French Connection

Our around-the-world trip culminated in Paris. Even though it was hardly our first visit (Vik spent several months there as an expatriate many moons ago, and Kaberi had made numerous trips to the City of Lights over the years), we still found a number of new experiences to share. Having timed our stay to start on a Saturday morning in order to frequent the weekend markets, we started our day at the antique fair of St-Ouen in the northern outskirts of the city. We walked through the narrow alleyways crammed with bric-a-brac displays and past larger streetside buildings housing more upscale stalls. We soon found two shops specializing in antique prints where Kaberi picked out an unusual orchid print dating from the 1850s as well as a set of 1901 collectors’ cards depicting several cities we just happened to have visited in recent months. After first stopping off at the hotel to safely stow our new-found treasures, we then proceeded to continue into central Paris. We next made our way to the 8th arrondisement to have lunch at Lauderee, a fancy tea shop specializing in French macaroons (which Kaberi would describe as light as air and nothing like the dense American version). Between us, we split a towering salmon club sandwich and an assortment of mini-macaroons while taking in the gilded molding and charmingly fussy décor. Invigorated with the sudden rush of sugar, we strolled through the Tuilleries to the L’Orangerie, an ethereal museum featuring eight wrap-around works from Monet’s Water Lillies collection. Unlike the smaller versions of the works we had seen elsewhere, these masterpieces were each easily thirty feet long. Displayed simply with one to a curved wall, each painting made us feel as if we were in the midst of a quiet pond in Giverny. The scale and subtle colors entranced us as we admired the magnitude of each creation. Seeing these paintings for the first time was easily the highlight of the day. Exiting L’Orangerie, we soon found ourselves before the large ferris wheel on the eastern side of the Place de la Concorde. Overcome with the desire to do something completely silly, Kaberi cajoled Vik into taking a ride to the top to see Paris from the air. At the apex, we could see the glass pyramid and main courtyard of the Louvre to our east, Sacre Couer to our north, the Arc de Triomphe to our west and the majestic Eiffel Tower to our south. Our overpriced ride (roughly $28 for two for twenty minutes) took us on four revolutions with which to enjoy Paris with a beautiful blue sky backdrop. Remaining in the first arrondisement, we revisited a restaurant that we had discovered on our last visit to Paris. We chose one of the ubiquitous corner cafes for a glass of wine and watched Parisians and fellow tourists wind their day to a close. Our dinner at Livingstone didn’t live up to our fond memories, but we still found it impossible to be disappointed with the day. The next morning, after breakfast at our hotel, we relocated ourselves to a rental studio apartment in the 7th arrondisement located literally less than a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower. With a kitchen now at our disposal, we decided to explore the Sunday morning food markets, first walking to Rue Cler and then continuing on to the organic market at Sevres-Bablyon. Wandering the stalls of fresh produce, cheeses, breads and wines, we stopped to purchase figs, freshly-baked pain de mie and chevre cheese. Our subsequent excursion to the Les Puces des Vanves market proved much less fruitful than our experience from the day before. As we arrived, we found the vendors were packing away their wares and folding up their tables. In the afternoon, Kaberi visited the gorgeous Museum d’Orsay (fashioned out of an old railway station) while Vik remained at the apartment to research health insurance options (proof that our journey was in its final stages). We met back at the apartment before heading out for a traditional and casual French dinner in the neighborhood. With most Parisian restaurants closed on Sundays, we settled on a tiny hole-in-the-wall eatery offering an authentic country meal prepared by a warm French grandmother. As we walked back, the Eiffel Tower, lit up the night sky and served as our beacon to home. The next day, we headed to Saint Michel in the 6th arrondisement, Vik’s old haunt, and one of Kaberi’s favorite neighborhoods in the city. Here, Kaberi continued to indulge her new obsession with macaroons (which have summarily replaced cupcakes as Kaberi’s guilty sweet pleasure of choice), Vik patiently followed his wife from one establishment to another, including Gerard Mulot, Pierre Herme, Paul, and Cacao de Chocolat. We then ventured across the river to the 4th arrondisement to Place de Vosges, billed as the most romantic square in Paris. Happening upon an unoccupied park bench, we enjoyed a casual picnic of tuna baguettes and mini-macaroons. Attempting to walk off some of the caloric damage, we focused our attention on searching for the hard-to-find Passages in the 2nd arrondisement. Triangulating the locations from our multiple tourist city maps, we soon found the discreet, unmarked entrances. Our efforts were rewarded with supreme examples of vintage Parisian architecture; recently renovations of the arcades celebrated the detailed enclaves of wrought iron, gleaming wood, intricate mosaics and old-fashioned lights. As Kaberi continued on to walk rue St-Honore, Vik begged off from yet another afternoon of girlfriend duty. On our last day, we started off with fresh baked goods from be, Alain Ducasse’ boulangerie in the 17th arrondisement. Grabbing a pain au chocolate for breakfast and a baguette to go, we continued to the Rodin Museum located just east of the Invalides dome in the 7th arrondisement. Situated in a gorgeous garden, we admired exquisite statues of The Thinker and the Gates of Hell before venturing inside to see The Kiss. After Vik teased Kaberi about her obsessive picture taking (marked by endless snapping away from every possible angle), we finally moved on to enjoy a quick lunch nearby. In the afternoon, after simply strolling the streets of the 6th and 7th arrondisements, we headed to Mariage Freres for tea. Entering into a corner store, we were greeted by floor to ceiling displays of tea tins from around the world. After sipping green and black varietals in the tea room, Kaberi agonized over which tea to purchase before the journey home. Kaberi justified her decision to buy tea in France at exorbitant prices (rather than at the source in the more affordable tea hubs of India and China) on the basis of the superior aesthetics of the French packaging. With our last night, we ventured to the Eiffel Tower (where else?) where we closed our evening by laying out on the grass of the Champs de Mar to watch the nightly light show. Despite the overall exhaustion we had accumulated with eight months of travel under our belts, we had managed to realize an excellent conclusion to our trip. Even Vik, who wears his distaste of Parisians as a badge of honor, had to admit that he had thoroughly enjoyed himself.

