Paris... that pretty much says it all

One weekend in Venice, the next in Paris... I could get used to this! (Actually I couldn’t... I am soo tired from all this traveling!) Well again, I have a reasonable excuse- my Uncle Larry spends every January in France for wine tasting and when I saw him and my Aunt Ida last spring, I told them that if they were in Paris this winter that I would meet up with them, and so I did! Well, my aunt couldn’t make it unfortunately, but Blake and I found some good deals and were able to meet up with my Uncle Larry for the weekend.

My Uncle Larry is known for having extremely good taste in wines and food, so Blake and I were pretty excited to meet up with him for a few meals. Blake and I had both been to Paris before, so sightseeing wasn’t a huge priority, and the meals were definitely the highlights of the trip.

We arrived in time for dinner on Friday night and met up with my uncle for dinner at a cute Bistro. The restaurants in foreign countries tend to seat you closer to fellow dinners than in the states, and so we ended up getting in a conversation with our French neighbors about wine. They were quite impressed, and I decided that we need my uncle to go to all the countries that hate America, or that think we are unclassy and uneducated. He could just go out to eat and convert them one by one. They loved him, especially when he said that French wine is the best!

On Saturday morning, Blake and I went to the Musee d'Orsay, which has a great collection housed in the old train station.

After a couple of hours there (and after being lost for a little while), we met up for lunch with my Uncle to eat some calves head. Yep... you heard me. Blake was brave enough to order the “Tete de veau” which Uncle Larry suggested, although I was pretty adamant about it not being served in the head of the calf, which is how it is supposed to be served. The waiter made a joke about letting the wait staff eat the best part, the eyes. Wait, actually, I am not sure if he was kidding or not. Hmmmm… But regardless, I consider myself somewhat adventurous when it comes to eating (oh, I eat some mushrooms now, fyi), but I draw the line at looking at the head of a baby cow while eating it. Blake took a picture of what it looks like on a plate:

It was better than I thought it was going to be- we tried the tongue, cheek, and of course, the brains. I wasn’t crazy about the brains, the texture was a little weird, but the cheek was really good. The whole time this French couple next to us keeps glancing over at Blake, and finally they asked him what he thought. He admitted that it was quite good, and they were very impressed with him and told him it was a very special French dish. Then we ended up getting in another conversation about wine with this couple, who now probably think differently about Americans. 4 down, and (insert number of French citizens) to go.

That afternoon we walked around the city for a bit with my Uncle and just enjoyed a pretty nice afternoon for January (it had been raining that morning). Nothing really “blog-worthy” there, just a nice afternoon with my uncle who is a great tour-guide. Blake got a few cool pictures of the city:



But back to the “blog-worthy” stuff… I told you already, the highlight was the meals with my Uncle! And Saturday night topped it all. It was a place called La Tour D’Argent, which is the oldest restaurant in Paris, dating back to 1582. The view of Notre Dame and the Seine was gorgeous, and the food was amazing. The restaurant served as inspiration for scenes in the Pixar movie Ratatouille.

My Uncle was like a kid in a candy store with the gigantic wine list (it has a wine cellar with over a ½ million bottles of wine!):

As an appetizer, we had eggs with truffles and learned the proper way to eat them to fully enjoy the aroma (no really, this is how it is done):

Blake and I ordered the pressed duck, which is what the restaurant is famous for. You even get a postcard at the end of your meal that gives you the number of the duck that you just ate (Lucky #1,075,664). My uncle had described the process of how they make pressed duck to us, and I remember being slightly disturbed by it, but luckily I didn’t read this article about the process. (Note- this is not for the faint at heart!) At first it was a little hard to digest (ha- pun intended!), especially since I used to have a pet duck (Hamilton) and all:

But I have to say, I got over it, and it was amazing. Seriously… amazing.

After dinner I was supposed to meet up with a friend of mine, Lori, who is getting her post-doc in Paris, but our cell phone ran out of minutes and we weren’t able to figure out where she was! It was terrible! But we will be back- I love Paris!

The next morning, Blake and I hopped on a train and headed to Versailles, which is about a half hour train ride outside the city. Here we saw the Palace of Versailles, which was pretty amazing. We were a bit rushed, and it wasn’t the best time of year to see gardens, but I was still quite impressed. Here are a few pics from the palace and the gardens:



To see all my pics from the trip (and some of Blake's too) check out my flickr gallery.

After Versailles, we headed back to the city, bought nutella and banana crepes (one of my favorite things, um, ever), grabbed our stuff and headed out of town. It was a great quick weekend, although it ended on a sour note at Charles DeGual airport. I hate that place. It is terrible. I don’t even want to go into it. Just try to avoid it all costs.

