Reims. Champagne Area, December 2012

We rented a car to go from Paris to Reims.  In retrospect it turns out this was a horrid idea.  Before I go to far I want to recommend Reims.  Let's say you are 'stuck' in Paris for a few days.  I know, there are worse things than being 'stuck' in Paris.  But bear with me.  Let's say you are stuck in Paris and you've already seen the sights.  Reims can be reached by train in about 45 minutes from any of the main Paris train stations.  From the train station in Reims you can be at the Reims Cathedral in 5 minutes walking and there are a myriad of great small and large Champagne houses within 10 minutes of there.

Reims Cathedral, Paty is doing her Joan of Arc impersonation.

Reims Cathedral, in a not so amazing coincidence this is also known as Notre Dame.  Specifically Notre Dame de Reims.

And I will put up the Reims Notre Dame against the 'other' Notre Dame's history anytime.  tThis is the cathedral where all the Kings of France received their coronation.  This tradition was started in 1429 when none other than Joan of Arc liberated the Cathedral from someone that at the time must have been deemed bad (google: England and Hundred Years War) and the coronation of Charles VII was attended by Miss Arc herself.

In short, I am not one to go in for the Church and Cathedral tour of Europe.  But this place is so impressive it alone is worth the 45 minute train ride from Paris.

Additionally, notice from the attached photo.  The place was empty.  At the Notre Dame in Paris we waited in a 1/4 mile long line to get in.  Here I went inside the Cathedral and it was just us, a couple workers and one other tourist couple.  It was so empty is was a little bit spooky.  I kept expecting Tom Hanks to jump out of a corner whilst filming another Dan Brown movie.

Besides the adequately impressive Joan of Arc history, this structure was a part of World War I and to a lesser extent World War II.  It was almost entirely flattened in WWI.  Here is a good picture showing the stained glass windows.  The dark windows on the right are original 1500'ish, while the lighter ones are new since WWI.  They do not look as Stained Glass'ish, but rest assured they are the same.  I just had to adjust the light sensitivity way up to capture the huge contrast between the two windows.

Left, post WWI stained glass. Right, around 1500 stained glass.

Last photo of the cathedral.  This is the famous Rose Window.  It doubles to give some perspective on the size of the cathedral and the utter emptiness we experienced.  At 140 meters long, 30 meters wide and 38 meters tall; it is a very large structure.

Now we are a few pictures and way too many words in and I haven't mentioned our reason for coming to Reims...Champagne!

For those of you new to Tobinblog, Paty is a Champagne advocate.  Because, let's be honest, Life Is Flat Without Bubbles and we should Celebrate Everyday.

Reims is the heart of Champagne.  Épernay is about 28 kilometers away and holds more of the big Champagne house headquarters, but Reims is the biggest city in the Champagne region and has plenty of big houses as well.

Since we were there in December, the traditional Christmas markets were out in Reims.  This was a great one, it was a heated hut sponsored by a local artisan (grower's) champagne house:

Paty double fisting?

They had a map on the ceiling of all the visitors.  Of course because Paty is Paty, we had to have two dots when they asked us where we were from.  I was the first Seattle dot and I am relatively certain that Paty will be the first and only Merida, Yucatan, Mexico dot.

Day two we started our tour of the Champagne houses.  Reims is the home to quite a few large houses, headlined by two we toured on the first day: Pommery and Tattinger.  Each house is pretty much like a large estate.  This is the entrance to Pommery, that is some sort of modern art in the driveway.  Tattinger (not pictured) is less than a half mile from the entrance pictured here.  The Champagne houses tend to cluster together.

In the lobby, this is the famous barrell that they rolled from Reims to Paris for a World's Fair:

Yes, it really is that big.

The estates are above ground, but all the Champagne houses do their work below ground in man made limestone caves.  There is a ton of history about these caves.  Originally the evcavation was done by the Romans when they were building Reims and the first Cathedral.  It was told to us during the Pommery tour that Madame Pommery was the first to realize that this was an ideal place to make Champagne due to the constant cool temperature and humidity.  Take that with a grain of salt, but all the Champagne house have utilized caves for over 100 years.  There is also extensive WWI and WWII history involved with the caves.  There were a lot of carvings done on the limestone from people that were taking refuge in the caves, especially during WWII.  The limestone is still extremely soft, you can make a mark on it with your fingernail.

The entrance to the winery and cellar at the bottom of a 116 step staircase.

