Visit to the US Ambassador's residence

Front entrance off of Rue du Faubourg Saint Honore

Entry hall

Detail of the ceiling

That's George Washington at the top of the stairs

Garden behind the residence

In the garden admiring the residence and the Alexander Calder sculpture

 

Marrakech, Morocco

In December, Catherine and I went to Marrakech, Morocco in December.  There were some cool sites, but lots of tourist scams and very hard sells.  Here are some pictures from our trip.

The markets inside the Medina

A common mode of transportation

More cheap transportation

The Koutoubia Mosque, the largest mosque in Marrakech, and one of the oldest mosques in the world.

A close up of the Koutoubia Mosque.  Sorry about the perspective distortion.

A look inside a mosque.

Inside the Ben Youssef Madrasa.

The two of us at the Majorelle Gardens.

Are you going home for Christmas?

It's only six days to Christmas now, and I still have gift shopping to do. Partially, this is due to my devotion to procrastination. But in my defense, it's been hard to remember that it's the holiday season here. 

For the first time, there are no final exams to herald the impending winter break. Work comes and goes every day, indifferent to the smell of pine and the tinkling of faraway bells. Outside, there are no ostentatious River Oaks lighting displays to boast that Santa is coming and he's stopping in this neighborhood first. The French, more or less indifferent to Christmas because they are largely secular -- but also because they are French and indifference is kind of their thing -- don't stroll around babbling "Happy birthday Jesus"  to strangers as if to prove that by having holiday cheer they are living a Good Christian Life. We "bonjour"  and "au revoir" each other as in every other season, guarding our enthusiasm away for some later time. 

Decorations on an average street.

The Champs Elysées (Times Square of Paris) gets into the act though.

Nonetheless, there are reminders here and there that we should be donning our gayest apparel and getting excited for Christmas. For starters, it is a well-accepted fact that holiday cheer commences approximately five minutes after the end of Thanksgiving. Our Thanksgiving was delayed this year, so our Christmas tree was correspondingly pushed back a week. 

YUM. Why do we only eat pumpkin pie one day out of the year?

So thankful.

Once all of the turkey chicken (yeah, we took the easy way out) leftovers were fed to the cat, we set out to find our Christmas tree. 

Mike: in charge of carrying the tree

Catherine: in charge of decorating the tree

Minidou: in charge of being lazy and generally unhelpful

A cockatiel in a fir tree

Holiday time also means family time, so the Bratics' visit to Paris marked a change in the season. They came to visit for five days, which were filled with food, shopping, and wandering the pavements of Paris. 

On the Petite Ceinture, the Paris inspiration for New York's high line park.

Banana nutella crepe!!

Julia's not too excited about having to share.

Being away from friends and family for ten months is incredibly difficult. Even more so during the holidays. Beneath the friendly words of coworkers asking each other, "are you going home for Christmas?" is the unmistakable subtext that you are supposed to be at HOME for the holidays, and home is NOT HERE. The query refers invariably to some faraway "home," whether you immigrated last week or twenty years ago. A reminder that there is a place where you inherently belong, if only you could get back to it. I suppose I could have started this post with a psycho-analytic discussion of my repression of holiday cheer in response to separation anxiety, but it's oh-so-much easier to blame French indifference and insufficient holiday lighting.

Working at UNESCO has given me a greater appreciation for not belonging to a group, and for embracing a culture of my very own, traceable back to my faraway home. Last month, I enthusiastically took up the task of making Polish pierogies at holiday time, a tradition that I shared with my grandmother when I was a young girl, and have continued to share with my father into my adult years. This year was the first time I'd ever made pierogies all on my own.

I think I added too much water to the dough...

I'm slowly getting the hang of these, but they're nothing compared to the little dumplings my grandmother could turn out.

From Charles de Gaulle airport: even reindeer have unique holiday traditions reflecting their origins and culture. 

