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.