This is what the tour basically consisted of, plus some art.

These roms are everywhere with this much or more Champagne. And some of the last of the famous 1898 vintage.

After the tour, you finally get to taste. Paty tried to be the hostess.

After the tasting we needed lunch.  We had reservations at Le Jardin.  Basically 'The Garden' option, kind of like the bar but set in another entire building in a different part of the estate, off a three star Michelin restaurant.  It was fabulously good.  During our time in Reims we bascially settled into doing super awesome lunches then having a cheap doner kebab for dinner at the hotel while drinking a bottle of great Champagne that we just picked up.

So that's what three Michelin Stars looks like.

Random super cool church next to Tattinger.

Riddling racks, these were everywhere.

Paris, December 2012

Paris in Winter.

Paris in December.

Paty had almost three weeks of vacation in the use it or lose it before Janruary 1, so were looking for somewhere to go.  The options were plentiful, but we were limited by where could we get with 180K Alaska Airlines miles.  It turns out we could get almost anywhere we wanted.  But we could not get home.  There were hidden (and sometimes over)  blackout dates for much of the world.  Ideally we wanted to go to New Zealand as our first choice.  I actually found a flight from Dec 1 - Dec 8.  But with traveling that would have been 6 nights in country and about 48 hours total in flight.  Not worth it.  Then my focus turned to Peru.  I have had Machu Picchu on my bucket list for a long time and in an amazing coincidence we have a friend living in Cusco, Peru.  But Paty did not want to go somewhere 'normal', she wanted to speak another language.  Since she speaks Spanish everyday at work, this convoluted logic makes a bit of sense.

Then after about two weeks of searching, a Paris flight opened up.  40K miles each (almost too cheap) and we were off.  Seattle > Chicago > Paris.  The good news is we still have 100K miles banked and with US Soccer World Cup Qualifiers in Costa Rica and Panama in the fall...

Since Paty was in Brazil, it was up to me to make arrangements.  And the first thing I learned is that Paris is expensive.  I already knew that, but add in the relative strength of the dollar compared to the Euro (the Exchange on this trip was 1 Euro = $1.33 or thereabouts) made it worse.  Our plan was for one week in Paris and one week in the French countryside...somewhere.  I found a service that rents apartments in Paris for people like us.  I had one place in the Latin Quarter all booked, but at the last second it was not available.  Being Three days before we left, I had to make a split decision and I ended up picking out option #2 which was a small apartment in Ile St Louis.  The apartment could be graded on three criteria in order of important to us:  Location, Cleanliness and Size.  Well our aprartment got a 10, 9 and 1 respectively.  Ile St Louis is an island right in the middle of Paris.  It is the island right behind where the Notre Dame Cathedral is.  From our apartment to the front of Notre Dame was 600 meters or about a 4 minute walk.  The location and the island were perfect, the apartment was super clean.  It was also SUPER small, capital letters intended.  Conflicting reports out of the Mr and Mrs Tobin camp have claimed that someone was so mad when he or she saw the apartment that him or her cried and insisted on moving.

But we got  used to it and made the best of it as every morning the bakery, cheese shop and butcher was literally next door to our place.  And with the exception of one night, it was very quiet.

Here is a pic of our little island:

Christmas lights throughout the island.

And here is what we ate almost every day at some point:

With egg: Croque Monsieur, W/O egg: Croque Madam

Here is the photo of our island from one of the many bridges that connect us to the rest of Paris:

Add captionNotre Dame in the background, the Eiffel Tower 5 degrees to the left off picture.

Hey look, gelato shaped as a flower:

Yes, it was cold in Paris.

Now that we have gotten accustomed to the mini Paris apartment and had some time to rest and relax, it's time to go exploring.  We are not ones for checking off a list in a tour book.  Basically we just left the apartment on foot everyday with a vague plan on somethings we wanted to see.  We arrived on a Tuesday and had the apartment until the following Tuesday, but as we paid for the week we had the option of leaving early so our intention was to head somewhere else on Monday.  Thus, six nights in Paris.  One of the beauties of Paris is there are amazing sites everywhere.  We all know about the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, but pretty much everywhere you turn there is some amazing beautiful and most likely old building.  Here is the door to some random church we happened to walk by:

This is pretty much the site I saw the entire trip, Paty crossing the street by herself.  Because like a true Parisian if there are no cars coming, I go.  But Paty has this ingrained rule abiding streak that makes her either wait for the walk sign or hesitate so much about crossing on the red no crossing sign that she ends up 10 seconds behind:

Obligatory Eiffel Tower Pictures:

Later in the week we went up to one of our favorite place, Montmarte.  It is in the the 18th arrondissement of Paris.  An arrondissement is basically a district.  They are basically the way you tell someone where you are in Paris.  "Today we hung out with the hipster's in the 18th" would be a quote I could have used.