If there's one thing shared in all cultures across the world, though, it's that the holidays are a time to relax and enjoy yourself. Take a week off of work (or two), travel, eat, drink, visit loved ones, and be merry. My office is closed December 21 through January 1st, and I have a strict policy against having to work on my birthday, January 2nd, so we're taking a nice long vacation back home. Yes, real HOME. Where all your friends and family are, where people pronounce your name right, and where the food is somehow always better. Joy to the world, at least in my little corner of it.

What the holidays are really about: chilling at home.

Rennes and Nantes

Armistice Day

While the US celebrates Veterans Day, France celebrates Armistice Day.  The armistice that ended World War I was on November 11, 1919.  It's a national holiday, so most of the country is off of work.  I decided to take a day off of work at NI (because I'm still working on an American calendar) and make a three day weekend out of it.  We found an excellent fare on the rail company for $34 round trip per person to Rennes, a small city in northwestern France about 200 miles west of Paris.  Rennes is such a small city, so we decided to spend one day there and two days in Nantes, a modern city about an hour (by train, of course) south of Rennes.

 Rennes

We arrived in Rennes Friday night and went to our hotel.  The hotel was about 1/4 mile from the center of Rennes' nightlife, so we bundled up and wandered out to see the city.  Since the city is so compact we were able to just follow the crowds to an area with a bunch of bars.

Rennes is a university town, so it's got more than its fair share of bars.  We wandered into one, got a drink, and hung out for about an hour.

It rained all Saturday morning, but that didn't stop us from exploring Rennes' main market, set in the same streets lined with bars from the previous night.

Roman turret

After we saw all of the market (and tried more free samples than we probably should have) we saw one of the original Roman walls of the city.

Near the far end of the market we found a welcome taste of home: ¡Ay Mexico!  We ate there to fill the missing space in our stomachs hearts for Texmex.  It was delicious. 

A couple of timbered buildings

Rennes has some really cool architecture.  It feels a lot older than Paris because there are timbered buildings all over the place. A lot of the timbered buildings were clearly repaired over time, which showed the city was interested in keeping the old architecture around.  The insides of a lot of shops had exposed timber supports -- some real, some fake -- which gave the city its own unique architectural style.

More cool architecture

Nantes

Nantes is a very different city than Rennes.  It's modern and built up.  What it's missing in the typical small-French-town charm (which Paris desperately tries to cling to) it makes up for in modern amenities.  There may not be cobblestones everywhere, but they're replaced by perfectly smooth pavers.  A lot of the older architecture has been removed in favor of newer buildings, which means that our hotel wasn't drafty and had a full size elevator (although it didn't go to the top floor).

Nantes was one of the major slave-trading cities of Europe for over a century in the 1700s and early 1800s.  The city now has a stirring museum dedicated to the abolition of slavery.

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The elephant!

One of the islands in the middle of the river running through Nantes has a large amusement park dedicated to machines.  The artists there create tons of machines for parades around Nantes.  Every year they create a large fairy tale spread across the city. At the museum there's also a huge animatronic elephant that you can ride.  The elephant holds about 50 people and drives around.  It can move its head and trunk in any direction (independently).  The elephant's legs move and track realistically.  Its eyes open and close. Its ears move, too.  And of course it trumpets.

Oh...yeah...The elephant could pee.  I thankfully didn't see it or get peed on.

Queen Anne was born in this castle

On our second day in Nantes, we went to the castle.  It's been recently renovated, and parts have been rebuilt throughout the centuries, so it's hard to say what's original.  The museum inside details the history of Nantes.  As a maritime city they focus a lot on ships and maps of the river.  It gets a bit old, but it was still worth seeing.

The last thing we did before leaving was go to the Passage Pommeraye.  It's a cool little mall built between two streets in the mid 1800s.  There are a lot of neat stores inside and it's got a big staircase in the middle of it.

Our trip to Rennes and Nantes gave us another new perspective on France.  It also gave us a belly full of crêpes :-).

Crêpey crêpe crêpe crêpe

I'd never been to northwest France, and Catherine had never been to either of those cities (something which is pretty rare for her).  I hope we'll get to travel more in France.  And I definitely wouldn't mind drier, warmer destinations.