A Hole in the Ice

So yesterday I was having lunch with my friend, Pär, who was telling me about a recent ice skating experience of his. (And when Swedes talk about ice skating, they dont mean in a rink, they go long distances across lakes and rivers.) He was saying that there werent many "vak", and then he was trying to figure out what that word was in English. So he starts describing how the word sort of means a hole in the ice, and asked me what we would call that. I thought about it, and I said, "I think we call it a hole in the ice." He was pretty confident that there was a specific term for this special type of hole in the ice (since they distinguish this special hole in swedish), so to prove me wrong, he texted Blake:

Pär: What do you call a whole in the ice?
C: A hole in the ice.
Pär: Come on. U have to have a word for it.
C: Yeah, 'a hole in the ice!'

And English is rich? :(

A few hours later, I got an email with this link: http://tyda.se/search?form=1&w=vak&w_lang=&x=0&y=0

Victory is mine!!!

Venice- The Stockholm of the South

Who goes to visit Venice in the middle of winter you ask? Well, Giselle (Blake’s older sister) is a ballet dancer in Dresden, Germany, and she doesn’t get a lot of time off, and so when she did recently, she wanted to meet up with her bro and to get out of Dresden. So we found the cheapest place to fly into for both of us (although in retrospect, even though it was cheap to get there, it wasn’t so cheap once we actually got there, but, oh well- I got to take a weekend in Venice! Hecks yeah!).

Blake and I didn’t get in until really late on Friday night, and by the time we figured our way to our hotel through the bus and water bus system, we were ready to crash. So that brings us to Saturday...

We had decided to not rush to see certain things, and just wanted to take in the city by walking around it. For most of the day there wasn’t any big “blog-worthy” story, we just had a really good time getting lost and exploring the city. The city is absolutely gorgeous, and the weather was a little on the chilly side, but compared to Sweden, it wasn’t bad, and the sun was shining, so we were happy.

If you haven’t been there before, Venice is a city that is mostly on water, and it is connected by a series of canals and bridges. There are no streets, which means no cars, which makes it a very quiet city. It is actually a little unsettling at times when it is really quiet. But it is absolutely beautiful. I had a lot of fun just trying to capture it on film. Here are a few of my favorite pics that I managed to take, but if you want to see all my pics (well all the decent ones), click here.

One of the funnier things was the random spotting of a he/she walking the streets in a bright blue outfit, complete with fuzzy blue jacket, hat, glasses, and matching shoes. We were trying to get a picture without drawing attention to what we were doing, so we could only get her (?) from the back:

Oh yeah, and there was the whole Gaza war protest thing. We wanted to check out the Jewish ghetto, but a) forgot it was Saturday, and b) there were a ton of police in riot gear in that area just hanging out. We couldn’t figure out why the police where there, until we saw a very large group walking across the bridge towards the Jewish Ghetto. Blake got this picture from a slight distance:

There were a few Jewish people standing at a distance just watching it, and we noticed a few people on the bridge making gestures in their direction. The whole thing was a little unsettling, especially for such a complicated situation.

On Saturday night we met up with one of Blake’s friends from Lund, Carlo at a bar not too far from San Marco (I think... I didn’t look at the map the whole weekend, which was awesome- thanks Blake and Giselle for being my navigator!).

Most of the evening was spent drinking outdoors, which was a little weird since it was only slightly above freezing outside, but it was a lot of fun. I even met some Italian guy who wants to study at the campus that I work on in Stockholm, so that was random. I may have told him I could help him, which doesn’t make sense, since I have absolutely no connections to the University itself... hmmm.. oh well!

The next day we were a little sluggish, but rallied to go to the Academia, which is a museum filled with Venetian art. It was ok... nothing spectacular. Most of the museum was closed off, so maybe the other half that we couldn’t see is better.

The rest of the day was spent enjoying the city again, and then we got on a water bus, and then a bus, and then headed home!

Scandinavian Eco Agents

Ok, so it isnt Swedish (it's actually Norwegian), but you got to love the eco agents:

12 Days of Christmas

Most of my Christmas break back in Detroit was spent hanging out with friends and family (although the ridiculous amounts of snow tried to ruin my plans and succeeded a few times). It was great to see everyone and I apologize to those that I did not get to see- 12 days is not enough time! But here are a few "blogworthy" stories:

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: Not giving up my window seat to a lady with a baby. There was like 5oo kids (ok, more like 30, but that is still a large number of children on a small airplane) on my flight from Copenhagen to Chicago. One of them (of course) was sitting next to me, and 3 hours in the flight attendants finally realized that there was an open seat a few rows back in the middle aisle and asked me to switch with someone. I thought about it and finally decided on no. I have given up my seat now several times to people with children, and I always suffer for it. Where's my karma?!! Seriously. I am not getting up, moving all my stuff, just to get a middle seat.. forget it. Don’t look at me like that! I requested the window seat on purpose.. months ago! I wasn’t a complete jerk about it though and asked if the lady who had the aisle seat next to that empty middle seat would switch an aisle seat for an aisle seat, which makes more sense anyways. So don’t worry, the lady with the baby got her 2 seats and I didn’t have to move, so everyone was happy (ish).

