L'agonie

The time has come for me to announce the demise of my faithful digital camera. These images are the last you'll see coming from the little ol' Kodak EasyShare. You'll be missed, little buddy.
Things are heating up in Paris, in more ways than one. I'm currently spending my last day as a 20-year-old holed up in my bedroom at 24, rue de Rocroy, trying to put together a dossier on John Ford's Vers sa destinée (Young Mr. Lincoln), so that I don't have to spend my first day as a 21-year-old doing so.
Paris has really been jerking me around, lately, weatherwise. We've had a couple of really gorgeous 60-something degree sunny days, where it feels like the whole city tumbles out into the Luxembourg Gardens to soak up the sun and feed the ducks, or stroll along the quais, perusing the wares of the bouquinists, or play a friendly game of boules in the neighborhood park. But then there's days like today, where it's cold and rainy and dark and there are too many other Americans on the metro for me to reveal that my metro book is in English -- heaven forbid I be associated with all these 16-year-old yahoos screaming at each other and slightly older women talking about way-too-personal-for-public-transport things ("So then she found this RASH..."), just because they assume no one else can understand. Joke's on them, I suppose.
Then there's been other craziness, both in and out of Paris. I've been out of town the last couple of weekends - the first in Provence with Sweet Briar, where I dangled my toes and skipped stones in a bright blue river under a 2000-year-old Roman aqueduct, spent the night in a monastary nestled in the brushy hills overlooking the Rhone valley, and followed the world's most thorough tour guide through Important Sites like the Palais des Papes in Avignon and the Roman ruins in Arles. I would have liked a little less talking about Romans and a little more visiting local agricultural producers (the vines were calling to me!), but it was a lovely weekend just the same.
Then Emily Freeman (of the Brattleboro Freemans) appeared on her spring break, and stuck around for a few days before the two of us whisked away for a weekend in Switzerland chez Frutzli, where we visited baby cows and a watch museum, ate a lot of good food, went grocery shopping at least three times, wandered the streets of Geneva and rolled along the country roads around Aclens, read light vacation literature, and spent some good quality time at the Crazy Pub, along with everyone Johann has ever known, where I discovered a certain hidden talent for darts. Kind of.
And now I'm back in Paris for another week, featuring a guest appearance from Emma Chubb (of the Pittsburgh Chubbs), before heading off to Berlin and Krakow for a week, then coming back to show some relations around the City of Lights. I just can't wait for spring to actually get here for good. Here is a picture of my friends standing illicitly atop a Roman amphitheater (now used for bullfights) in Arles:

Goings on about town.

And Paris slowly moves toward spring -- regular afternoon showers, blue-skied sunny mornings, sweater-and-scarf coffees in sidewalk cafés, and even a few trees starting to push out little green leaves and big white blossoms. All of this has made for several lovely balades about town, including a rather memorable afternoon consisting of an open-air panini lunch, seeing An Affair to Remember on a big screen (thank the good lord for Paris's repertory cinemas) and spending the rest of the afternoon reading on a sun-drenched café terrace. Life here is really not so bad.
Even with the urban idyll that Paris has been lately, sometimes a girl needs to breathe a little rural air. And so, I, in the company of fellow Vermonter and near-relative Julia, set off to Reims for the day. It was, as you can see to the left, a lovely day to be out in the significantally less crowded northeast of France. Our train rolled through rolling green hills, by tiny little tile-roofed villages, and through miles and miles of ramrod-straight rows of grapes. And grapes and grapes and grapes and grapes, until we arrived in Reims, the heart of the Champagne region and home of some of the biggest Champagne houses in the world -- Veuve Cliquot, Taittinger, etc. It is also close to the town with what is now in the running for my favorite French town name -- Ay. (or, as I like to imagine most people say it "Ay!")
Julia and I, not wanting to waste such an important agro-cultural opportunity, paid a visit chez Mumm, and toured through part of their 25 km of cellars with a very enthusiastic tour guide, a large family from Austin, Texas, and another American couple who didn't quite seem to approve of our eagerness to ask questions about the Champagne production process. I learned all sorts of things (like the names of various sizes of Champagne bottles, which go all the way up to 20 times the size of a normal bottle, and the fact that most champagne is made up of three different kinds of grapes, and that Mumm is hoarding bottles of Champagne from 1896 in their cellars, but that you and I should not keep a bottle of Champagne for more than 5 years, at which point it starts "declining")
After appreciating the difference between a non-vintaged Mumms (dominant note: apple) and a 1999 Mumms (dominant note: apricot), we strolled back into town to view some other important cultural sites: namely, the cathedral, which features a chapel with stained glass by Marc Chagall -- by far the coolest stained glass I've seen since being in France. After a while, all the cathedrals start sort of blending together (tall gray towers! really high ceilings! lots and lots of uncomforable chairs!), but the Chagall windows combined with the fact that many of the major French kings were crowned takes Reims up a notch. Well played. I really, really liked those windows.
After a spin through "chez Jesu," as Vero would say, it was off for a wander about town, afternoon coffee and churros, a brief visit with everyone's favorite Swedish export (H&M), and then tracking down fixings for a dinner picnic for the train ride home just as the sun went down, the streets emptied, and a light drizzle began. A lovely day.