Pesto Change-o!

After completing our tour of duty in St. Martin de l’Arcon, we returned our rental car in Montpellier (but only after dealing with the stress of a malfunctioning fuel gauge) and caught a morning train to Nice. At Nice, we jumped on an eastbound train and disembarked thirty minutes later at Ventimiglia (which translates to “20 miles”), an Italian border town where we were meeting Kaberi’s cousin Amit and his wife Chetna who were vacationing with their two young daughters, Aryana and Anika. They had rented a well-outfitted hillside apartment in Apricale, a nearby village with the well-deserved reputation as one of the most picturesque settings in Italy.

After a pleasant drive to Apricale, we embarked upon the short, but steep, walk up the hill to the apartment. Huffing and puffing, we wound up getting more of a workout than we had anticipated. A few hours later, on a walk to the town center, we found ourselves put further to shame by older townspeople (a mere two to three times our age) effortlessly navigating the steep terrain while we fought to catch our breath with each step.

Upon settling in at the apartment, we had a chance to play with three-month old Anika and were quickly enchanted by her happy-go-lucky temperament. In comparison, three-year-old Aryana bowled us over with her seemingly-boundless energy and curiosity. We found ourselves thoroughly outmatched until nap-time beckoned. Amit and Chetna fortunately had stocked the apartment with ample provisions for rebuilding one’s energy. While the kids napped, we spent the afternoon enjoying local meats and cheeses with tall glasses of Lambrusco wine and Bailey’s. After a relaxing chat, we made our way into the village for an authentic Italian meal at an outdoor terrazzo.

The next day, Amit and Kaberi hiked uphill for a coffee fix before the six of us partook in a hearty breakfast at home. Making good use of our relatively-early start to the day, we drove to a farmers market in the idyllic neighboring town of Dolceacqua to stock up on fresh, local ingredients for a pasta dinner planned for that evening. We enjoyed sampling the myriad cheese options available to us before we carefully accumulated mushroom ravioli, cheese ravioli, fresh tomatoes and apricots. Afterward, we briefly strolled up cobblestone alleys and across a prominent bridge depicted in a Monet painting. In deference to Aryana’s utter glee at hearing the local belltower toll, we good-naturedly waited until the top of the hour before continuing on our way.

From Dolceacqua, we followed the coastline across the border to Menton, a French beachside hamlet that once stood in Italian territory. We were all amused by the exploitative toll system that forced motorists to pull a ticket in Italy and pay toll to enter France 50 feet later. After securing a parking spot in the heart of town, we found an inviting spot to dine al fresco with views of the sparkling emerald and aqua Mediterranean. After lunch, we continued on to one of the only sandy (as opposed to pebbly) beaches on the French Rivera where all of us ventured into the surprisingly-cold late June surf.

On our return, we stopped in at a local Conad supermarket to augment our dinner provisions. We soon found freshly made pesto (a regional specialty), two local varietals of red wines, and a panoply of meringues and éclairs (bearing more of a French ancestry than Italian, in Kaberi’s humble opinion). After returning home to the apartment, Amit and Chetna ventured out for a drink while we babysat the girls. With Aryana down for a nap, the two of us devoted ourselves to lavishing attention on Anika. When Amit and Chetna returned, we started the dinner process, with our hosts whipping up a feast of salad and pesto ravioli accompanied by local red wines and capped off with Kaberi’s hand-selected dessert options. Both the company and the food made for a fabulous evening at home, a nice change of pace after our soporific week in southern France.

