The planets have aligned.

It is a great Sunday for the monkeys.  We were so happy to see that our North American Sports Network is showing not one but two of our teams tonight.  The Redskins first and then the mighty Steelers.  They are shown a little later than we are used to in the States but who cares.  The beauty of it all is that Troy is off tomorrow.  So he can watch without the Monday morning regret of staying up too late.  We are ready for some football!

Happy turkey day and other tidbits.

This is filed under the "just when you think you have seen it all" category.

Walking Allie to school this morning, (yes, I know it is Thanksgiving however for the sake of continuity, she went to school. But before you yell at me, she is only going half day, and besides she is still too young to protest going to school on a holiday. Hee hee hee!)  I saw the funniest thing.  A women caught my eye because she was wearing a long fur coat.  However, that is not the unusual thing.  She had a small dog on a leash and that dog was wearing a leather coat!  A true Parisian dog.  What a life.  Just one of the many daily things you may see here in Paris that make you giggle.

The monkeys will be celebrating Thanksgiving with a great group of friends.  We wish everyone a good holiday and remind all to give thanks for the special gifts in our lives as well as think of those less fortunate and do something for them today.

As for our families, we miss you and you are all in our thoughts today.  Gobble Gobble!  

Oslo!

First, sorry for being so delinquent in our postings. Life is fun. Sometimes we forget our obligations! :)

We got back from Oslo, Norway on Thursday night. What a fine city it is. It's extremely clean, the people are very friendly and for the most part speak flawless English, and it never seems crowded.  It's quite expensive, especially food, but still well worth it.

Troy was there for a conference, but we all still managed to squeeze in a visit to the Viking ship museum on the edge of the city. Here they have 3 Viking ships that were used as burial vessels. They were recovered in excellent condition with most of the burial accoutrements (minus the valuables, which were looted hundreds of years ago). The ships were rebuilt, and give you an appreciation for the ingenuity of these folks who sailed thousands of miles over open ocean to North America without instruments. Very impressive.

Dana and Allie went to the International Children's Art Museum and saw lots of pieces from kids everywhere. At the end they give the kids a chance to draw their own works, albeit on an etch-a-sketch kind of thing. Maybe someday Allie will send them one of her masterpieces. 

The rest of our leisure time was spent wandering the streets and shops, and of course eating.  Because of the latitude the sun set at about 3:30, meaning most of Troy's visit was spent in the dark or in a building.  Still, we are already planning a Scandanavian cruise for summer of 2010 where we can revisit Oslo, but also see Denmark, Sweden and hopefully Finland. 

Wine of the weekend

What a great find!

Chateau de Nages 2006, from the Costieres de Nimes region.  The chances of finding this particular one in your U.S. wine shop are probably infinitesimal, but try something from the region at least. Nice rich dark fruit flavors with a woody undertone and hints of smoke. Dry but not puckering, this one's made from a blend of grenache and syrah grapes. Would work great with beef kabobs or even some sort of beef dish with a light cream sauce. All this for less than 8 euros (or about $10.50), better than some at twice the price.

Stuff that's hard to find here

Don't get me wrong. Paris is a pretty good place to live. Great food, nice sights, plenty of culture, always something to do, the works.  But you have a very hard time finding certain items here, and given the vast numbers of expatriates from every conceivable country here, you'd think you could get just about anything.  Not so. For example, I celebrate when I am able to find:

red onions -  One would think that the sweetly subtle flavor of red onions would make them desirable in a place known for its culinary temptations. Instead, I am lucky to find half a dozen small, scraggly depressed-looking specimens tucked away in a remote corner of a store. I've never seen them at a veggie stand, but maybe they exist in the Latin Quarter. Yet I can't even sneeze without getting leeks wet. What the hell do you do with leeks? OK, soup. Then what?

inexpensive childrens' shoes - All clothes in Paris are expensive, it seems, but even by Parisian standards little kids shoes are ridiculous. Eighty euros for something the kid will outgrow in 6 months? At today's exchange rates that's about $100. I wonder if kid shoe salespeople are like real estate agents in the States, making a commission and ecstatic to sell a couple pairs a week. "Felicitations, Jacques," the manager might say, "you've just hit the 1,000,000 euro mark. Welcome to the Golden Sole Club!"

spicy peppers - any kind:  C'mon mes amis!  I know most French cooking doesn't do spicy, but you've got people here from Thailand, India, Morocco, the Phillipines, you name it. And Cajuns were French once weren't they? I occasionally see serranos, which are pretty mild. I've never seen a fresh jalapeno here. And a habanero?  Mon Dieu!  That word is never even whispered for fear of angering the ghosts of long-dead French chefs.  Instead I get generic pimientos that I think I could cut open and rub in my eye without even wincing a wee bit.

churchgoers - France has tons (literally!) of beautiful churches and renowned cathedrals. Perhaps you've heard of Notre Dame?  We have a modest little Chez God around the circle from us, complete with happy bells that toll on the hour. But if you go there on Sunday, they might ask you to sing in the choir. "Ah, oui, you see, we are a beet short on altos tooday...."  Even accounting for the fact the French don't like to get up too early, especially on weekends, I think their church-to-churchgoers ratio is tops in Europe.  They're good places to find other Americans, however.

mailboxes - Wanna mail a letter? Haul your rump over to the post office. There are very few of those little metal drop boxes you see elsewhere. The boxes here are very small and you need a treasure map to find them in the city.  You never leave mail for the post man at your residence. Fortunately there are many post offices scattered around and you are seldom more than a 5 minute walk from one, so it's no big deal. 

I'll keep looking. Does anyone know if you can freeze jalapenos?

For those who sacrifice

Did you thank a veteran today? Or any member of our armed forces?  When all else seems to be going down the drain day after day young men and women are signing up to begin a service or continue to serve their country and honor the values and democracy we all hold dear.  

