that this might well be the last Excellent Adventures in this format. I am considering a change to something different and if I do so it should be in place before we plan our next adventure.

All the best,

Barb and Baden