Tour de France

After an overnight stop in Madrid with Iraxci, we caught an afternoon flight to Toulouse, the French city where Airbus is headquartered. Once we touched down and made our approach to the gate, Vik was entranced by the sight of a huge, bulging, beluga whale-shaped aircraft sitting outside one of the hangars (apparently, an Airbus experimental plane). Upon setting foot in the airport, we immediately armed ourselves with a Rough Guide to Langueduc-Roussilon (a so-called underrated region of southern France lying to the west of Provence) and a detailed Michelin map of the area. After picking up our rental car, a silver, automatic-transmission Citroen C3, we began the three-hour journey north-east to the village of St. Martin de l’Arcon.

After thirty minutes on the A9 autoroute, we stopped for directions and sustenance at a rest area gas station. Here, we encountered an incredibly-personable French storeclerk who gave us advice on the routing and highlighted key milestone points on our map. On our way out, we bought fresh sandwiches that rivaled their fresh-prepared, gourmet counterparts at Au Bon Pain or Panera Bread. After getting off of the highway near the town of Beziers (which looked to be a mere 25 kilometers from our destination), we spent another 90 minutes winding through narrow, pitch-black switchback roads. After making a couple of wrong turns on the basis of subpar road signage, we finally pulled into the driveway of the cottage where we would be spending the next week, exhausted and relieved.

Our accommodations had been generously set aside for our use by its owner, a British-based friend of a friend. She had warned us in prior e-mail correspondence about the possibility of encountering a scorpion or two during our stay. Fortunately, the only scorpion present in the cottage was the 5 foot “6” inch tall one bossing Vik around. We did, however, encounter other representatives of the insect world, namely a plethora of spiders and mosquitos, which encouraged us to spend as little time in the cottage as possible.

Using the Michelin map as our compass, we explored the area’s sleepy little backwaters to our heart’s content. On our first day, we drove on picturesque roads that underlie one of the stages of the Tour de France. We slowly made our way to Beziers, stuck behind two cautious timber trucks, where Vik’s singleminded obsession with procuring a GSM sim card propelled us to a mobile store. Half an hour and 30 Euros later, we were in possession of 15 minutes of mobile talk time and Vik was finally able to enjoy the town surroundings. We walked the small streets to the main Cathedral offering beautiful views of the river bisecting the city. As we returned to our car, an open air foodgrocer near the central market caught our eye, leading to a carton of wild strawberries and a cheap bottle of local red wine accompanying us on the ride home.

The next day, we journeyed west to picturesque Carcassone, a World Heritage site that we had seen beautifully illuminated from the highway during our initial drive to the cottage. As the artistically-licensed reconstruction of a medieval castle (the domed turrets added in the restoration were not historically accurate), Carcassone was captivating from a distance, but merely a tourist trap (like Bruge in Belgium) from up close.

On our return, Kaberi, in her role as navigator, gave Vik directions to repeat the prior day's route before promptly falling asleep. Unfortunately, half an hour into her nap, Kaberi was awoken with an urgent request for assistance by a frantic Vik who had missed the correct turnoff which so happened to be the only exit for the next 50 miles. After we missed another exit which would have allowed us to retrace our route (much to Kaberi’s dismay), we once again took slow, meandering backroads home, stopping briefly at a local Champion grocery store to stock up on such necessities as After Eight chocolates and another local vintage of red wine. The alternate route allowed us to discover a local boulangerie which quickly became our source for such staples as pain chocolate, pomme beignets and pain de mie.

Later in the week, we drove through Languedoc’s lush wine country to the college town of Montpellier. After locating the train station for our own reference (we were scheduled to take a train from Montpellier to Nice later in the week), we navigated the labyrinth of streets before finally locating a parking space. A brief stroll delivered us to a reasonably-priced Internet café (in sharp contrast to a pub near the cottage that charged an obscene 5 Euros per hour for remarkably-intermittent service). At Kaberi’s insistence, we uploaded the relevant Indonesian updates to this blog (narrowing the visit to publish time lag to a mere five weeks) before dining on crepes in Montpellier’s central Place de la Comedie, a plaza overlooking the ornate, gilded Opera house. After dinner, we indulged in a “version originale” showing of Ocean’s 13 at a local cinema.

The high point of our time in southern France was getting a chance to visit with our friend Doug (Vik’s old boss at Disney and a man with a treasure trove of embarrassing stories about a 24-year-old Vik). A fellow Carleton grad with a similar passion for world travel as Kaberi, Doug was on a Mediterranean Disney cruise with his family. With his ship docked for the day in Marseilles (an easy three-hour drive from our cottage), Doug was able to meet up with us outside the eclectic city’s exuberant Hotel de Ville. Our freewheeling conversation over a fine seafood meal went by far too quickly as we chatted about our travels and caught up on each others’ lives.

The week crawled by at times, but nevertheless gave us a chance to catch our breath from our adventures in Egypt, Spain and Morocco. We both luxuriated in a little downtime with which to fit in some summer reading, blogpost writing and, of course, excessive sleeping. As the end of June approached, we felt rejuvenated and ready to embark upon new adventures in Europe.