Do you want to live in a tent in the middle of nowhere memorizing your foot prints outside your door as to know who has come and gone while you slept?  Do you want to live on an aircraft carrier for 6 months plus and miss the changing of the leaves or the spring flowers growing up randomly on the sidewalks?  Do you want to fly over a very very dark and foreign soil to rescue wounded and bring them out of harm's way?  Well, these are few of the many reasons we stop and honor all military at home and abroad today and everyday.

Regardless of the changing political offices, people and action we must thank those who turned their lives upside down or lost their lives for the freedom we have today.  We must thank those who are actively fighting that fight today as well, along with those who have done and are doing the same worldwide.

A snap shot of Virginia

Can't say I didn't think about it...a few times.  I thought wouldn't it be nice to be back in our cozy little town home with our great friends and clean, friendly neighborhood.  Access to a cute little preschool, gym for free (well, free with the homeowners dues).  Special dinners for Allie, Mexican food galore and of course fresh sushi.  I did think about not getting on that plane back.  But when reality set in and I thought of the opportunity handed to us of living in PARIS and the diamond in the rough not yet explored by me, well, I got on the plane happily.  Not just because our cats were probably tearing up our apartment but because of the things I have yet to experience, explore, take advantage of and teach Allie about.  The beautiful Eiffel Tower twinkling from our bedroom window, the Rodin museum without the tourists, the Luxembourg gardens with the boats and the new ducklings floating peacefully together.  Life is good and it is time to take advantage of it and not look to the past for greener pastures.  My mantra this month.

One more week of travel.   We are tired monkeys but looking forward to the next trip.  Oslo, Norway beckons. 

The U.S. election

As you know by now, the elections are over and Barack Obama is the president-elect of the United States.  We were actually in the States on Election Day, so we got to see the election from the perspective of both sides of the Atlantic. The French were unabashed in their support for Obama, believing he will put a warmer and more consensus-oriented face on U.S./world relations. Even the extpatriate community here supported him by at least 4 to 1 over McCain (according to my unofficial tally).  The Economist magazine did an online "election" of sorts where 53,000 people worldwide voted and the candidates received faux Electoral College votes based on the proportion of population in the countries. In this experiment, Obama wins the popular vote by about 44,000 to 9,000.  The electoral college vote is even more lopsided:  9,115 to 203, with McCain taking only Cuba, Congo, Algeria and Iraq (?). See The Economist, Nov 8-14, page 23 or www.economist.com/vote2008 

This isn't a political column, but congratulations to Mr Obama just the same. I don't envy him. There is really no way he can live up to the enormous expectations with which he has been saddled.  He inherits record debt, a broken U.S. economy bobbing in a global recession, an unpopular war with no obvious exit route, Iran cranking away on a nuclear weapon and Russia starting to get feisty again. Meanwhile, he arrives on the scene as the biggest celebrity politician we have ever had, with scads of endorsements from that most intellectual and sage of political policy think-tanks, Hollywood, and everyone who is anyone from inside the beltway scurrying to touch the hem of his garment. I even heard he laid hands on a blind man and made him see. Or maybe he made a deaf man blind, I can't remember. Regardless, despite his talents and the enthusiasm he generates he could very well go down in the books as a miserable president simply from the hand he was dealt.

Anyway, as an American you can't help but be proud that we've gotten to the point where an African American can be president. Whether you voted for him or not, you can't escape the magnitude of history made this week. And pause too to remember that we take for granted the orderly change of power that occurs (except for a brief bit of snippiness in 2000) after our elections. Not all countries can count on that. So even if the world is going to hell in a shopping cart (it won't fit in a handbasket), we can at least take pride in our nation and have a bit of optimism for a little while.

Edinburgh and back

We're back from Edinburgh.  Actually we're already gone again, to Washington DC for a little while, but we're so delinquent in our postings that let's put aside that inconvenient truth for now.

Allie kicked her fever and runny nose on our 3rd or 4th day in Edinburgh, so the trip could be salvaged. However, the weather was unrelentingly...well, Scottish. It rained at least some everyday, usually accompanied by winds that the local weatherpeople referred to as "a bit blustery."  We were soon to learn that "a bit blustery" is the Scottish (or is it Scotch?) euphemism for "gale force winds."  You know, the kind where you have to lean into them just to stop from being blown over? I expected to see old women blowing by like tumbleweeds in a Western, but I didn't. Maybe they got rolled into the bus stop shelters and piled up.

Anyway, my conference successfully concluded, we walked up to Edinburgh Castle during a break in the rain. We lured Allie there by telling her we could look for the King and the Queen, but of course they weren't there that day. However, we did get some nice views of the city and a little bit of Scotland's history.  Kind of neat to be in a place where people have lived, worked and fought for the better part of 2,000 years. Most of the castle only dates back to the 16th century, if I remember correctly, but it's still pretty nifty.

After that we walked the Royal Mile (the stretch between the Castle and Holyrood Palace where the royal family still stays when they come to Edinburgh) and back again, ducking into pubs to warm up and have a pint. That was where we discovered a horrible law in the U.K. that requires "kid licenses" in establishments where alcohol is served or children can't come in. How ridiculous is that? Few places have knuckled under to this asinine government scheme, so as a result we got turned away from more places than we got in. This would never happen in Ireland.

Later, Allie was well enough to go in the hotel pool with Papa, her first swim in nearly 6 months. Magic! as the French like to say in English.  Pretty sweet hotel, if we haven't already mentioned. The Roxburghe in Charlotte Square. It's especially sweet at the government rate.

So our Scotland adventure is over, and not a single sheep. If we come back (and we'd like to) we'll hit the highlands. Plenty of 'em there!