Big changes

Have you seen the movie "Up In The Air"?  Well, there's a scene where George Clooney's character describes being in an airport as his home - and I know the intention was to make everyone think "oh, that man's life is so empty", but honestly, it just made me envious.  Do you realize that it's been more than a year since I've even set foot in an airport?  This wouldn't bother a lot of people, but Miss K is a travel weasel and an airport is my natural habitat - I don't do well in captivity and for me, not being able to afford to travel has been like a prison.

But, my pretties, I have some big news - this travel weasel is staging a prison break, and this blog is going to be changing, for the very simple reason that my location and circumstances are going to be changing.  Yes, it's true - after two and a half years in Paris, I am moving on to sandier (and far more lucrative) pastures: Saudi Arabia.  

I hope that tales of my expat life there will still be of interest to you, but my plan is to change the Expat Postcards to more of a general travel blog - you seem to have enjoyed the Letters from London (thus far, there are still more to come) and I have a number of similar posts that I wrote about other places I've visited (which I'll post in due course), and since I plan to be on a plane to somewhere new and exciting every time there's a three-day weekend or a holiday, there is plenty still to come.  So I'm hoping that you'll still tune in for more of my silliness?

And don't worry, Paris won't be disappearing completely from this blog, I still have a zillion photos that I haven't posted and lots of stories to go with them, so you'll still get your Paris fix from time to time...

Miss K - Travel Weasel

I know I will get absolutely no sympathy about this, but Paris is feeling a little stale to me right now.  But before you start lighting the torches and sharpening the pitchforks, let me explain why - it's because I haven't left the city in nearly a year.  I got back to Paris just before New Year's Eve, and other than a day trip to Vaux-le-Vicomte (the post on that is yet to come, with fabulous photos), I haven't been outside the city in all these months - for a travel weasel like me, that's a looooooooooooong time to be in one place.  Last year I managed to get to London, Toronto, Monaco and Marrakech.  The year before that: Prague, Bucharest and Istanbul.  I once went around the world in 31 days.  I once went to Egypt in the spring and Jordan in the autumn of the same year. I once spent Christmas in a Scottish castle and then went to Barcelona for New Year's.  And those are just a few examples...  The point is, I used to travel.  

I think part of the reason I have had such a crappy year is that I've got a bad case of cabin fever, and there wasn't anything I could do about it.  Between the nightmare of trying to find places to live and not having any money, I just couldn't go anywhere.  BUT the travel gods have smiled upon me - I am leaving for London tomorrow for a work trip, and will have to go back again for work, probably next week or possibly the week after.  And in between, my whole office in Paris is going off for a corporate retreat in the south of France.  Okay, so all these trips are work-related and they're not very exciting, but I don't care.  I am going somewhere, and when that brief flurry of travel dies down, then I'll be able to appreciate Paris again.  In the meantime, if you could try not to stab me with those pitchforks, I'd really appreciate it...

Zzzzzzzzombie...

Let me tell you a little story about the zombiefication (it's my blog, I get to make up whatever words I want, so there) of Miss K.  It all started on the 29th of December when I caught my red-eye flight from Toronto to Paris.  Here's the thing: I can't sleep on planes.  Ever.  I am so wretchedly uncomfortable that it's impossible, no matter how tired I am - somehow it seems that my already-long legs grow an extra three inches, my already-bony knees expand to the size of watermelons, my already-broad shoulders increase to linebacker size, my already-long neck elongates so far that my skull dangles right off the back of the headrest, and I'm pretty sure I grow an extra arm from somewhere around my left shoulderblade.  But one day, a friend of mine introduced me to sleeping pills and ahhhhh, sleep on a plane became possible (the first time it happened I was freaked: took off in Toronto, swallowed a pill and, like, five minutes later we were landing at Heathrow, it was like traveling through time!)

Anyway, all was going according to plan - got on the plane, ate my meal, washed my sleeping pill down with some red wine (yeah, I'm so rock'n'roll), put in my industrial-strength earplugs, put on my eye-mask and blanket, pretzeled all my extra limbs into the most comfortable position possible...and then the toddler in the row in front of me started to scream.  And I mean the most bloodcurdling, earshattering scream ever in the history of the universe - my industrial-strength earplugs were no match for ol' Lungs McDecibelthroat.  And he screamed all the way to Paris, I kid you not.  And the reason I know this?  Is because I was f*cking awake for the whole flight.  Grrrrr doesn't even begin to cover it.  But remember that sleeping pill I took?  Well, the good people who invented Zopiclone were not messing around - the stuff works, especially when you combine it with fatigue and jetlag.  So as soon as I got on the bus from the airport?  Asleep.  As soon as I walked from my stop to my apartment and got into my room?  Asleep.  Asleep for 14 hours, people!

