A Night at the Opera in Paris!

What a scintillating, amazing city! How can so many famous streets and astounding monuments and impressive palaces and enormous museums and bridges and buildings and churches be in one place?! 

Turns our our apartment is a hop, skip, & a jump from the Eiffel Tower, so we high-tailed it out the door to find it as soon as we got ourselves settled in. We were already feeling giddy about having an apartment in Paris for gosh sakes, but when we turned a corner and saw the top of the Tour de Eiffel for the first time we jumped up and down and hugged each other with glee! Had to wipe a little tear away!

One of the MANY awe-inspiring places in Paris we viewed from the bus the next day (yes, we had worn ourselves a little thin with exploration on foot in the rain and wind the day we got there) was Opera Garnier. Um huh, it's the palace (too luxurious to call it a building) with a massive dome and underground lake and huge chandelier that inspired Gaston Leroux to write a story called The Phantom of the Opera.

Well, of course we were enchanted and decided to go back later to see what we could see. Turns out there was a performance going on that night. We managed to decipher that there would be an opera by Mozart (an all-time favorite!) called L'Enlevement au serail (never heard of it!) and that we could get obstructed view seats in an otherwise sold-out house for merely 10 euro. Which we jumped at, although with our very limited French language skills we weren't exactly sure exactly what we were jumping at! We just knew we were going inside the sumptuously dazzling place to see an opera! In Paris!

We soon discovered that Opera Garnier is as beautiful inside as it is outside and that our seats were in a box (!) just above the main level, nearly next to the stage! 

Best part yet: The enormously talented performers sang their parts in German (um, not our 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th language). But not to fear because there were subtitles above the stage to translate for us. And of course those subtitles were in - you guessed it - French! (I'm putting my comprehension level at oh, about 12% - but I think Diana's was much higher!)

A night at the opera in Paris! What's next?!!!!!!

Avignon & Arles - Happy Days in Provence

New favorite phrase in French: Tout va bien! All is good!

After two days in Avignon and one in Arles, we are starting to get the hang of being in the south of France. In fact . . .

You know you’re in France when:

• You order your breakfast in French because there’s no choice of language: Une baguette et un cafe s’il vous plait. And you actually get what you wanted! And the flakiness of the croissant is a work of art.
• You eat every meal outside at a little table, relishing the sound of people fluently speaking French around you, and the slight chill in the air, and the sound of church bells chiming.
• You have a glass of local wine with every meal except the one you had the cafe at.
• You once in a while have a scoop of ice cream for lunch because you can’t figure out what the other items on the menu are.
• Your legs have gotten very strong without even thinking about a stair master or treadmill workout.
• You are happy you brought lace up shoes that can handle the cobblestones, and you don’t really care that they look a little dorky.
• You get to where you rather fully expect that the street names will change every block, I mean every curve.
• Train announcements are in French, German, sometimes Italian, and English. And the ones in English you can’t really understand.

Rooftops of Avignon through stained glass from Palais des Papes

In Avignon, we’ve walked through the palace where nine different Popes lived for 60 years in the 14th century when they moved out of the Vatican in Rome. We’ve walked on a very famous broken bridge and have been trying ever since to get the song out of our heads! We’ve walked for miles and miles, up and down ramps and stairs and hills to see beautiful views of the Rhone River. We’ve enjoyed fabulous food and great Cotes du Rhone wine. In Arles we’ve marveled at a Roman arena and we've stood at outlooks where Vincent Van Gogh set up his easel to paint. 

A Day of Wonder - Nice, France

When your daylight hours begin at midnight because the sun is already up in the sky and you’ve flown across so many time zones so that it now registers as 7 a.m., you know you’re in Europe! And it’s how you begin a long marvel-filled day.

We landed in Dusseldorf, Germany to spend several hours in the quiet, immaculately clean, precisely ordered airport where everything was in, well, German - and oh, how we’d practiced our French! Yet soon we found ourselves on an AirBerlin flight gazing down in awe over the massive, rocky Alpes Martimes to quickly find ourselves landing practically right onto the sparking, fabled, exciting Mediterranean Sea in Nice, France!

It’s warm! It’s sunny! It’s 75 degrees! Shedding our travel jackets and changing into sandals, we moved from plan A to B and even C when we learned of the bus strike, but we eventually got to our hotel, exclaiming in wonder at the sparking Mediterranean out our taxi windows.

Exploring the city on foot was a marvel - the Sea is right here with its fabled rocky beach, sun-loving clothing-optional fans, four-mile long Promenade des Anglais, quaintly beautiful buildings. And into the old city Vieux Nice, the narrow winding stone-paved streets bringing charm and exclamation around every turn. We stopped for socca (chickpea crepe) and un verre du vin rouge, found a torte au blette pastry to save for breakfast, and thoroughly enjoyed two scoops of gelato in a place we’ll never be able to find again! Not a bad dinner for our first night in France.

Oh, what a joy to enjoy the day the full day through!

Off to France!

Today I leave on another adventure, this time exploring France from the Mediterranean coast to the English Channel - and many things in between - that is, as much as can be squeezed in while still savoring it!

I'm traveling once again with my friend Diana, who has been a part of both Italy and Scandinavia trips over the past few years. We're each a bit intrepid, and together we feel we can handle whatever comes our way. And there's always plenty of that on these journeys! We've been learning to speak a little French, but are pretty sure as soon as we get there we probably won't know any at all!

Itinerary, in brief:
Nice - on the French Riviera for a few days
Avignon - in Provence for three nights
Paris! for five or six days or a week!
Bayeaux - in Normandy for a day or two
Amboise - in the Loire Valley for a day

Need to run catch a plane! Au revoir, mes amis!