Exploring Burgundy and our first day in Paris

Wednesday, Jay worked while I lazed around and read and wrote. Around noon we drove to Fixin, a tiny Burgundy to village to have lunch with Oliver and Nina. The food was delicious, the company delightful, and the wine to die for. Afterwards, with Oliver's encouragement, Jay and I went to Beaune so that we could walk around and visit the hospital. The hospital in Beaune is probably most famous because of it's colorful roof, and if you Google Beaune, you're sure to get an image of this roof in your searches. 

The roof as seen from the inner courtyard of the old Beaune Hospital.

It was founded in 1443 and was an active hospital until 1950. The old hospital is now a museum and the services are provided in a modern building. It was founded as a hospital for everyone, including the poor sick. Nicolas Rolin , who built the hospital, had a lot of fairly innovative ideas about how a hospital should be run that led to its success. We heard all about it in the audio tour, which was told as through by Nicolas Rolin and his wife, Guigone de Salins, and they just LOVED talking about how generous and pious they were and how great all Nicolas's ideas were about the running of the hospital. Not that I disagree, but it wore a little thin. Of course, my favorite part was the laboratory and the pharmacy. It was cool seeing all the old medical equipment and storage containers for drugs, some of which were terrifying  (mercury), others of  which actually made some sense (foxglove, which the modern-ish drug digitalis is derived). After Beaune we returned to Claude and Monique's for sandwiches, had a challenging but entertaining conversation with Claude, and went to bed. At one point they asked us what we did that day. Jay saw the problem coming from a mile away, but he soldiered on. So he said we went to Beaune, but I think the way we say Beaune sounds a lot like "Bon" to them, so they thought we said "Oh, we went to good." Which I can understand would be confusing. Then I started playing word association: "Hospital? Roof?" and the finally got it and said "Ooooh! Beaune." And Jay and I spent the next couple of minutes trying to say it correctly. We never succeeded.

Thursday, Jay worked till around 3 and we went on a search to buy wine. We wanted to buy some wines in Burgundy, but everything we'd seen so far was too intimidating, so Jay did some research and found a wine store in Nuit-St-George which had excellent reviews on TripAdvisor, Cave de Bacchus. Meanwhile, I did a little research on things to do around Nuit-St-George. We got ourselves to Nuit-St-George and managed to park without too much difficulty. When we walked up to Cave de Bacchus, we were a little concerned that it was closed, but it turns out you just needed to be let in by a buzzer. So now we're intimidated. We establish with the proprietor that we want to buy wine, that Jay speaks very little French, and that she speaks very little English, and she asks us if we want to see the wine list. We thought, why not? So she hands us a binder about half the size of a phone book that lists all the wines they have in their inventory and then goes back to her counter. We stared at the binder for about 5 minutes, not really having any idea what we were doing before Jay finally said "should I ask for her help?" and I gave an emphatic "yes." So Jay asks her in his slow and (I assume) broken French and says something we'd like to buy six bottles, this is our price range, will you help us? She asked us a few questions like, do we want 6 of one wine, or 3 and 3 or 2-2-2, and we said 2-2-2. Then she asked if we wanted it to be drunk now. We said sure, and she picked out a wine for us. After that we decided that we didn't need to be able to drink them now, and that we'd like a wine from 2012 (our wedding year), so she found us another one. Finally, she found a third wine for us that is expected to drink well in 2-3 years. But first, she made sure that we had a proper place to cellar it. Then she asked if we had air conditioning in the car, we said no, and I swear, she almost didn't sell us the wine. Then we told her it was a short drive so she relaxed. At one point she referred to the wines as babies and threatened to call us on the telephone to check on them.