But that worked well because it was New Year's Eve and I had a party to go to (which was fabulous and I had a great time and it totally took the bad mojo off the holiday for me, in case you were wondering), so I was absolutely fine to be awake until 6am and then to sleep off my monster hangover all day.  But by this point, my poor body clock had no idea what timezone it was in, who the hell I am, or why it should cooperate with me in any way whatsoever.  So I spent the last few nights tossing and turning (and cursing that toddler - if that's wrong and bad and mean, I'll just go ahead and add it to the very long list of things I'm already going to hell for) and not falling asleep until about 7am, which did not lead to productive days, I assure you.  So last night I had to turn to those nice Zopiclone people again to force my body clock to get into the right timezone, and I finally got a decent night's sleep. 

That's why you haven't heard from me for the past few days.  I mean, I could have posted, but Zombie Miss K would have only written something like: oihgeo ihah daegfnq oen igei hfqek fnkavn dtler joarhe.  So you really didn't miss much...

Reims with the Rednecks

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Reims with Mr and Mrs Redneck.  We didn't know much about champagne (other than how to drink it, which we are all very, very good at), so where better to find out about it than in Reims, the champagne capital of France, and therefore the world?  So we set off for a day of sightseeing (Reims cathedral and the Basilica St-Remi), education (touring a champagne house), and general merriment (the drinking of many samples of champagne).  In fact, our merriment factor was cranked up so far by the end of the day that we just had to keep it up on our train journey back to Paris.  We had planned to visit the bar car, but it was closed - and there we were, with a bottle of champagne that the Rednecks had purchased.  So, since it was an emergency, naturally we popped the cork and drank the champagne straight from the bottle (much to the disgust of the French people around us on the train).  Oh yeah, you just don't get much classier than that...  Anyway, some photos from the day.  Enjoy!

Snowy fields shot from the train window

Reims - home of champagne and pink buses

Reims - looking mighty picturesque

Reims cathedral exterior detail - souls being dragged off to hell

Reims cathedral exterior detail - seriously freaky bizarro gargoyle

Reims cathedral exterior detail - is this the patron saint of beer?

Reims cathedral exterior

Reims cathedral exterior

Reims cathedral exterior detail - close up of the highest point of the previous photo

Reims cathedral exterior

Reims cathedral exterior - more of the freaky bizarro gargoyles

Reims cathedral interior

Reims cathedral interior - stained glass designed by Marc Chagall

Reims cathedral - it's ridiculously tall

Champagne tour - learning the different sizes of bottles.  I like the one on the left...

Champagne tour - GH Mumm

Champagne tour - GH Mumm vintage vault

Champagne tour - GH Mumm's vast underground tunnels

GH Mumm - first tasting of the day

Basilica St Remi

Basilica St Remi - interior detail

Basilica St Remi

More tastings at GH Martel

And at Pommery

The beautiful buildings at Pommery

The beautiful tasting at Cazenove - last stop of the day

Quote of the day

After Wednesday's epic snow in Paris, I was more than a little concerned about catching my flight out of town on Thursday.  I had planned to walk to Opera and get the bus to the airport (thereby avoiding the hassles - which are many - of taking the Metro with a large suitcase), but since the roads were in complete chaos, I had to take the Metro/RER combo to get out to the airport.  The Metro was working fine, and the RER was delayed, slow, very crowded and fairly miserable, but it was worse when we got to the airport with crowds trying to get through the gates into the building.  There was a lot of very rude pushing and shoving, and from somewhere to my left, I hear this:

"The next person who pushes me, I'm gonna hit 'em with my cane!"  I look over there and see a rather large, extremely sassy, middle-aged African-American lady, who was, indeed, brandishing a cane.  I, of course, thought this was completely excellent, but she wasn't done:  "I don't want to get all American on y'all, but if I have to, I will!"  

I'm not sure words can describe my love for her at that exact moment.  Hee!  Thinking about that made me giggle my way through a 2.5 hour delay on my flight and it's still cracking me up to write about it...

Why the Belgians are better than the French (Pt 4 and final)

16.  Okay, you need to look very carefully at the photo below: the two people on this bike are facing away from each other.  Yes, that's right.  On the same bike, facing in different directions.  I...just...don't even know what to say about it, except that you would certainly never see the French doing anything that awesomely insane. 

17.  This is how the Belgians do hot chocolate.  Totally. Civilized. Country.

18.  The Belgian waffle (and yes, there actually is a waffle lurking underneath all that, you just can't see it - and that's how I like it!):  suuuure, the French do amazingly delicious and perfect pastries, but would you ever find anything resembling this hot mess in France?  Mais non! But quite honestly, if they loosened up on the perfection once in a while, it might do them some good...

19.  The French can sometimes be a bit too subtle.  The Belgians?  Yeah, not so much.

20.  A giant replica cone of frites by the front door - you would never see anything this tacky (and awesome) in France.  But I swear, every time I see this photo I get hungry, so it's effective advertising.  And also?  Hee!  Truly, my love knows no bounds.

 

So here we are at the end of my twenty reasons why the Belgians are better than the French (which, I repeat, was all tongue-in-cheek affectionate teasing, of course) - I've had fun choosing the photos and writing about it, I hope you've enjoyed reading it.  I now return you to our regularly scheduled programme...

