Happy New Year and Good Health, as the French expression goes. We are back from a whirlwind adventure to France this past week. We had a fantastic time, albeit a little chaotic, but we wanted to take advantage of dad having a week of vacation over the holidays and jetting to Paris sounded a lot more fun than hanging out in our hotel room!
First up was driving to Paris on Christmas Eve with everyone's Christmas presents in tow. We were hosted by a dear old friend who was an exchange student of my husband's family for a year when he and I were in college almost 20 years ago! We've kept in touch, and visited her about 13 years ago but a lot has changed since then. Her husband is a chef, so we were in for a treat as we celebrated with her family Christmas Eve! On the menu was escargo canapes, smoked salmon, foie gras, oysters, shimp (gambas) and finally duck for the main course. The dinner was no less than 3 hours and there was plenty of champagne and wine flowing, and good conversation in between. Our friend Laure speaks great English, so she was our interpreter the entire night. Hopefully next visit, our French will be a little more advanced than Merci and Bonjour! So we are forever grateful for them opening their home and allowing us to be part of a real Parisian Christmas celebration!
Christmas Day we slept in, had our own little Christmas morning celebration in the hotel and then we were off to start our touring.. we did a lot of walking, as we wondered at Notre Dame and ended at the Eiffel Tower that night. I was SO GLAD I'd booked our tickets online as the line was crazy long and we got "priority entrance", which I found was the case for a lot of the sites. So I'll certainly be keeping that in mind for future travels!
Commentaires