The gist of it is that we had a fantastic time interacting with this woman and we came away feeling like we got some wines that will be fantastic to drink soon and in a few years. We also left with the woman's card and the names of her husband and son who take care of the email side of the business. It was wonderful, we were giddy, and Jay decided he needed to email his old French teacher and tell her he'd bought wine in French. After that we drove up to Concouer, which is an even tinier village up the hill from Nuit-Saint-George and is the home to the Ferme Fruirouge, which is a farm that makes a number of fruit based condiments, with a focus on cassis. They had cassis mustard, ketchup, pepper, butter, and jam, in addition to some beverages. We got a pack of the condiments for ourselves and some gifts for our French hosts. The Ferme Fruirouge was great, but it would have been worth it to go up there just for the view of this little French village.  After that we met everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) back at Fred and Paca's and we went for a casual dinner with all the extended family at a sort of food truck that serves pizza and sandwiches and some other things. I wasn't able to partake, but Paca had gotten some gluten free food for me, so I was happy with my little stash of gluten free goodies. Highlight of the evening for me was when Quentin, who is ~14, realized my dietary restrictions. He picked up the bread from his sandwich, exclaimed "No bread!?" (in French) and had such a look of horror on his face that I'm still giggling over it. Jay and some of the boys played Bocce ball and Jay impressed Fred with his use of the word "Zut" which is pretty much the French version of "Shoot." At the end of the evening we said goodbye to all our new friends, kissed everyone on the cheeks multiple times, and retreated to Claude and Monique's. Friday morning I slept in while Jay worked, we packed everything up, returned the rental car, and then hopped the train to Paris!

Sacre-Couer

Our apartment in Paris was in Montmarte, so we decided to explore the area for our first half day in the city. First we walked to the Rue des Martyrs, which is sort of a food street, full of stores and restaurants and bars.  While we were walking up the street we noticed that many of the shops had large rotisseries cooking chicken. When we got closer, we saw that they usually had potatoes sitting in the bottom of the rotisserie, collecting the fat drippings from the chicken. So yeah, we decided that we would be eating rotisserie chicken one night. Because I wanted to see the Moulin Rouge, we headed off of Rue des Martyrs and wandered onto what we christened "guitar street" because all of the shops were for guitars, or accessories, or amps. Some of the guitars we saw were works of art. It was a cool little accident to stumble upon. We walked by the Moulin Rouge. It's not the original building, but a reproduction, the original burned down years ago, but it was cool to see it in person. We climbed up the hill and headed toward Sacre Couer. First we went into the lesser known church, Saint-Pierre de Montmarte. It's said to have been founded by St. Denis in the 3rd century, but there's little left of that original building. The current building is a mere 900 years old, though the entrance is framed on the inside with a pair of roman columns believed to have been part of the original temple of mars from which Montmarte was originally named. It's also believed to be the origin of the Jesuit order.

After walking around and gaping in awe at the arching ceilings, we headed over to the much younger, but also more famous Sacre-Couer, which was built from 1875 to 1914. It's a beautiful church. 

At the end of our visit we stepped inside, but a service was going on. We caught site of the of beautiful decorations and frescos, listened to the singing nuns for a minute, and the ducked quietly out. But before that, I decided that I wanted to climb to the dome. Jay agreed, as long as the ticket to do so was under 10 euro, I agreed, it was 8 euro, I won! So we climbed.

And climbed.

And climbed.

I didn't take this picture of the stairs until we were on the way down. But you get the idea. 

You think you know how many steps are involved in the phrase "300 stairs to the top" but you really don't until you've done it. It's so much more than you think. But we made it, took lots of pictures, caught our breaths, and then got dizzy going back down the stairs.

The view from the top of Sacre Couer. Worth it. 

Parched and tired, legs trembling, we stopped at a restaurant for drinks.

One last view of Sacre Couer from the base of the stairs. 

I finally got an Aperol Spritz, which I'd been seeing ads for ALL OVER Europe, and everywhere we go we see people drinking it. It's okay. Not my favorite, but at least I tried it. Once we'd sat for a while we were ready to go find dinner, so we headed to NoGlu, which is the first entirely gluten-free restaurant in Paris (though others have since followed its example). Except for the fact that we had to climb a set of stairs to get to our table, it was awesome. I didn't realize how much of a relief it would be to not have to worry about gluten. The meal was amazing and I came away full and content and happy. We headed back to our tiny apartment (If you saw Jay's bed blog, you saw the apartment. That's it. When the bed is opened up, you have about a foot on each side), planned our museums out for the next couple of days, and crashed.