File this under note to self: Next time in Paris, just stay in the 18th.  It's a great place, very cool and trendy restaurants and all the good new bakeries are up there that have won 5 of the last 6 years the contest to make the state baguette.  Paris is so big, you almost have to take the Metro wherever you go anyway, might as well just stay in the 18th and take the metro to the center when needed.

Touristy Center of top of Montmarte hill.  Where the artists sell their wares.

The photo above is where we bought a two paintings last time we were in Paris.  We did not buy anything this time.  But it is a great place to hang out in a nice day.  Today it was cold but sunny, so we hunkered down in an outside cafe and had some lunch and I read my book while Paty did Paty things.  I'm almost always happy to get the house wine by the pitchet or demi-pitchet (basically a pitcher of whatever they have as house wine) and again this did not disappoint.  We spent most of the day wandering around Montmarte, which also include Paty's favorite church Sacré-Cœur Basilica or the Basilica of Sacre-Cour.

Yes, that is the Vin Chaud or Gluwein or Hot Wine commonly sold at Christmas markets.

 Another day, more walking.  We walked around Paris A LOT.  But that's really all I wanted to do outisde of one planned outing, so I was good.

River Seine from one of the Ile St Louis bridges.

Random Photo that I thought turned out well.

Hey, look at that, there's the Louvre.  It's like famous and stuff.  We should go there.

That's a really nice scarf you have there Paty.

That's the scarf you bough in the Aran Islands six years ago. Oh and there's the Mona Lisa.

Someone complained that we did not have many photos together, Voila:

Still got the scarf.

It turns out that the Louvre is open until 9:30 on Friday's.  So even with a procrastination schedule (read, Paty really wanted to sleep in on our tiny little sofa bed and I got up to surf the net, write some soccer blurbs and make coffee) we had plenty of time.  Being as it was around 6 PM on a Friday night I thought we would have a "Night at the Museum" experience and the Louvre would be relatively empty.  This was not so, it was packed.  It's hard to explain just how big the actual museum is.  It's enormous and very easy to get lost.  And no matter where you go, there are people everywhere.  Except for a few choice exhibits like the Mona Lisa or Venus de Milo nothing is crowded though.  It's just a really really really large space.  Here's a photo trying to show one of many grand halls, I was trying to get the scope of the place but failed:

The Louvre is really large, and still got the scarf.

Paty with Venus de Milo, not the best picture.  I really need a new camera as I was borrowing Reid's all weather point and shoot for the majority of these photos.  The rest were taken via iPhone and not the new iPhone, either my ancient 3GS or Paty's 4G.

The last shot photo ever with the scarf.

 Paty wanted this photo for the background.  This is the Greek statue section, where I am taking the photo the Venus de Milo is only about 30 feet behind me.  We took a long time to get this photo right as there was a certain angle Paty wanted in order to get "The Best Parts" of the statue you see.

Paty with her Greek 'Friends'.

 Notice the lack of scarf.

It was never to be seen again.  We realized it at the end of our exploration of the Louvre.  This was maybe 40% into our exploration and after we realized we lost the scarf, we backtracked a LONG ways.  But we did not make it this far.  What is ironic (or not) is earlier in the visit I noticed and even commented to Paty that there was a ton of clothes (hats, gloves, other scarves, kids stuff) dropped all over the museum. 

All in all the Louvre was a memorable experience, lost scarf and incomprehensible conversation with the lost and found lady notwithstanding.

Saturday brought the only event that I had on the official "We Must Do This" agenda:

Parc de Princes Stadium. We were early.

Footy!  Paris Saint-Germain or PSG was hosting Evian (like the water) in a French Ligue 1 match.  We got to the stadium early as we still had to sort out how to pick up our tickets bought on-line.  And also procure a couple of scarves (pictured).