Why the Belgians are better than the French (Pt 2)

6.  Oh. My. God.  Where do I even start???  Believe me, I cannot even begin to describe how intrigued I am by the "poulycroc" and the "crizly", but I swear that I will go to my deathbed still wondering about the "cheese crack".  But perhaps it's for the best - I might have gotten hooked and ended up selling myself on the mean streets of Brussels for just another taste of cheese crack.  Dude, it's cheese crack - that could totally happen...

7. Belgium is a civilized country where you can buy frites at the little stand in the street (in this case, from Antoine's, which makes the best frites in Brussels) and then sit and enjoy them with beer or wine or whatever at a neighbouring bar where frites are "accepted".  Civilized, I'm telling you.

8.  The half-and-half - it's half white wine, half champagne, and the waiter brings both bottles and fills your glass to the point where the only thing keeping it from spilling is the surface tension, so the only way to start drinking it is to slurp - hee!  So not classy but so much fun.  And it's about half what it would cost in Paris, if they even served such an awesome thing, which they do not.

9.  Sure, the French make pain au chocolat, and it's wonderful.  But the Belgians do it too, and they add chocolate glaze on top.  Chocolate glaze on top of your pain au chocolat...mmm...excuse me for a moment while I wipe the drool off my chin.  Seriously, when the French are being left behind in the field of pastry?  Well, you might want to strap on your ice-skates, because apparently Hell has just frozen over...

10.  They sell copies of In Bruges in the tourist office in Bruges!!!  If you haven't seen the movie (Tiny Dancer hasn't, and I had to educate her that the correct way to refer to the city is: In F*ckin' Bruges), you may not realize how completely, totally, insanely awesome this fact is, but if you have?  Well, then you know.

To be continued...

Why the Belgians are better than the French (Pt 1)

Okay, even the title of this post is going to get me into huge trouble, but too bad.  In September, Tiny Dancer and I went to Brussels and Bruges for a long weekend, and being in a half-Flemish, half-French country really highlighted some of the differences between French speakers in France and in other countries (have I mentioned before that I know of Parisians who will only speak English to native French speakers from other countries because they simply can't bear to hear French spoken by anyone other than the French? Because a foreign accent is so "offensive" to their delicate ears. Seriously.) and of course this is meant only in a tongue-in-cheek, poking-affectionate-fun-at way...

1.  Belgians bring the crazy right away.  This is one of the first things we saw from the bus window upon entering Brussels.  Tasteful?  No.  Hilarious? Yes.  Hee!

2.  Belgians like fun art - not just the occasional temporary fun thing installed in the Tuileries masquerading as some kind of festival, or some wacky thing hidden away where no one will see it.  Nope, they stick a great big robot-thingie guy right on the path from the train station to the centre of town and they leave it there.  Excellent.  And fun.

 

3. Belgians know how to have a good time.  The sign for this beer festival?  Still up two weeks later.  Clearly they enjoyed themselves at the beer festival so much that they just couldn't be bothered to take the sign down afterward.  (In France, I am sure there is some humourless bureaucrat whose entire job is to make sure signs are promptly taken down after events.)

4.  Belgians apparently sell "High Quality Pleasure" in shops, and Miss K entirely approves of anyone selling such a thing.

5. In Brussels, they quite literally roll the red carpet out for pedestrians.  Seriously!  The sign says so, and I'm not kidding, the carpet goes on forever.  Fantastique!  And as pedestrians who are almost killed every damn day on the Parisian streets, this is the exact moment when Tiny Dancer (pictured below) and I both fell in love with the Belgians.

To be continued...

Charming Chartres

Mrs Redneck and I took another day trip in August, this time to Chartres.  Now, there's a big difference between Fontainebleau and Chartres.  In Fontainebleau, the only reason to go there is to visit the chateau; in Chartres, the main reason to go there is to see the amazing cathedral, but quite honestly, if you're looking for a picture-postcard-gorgeous little French town?  Chartres is your place.  You can actually see the cathedral when you walk out of the train station (so it's not like you have any issues with finding the damn thing, unlike certain other places - yeah, Fontainebleau, I'm looking at you), there is a lovely little Beaux Arts museum, all the streets around the cathedral are so frickin' picturesque it nearly hurts, and there is a sweet little trolley that will take you all around the town in case you missed anything walking around.  In other words - highly recommended.  And if you do go to check it out, make sure you take one of Malcolm Miller's tours of the cathedral - he has been studying the place for 50-odd years and whenever he does a tour, he just talks about whatever the hell he wants to focus on that particular day.  Hee!  You just get what you're given and it's awesome.

View from train station - no risk of getting lost in Chartres

Dude, this is a friendly town - just look at the garbage cans...

Chartres cathedral - spectacular stained glass

Chartres cathedral - general awesomeness - interior

Chartres cathedral - general awesomeness - exterior

Chartres cathedral - more stunning stained glass

Chartres cathedral - exterior

Chartres cathedral - back is just as impressive as front

The salmon house

Just some random café but so damn charming

The adorable little trolley that will take you through the back streets

Whole town is like a postcard

Seriously!

Don't get confused, this isn't even the cathedral people come to see

So frickin' adorable