Ching ching clang

It's always fun to have people from home come to visit, and this September presented a perfect opportunity.  After a week getting accustomed to my new host family in La Roche, I hopped in a carpool to Paris.

For the last few months, I've been using BlaBlaCar, a carpool website whose popularity has exploded in France.  If you have a car and are going somewhere, you can put in the details of your trip on the website; others can sign up to join you and basically pitch in for gas.  Besides conserving gas and paying less than the train, you also get to meet new people from all over the world and often from your home town.

La Défense

In Paris, I stayed with Yann, a friend's brother.  He and his girlfriend were incredible hosts; I never thought I would say that I enjoyed an evening in Paris staying in and playing Guitar Hero, but that's what happened. Yann loves cooking: he made the best hamburger I've ever had in my life, with all sorts of random ingredients that somehow worked perfectly together: curry, goat cheese, onions, vegetables, and several sauces.  During the day, I explored La Défense, the small, modern business quarter of Paris marked by skyscrapers with a view of an itty bitty Arc de Triomphe.  It was rather empty on a Saturday, but there is a large American-style mall that attracts visitors as well as a pretty esplanade.

Once my parents and Ryan arrived, we broke in our Paris experience by making a spectacular scene in the Latin quarter trying to find one of our favorite restaurants from last winter.  (We found it, although I'm pretty sure it changed ownership...). Thankfully, it wasn't ridiculously cold like last December, so afterward we were able to visit the Luxembourg gardens in the afternoon and walk leisurely through the Cluny street market without freezing.

For me, new experiences in Paris this time around included the Conciergerie, the Picasso museum, and getting fined 50€ on the Métro.  We'll start there.  Advice: save your Métro ticket until you've completely left the Métro and are above ground, even if you don't have pockets and it's annoying to hold on to.  This was the first time in eight years of Paris visits that I've ever seen controllers and probably the first time I threw away my ticket underground after getting off.  Go figure.

In happier news, I really enjoyed the Conciergerie, which is connected to Sainte Chapelle; it is the oldest building on the Île de la Cité.  It's a new favorite for me because it mostly includes information from the French revolution, which often gets lost in museums among all the complicated royal history of earlier years.  It served as a prison during the Reign of Terror for around 2,700 accused enemies of the republic, including Marie Antoinette, most of whom went on to be executed by guillotine.

The Picasso museum was small but well done, including mostly paintings, sculptures, and drawings by Picasso himself in more or less chronological order, but also a handful of other works by artists like Matisse, Renoir, and Cézanne.  The museum just finished undergoing a 5-year renovation last year and I was happy to have visited after the giant crowds calmed down a little.

Vieux Lyon

Dad and Ryan overlooking Lyon

After a few days in Paris, we took a high-speed train southeast to Lyon, the second-largest city in France (by urban population).  It was my second time there; when studying abroad, we managed to add an extra weekend trip in order to try the food: Lyon is the gastronomy center of France.  It's also a lively student town and cultural hub with a wide variety of museums.  While the city is large enough to be divided into arrondissements like Paris, it's easy to get stuck in the winding streets of the 5th, la vielle ville (old town).  This time, I also wandered through the 1st and 2nd, which are located on the peninsula between the two rivers (Saône and Rhône).  We explored the Saône via boat tour, and also spent a morning in the 6th visiting the giant Parc Tête d'Or (literally Golden Head Park), a huge area with gardens, a lake, a zoo, and several trails.

As far as museums, we started with the Musée Lumière, one of my new favorites.  It gave a thorough presentation of the early cinematography scene and inventions of the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis.  They were inspired by Thomas Edison and William Dickson's invention of the the kinetoscope, an early version of the motion-picture projector, and continued experimenting with the aim of creating a device that both recorded and projected films.  The museum is located in the mansion of their father, Antoine, who was first a painter and then a photographer.

After, we saw the Musée des Beaux Arts (fine arts museum) which I thought was very well done.  I branched off and went to the Musée des Confluences, which turned out to be more of a children's natural history museum in an ultra-modern building.  The strange building itself was by far the highlight.

Guignol

I also visited the Musée Gadagne, which has two parts: a lengthy saga of the history of Lyon, and the world puppet museum.  The latter is inspired by Guignol, the main character in a famous French puppet show.  Guignol usually plays the part of a silk weaver; the silk weaving tradition is a huge part of Lyon's history.

The silk weavers and traders who passed through Lyon and stopped to eat at local inns started another tradition: the bouchon, typical restaurant.  Les bouchons are known for their meat dishes (sausage, pâté, roast pork...) and "pot Lyonnais", their 46-cl wine measurement.  There are about twenty certified bouchons in Lyon today, and you can find other restaurants whose cuisine is faite maison (homemade).

Raclette

Beautiful rainbow in Annecy

The final days of the trip were spent in Annecy, a small, picturesque town nestled in the Alpes.  We enjoyed a raclette at the restaurant La Freti, sharing a typical dish of the region: melted cheese (that one lucky person at the table must "harvest" themselves from the giant half-wheel as it melts...merci, Ryan), baked potatoes, and a cold meat plate.  Perfect for winter skiers in the mountains.

If you do a quick Google search of restaurants on Annecy, you'll find that the highest-rated is actually a homemade ice cream shop called the Palais des Glaces...so we were naturally all over that.  We stopped by every night and tasted many a free sample.  The online ratings don't lie.

Lac Annecy from les Talloires

Another plug for Annecy is the beautiful lake (Lac Annecy) surrounded by mountains.  My dad and Ryan biked the perimeter of the lake while my mom and I did the tour by boat.  The boat stops at several small towns; you can choose to get off at one and explore, and take the next boat back to Annecy.  We stopped at Talloires, a cute town with a beautiful view of the mountains and lake, where we took a "little" uphill hike to see une cascade (a waterfall).

Our last day was spent in Geneva in order to experience a bit of Switzerland; it's a rather ugly city thanks to the Calvinists, but interesting all the same, not to mention completely surrounded by France. We took an excellent walking tour to start and later visited the Patek Philippe Museum to learn about their famous watch tradition.

After quite the variety of adventures, we returned to Paris for one final evening.  Our Airbnb host sent us to a restaurant that was probably my favorite of the trip: Mélac, a bistrot à vins.  I believe we decided it was the best bœuf bourgignon yet, and the red wine was one of my favorites as well.  A good ending to the trip.

The next day, after saying goodbye, I finished out my adventures with a visit to the traveling ancient Egyptian Osiris exhibit at the Arab World Institute - extremely well done.

That afternoon, I BlaBlaCar-ed my way back to reality and work in La Roche.