PSG won 4-0 in what turned out to be a very COLD viewing experience.  The stadium is interesting.  They have two tiers holding approximately 48k fans that are covered with the concrete roof.  Reported attendance was 39,500 for the game we attended, it seems to be slightly less than that but not empty by any means.  And the 35k or so fans created quite a bit of noise.  PSG has made it to the knockout rounds of this years Champions League.  With the way the stadium is set up and how it funnels noise towards the pitch, that is going to be an intimidating atmosphere.

Good view of the stadium and how it's setup to keep sound in.

As for the game itself, it was cool to be able to say we saw Zlatan Imbrahimovich in person.  The Swedish striker is one of the handful of best players in this generation, not on par with Messi or Ronaldo but at the top of the tier right below those all timers.

Unfortunately the French league is not exactly challenging.  Zlatan had a goal and an assist in a 2 minute flurry of activity and then proceeded to seem thoroughly disinterested the remainder of the match.  As someone who knows abit about the inner workings of The Zlatan, it was fascinating to watch.

We were able to pre-game with the PSG fans.  We found a bar right outside the stadium that a lot of the supporters frequented.  That bar was also the site of our biggest photographical failing of the entire Paris trip is not the entire year.  About 10 mins after we entered the bar, it was starting to fill up and Paty was finally starting to warm up (it was REALLY cold that night, like 30 degrees) a person came into the pub wearing a vintage Seattle Super Sonics starter jacket.  The classic logo and everything.  Of course I had my Sounder jacket on and wanted a photo.  But before long we lost him in the crowd and when we went to look for this mysterious Sonic fan and/or hipster anti-Stern protestor, he was gone.  A missed photo op for sure.

That will be all for this epicly long Paris post.  We are off to Reims, the home of Champagne, for a schedule three nights on Monday.



Chris's Note: This is a work in progress.  Currently we are in Strasbourg and I'm writing this in fits and starts as I wait for Paty to get ready.  Now it's mostly done unless I decide to add a bit about Notre Dame Cathedral.  Oh and proofread as I haven't done that yet and now Paty seems to be ready again.

Valparaiso, Chile

It has come to my attention that I never did the Valparaiso post to cap off the Argentina trip from December 2011.  This needs to be fixed and tonight is the night to do it.

As you saw at the end of the Mendoza post, we took quite some time to take the bus from Mendoza to Valparaiso, Chile.  Why Valparaiso, you might ask?  Well that's a good question.  This trip was a bit more improvised than the normal Tobin trip.  Over the years, Paty and I have adopted a much more laissez faire attitude towards traveling.  We only had plans for Buenos Aires and Mendoza on this trip with most of the middle week open.  We were deciding between Iquazu Falls and Chile.  But logistically it is pretty hard to get around Argentina outside of the buses.  So from Mendoza, Chile made sense.

Our original thought was to go to Santiago, but while talking to people in Mendoza familiar with Chile the consensus was that Santiago is nice but mostly just a capital city, while Valparaiso has more character and is a great spot to spend four nights.  That led us to this view from our bed and breakfast room:

The view from our B&B room.

Valparaiso is an old city, it is currently the third largest metropolitan area in Chile (Valparaiso/Vina del Mar combined).  It is also a really old city.  Valparaiso is the original maritime capital of Chile.  It was the first financial capital of South America with the first stock exchange and a major stopover for ships traveling from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean or the Atlantic to the Pacific.  The picture shows a little bit of it, but the photo does not do justice to how much the city is built on a hillside.  The city itself is built into 23 different and distinct hills that all origniate from the sea.  There is a 3-8 block flat (filled tidelands) area that a major portion of the commercial part of the city is built on.  Then all the hotels, many of the bars/restaurants and all the neighborhoods on built up into the hills.  And the hills are steep.  A major part of the construction of the city is the funnicular system.  Here is one of the more famous funniculars, covering 108 vertical meters.

Funicular.

One goes up, the other goes down.  Always two cars on a funicular line.

Day one, courtesy of trip advisor research again, we did this:
Cooking in Chile 
It was an absolute blast.  Paty got a uniform and everything:

As part of the class, we met early and discussed the menu.  Then we went down into the city and shopped for the ingredients.

Yes, we picked fish.  Caught in the morning. Everything was fresh.

Editor's Note:  I just noticed that I never published this.  I will at some point get around to finishing this post but for now I'm going to hit Publish with what I have.  We REALLY like Valparaiso and the entire Chile experience.  Feel free to hit me up with any questions about the area.