On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: Props to my mom for waiting for me at the Detroit Airport. I was supposed to get in at midnight, but there was a snowstorm in Chicago, and so I was delayed for about 3 hours. It sucked and they made us change the gate about 4 times, but considering all but 4 flights out of Chicago where cancelled at the time, and there was a 1/2 mile long line for the United counter, I was happy just to be getting the heck out of there. So my mom came in and waited since I didn’t have a cell phone for the U.S. Also, my mom somehow managed to get out of the parking garage without paying, which was pretty awesome.

On the third day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: More snow. Lots of it. Over a foot, easily. It wouldn’t have been so bad except that Detroit's economy is so bad that they have completely cut the snow removal budget. No salt trucks, no plow trucks, nothing. My family and I were supposed to go the Pistons game on Friday night (where they went into double overtime!) but the roads were too bad to drive, so we watched it from home.

On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: Puppies. I met Jacob at Bdubs (aka- Buffalo Wild Wings... yumm!!) for dinner on Saturday night. We were approached by a girl who wanted to take a picture for social life in the metro Detroit area and this is how the conversation went according to Jacob:
Lady: Can I take your picture for the uhaps website to promote social life in Detroit?
Me: Sure, but neither of us live in Michigan.
Lady: Silence
Me: (to Jacob) Oh well, "Do I have anything in my teeth?"
Jacob: No, but you have an onion ring in your hand! (Note- he didn’t say this, otherwise I am pretty sure I would have put the onion ring down. Maybe.)

After dinner we walked over to a pet store and played with puppies that we would never adopt because they come from puppy mills (But they are still cute and fun to play with!). Then we went to the mall and looked at more puppies and made fun of the people adopting for not knowing enough to not adopt from puppy mills. (Not too much unlike our new vice president elect who made the mistake.) Oh, and we got ice cream. Best faux high school date ever.

On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: Even more snow. On Tuesday when the Pistons where playing at home again. This time I begged my parents and they decided to risk the bad weather and go anyways. So my dad tried to get tickets on Stubhub at work but the website kept saying to try again. Well after 2 hours of this, he decided to drive from work to the stubhub office which is near the Palace (where the Pistons play) and we would meet him there. He got there around 7:30 but they couldnt sell him tickets, and told him he had to purchase them online, but luckily there was a computer there. So he keeps on trying and again, the stubhub sight is down. My mom, brother and I get there at 7:45 and finally call the number and get through. The lady gets all of my dads credit card information, goes to make the purchase right as the clock hits 8:00. Game time. No tickets can be sold after game time. So we have just driven 2 cars in the terrible weather for over an hour and nothing. My dad went to thank the people at the stubhub office for their help and said, hey- here are 4 free tickets! They were crappy seats, but we didnt care, we just wanted to go at this point.

So we drive to the Palace and my dad drops us off while he goes to park the car. My mom, Matt and I try to get in and our tickets are rejected. We went over to customer service and apparently these tickets have already been used 10 minutes ago. Great. We wait for my dad who manages to somehow get past the ticket check with a bad ticket, and then started looking into buying tickets. They claim that the whole upper deck (cheap seats) are sold out, and that there are not 4 tickets together for sale. He gave us his employee discount, but the tickets were still going to be expensive for a game that is no almost halfway over. So my parents are trying to decide what to do when a random dude walks up to Matt and I and says, need tickets? Shocked, we mutter that we need 4 and he goes, here you go- 4 lower bowl seats. Merry Christmas! And takes off. Sweet! So somehow we managed to get 2 sets of free tickets in 1 night. And the 2nd set actually worked. :)

And they beat the Bulls! Huzzah!

On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: Christmas! Grandma and Grandpa came over for our traditional Christmas dinner which is a usually a smorgasbord of randomness. This year we had steak, shrimp, scallops, lamb, salads, potato latkes, and some moose that I smuggled into the country from Sweden. Soo good!

On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: After Christmas shopping with my mom. I wanted to buy everything because it was sooo soo cheap, especially compared to prices in Sweden. Got a sweet new leather jacket though as a late Christmas present... I cant complain.

On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: MSU Reunion at the Post! It was great to see a few friends from college on Friday if only for a little bit. Although out of a group of 12 or so, only 1 person was still living in Michigan. Which means we complained a lot about still being able to smoke in bars which is just plain awful.

Liz, Me, Andrew, Laura, and Michelle:

Michelle and Jacob:

Me and Mark:

On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: Chaeli's Baby Shower! I cant believe my cousin who is exactly 2 months older than me is having a little boy in March! Congrats Chaeli and John!

On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: O'Neill Family Christmas! 30 or so O'Neills at my Grandparents house in Jackson hanging out eating food and talking all day. No board games this year though which kept everyone calmer than normal. It was great to see everyone!

On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: Too much stuff to pack! Not that I am complaining, but I was overweight by 13 pounds and they wanted to charge my $125! So I repacked everything at the ticket counter and carried quite a bit with me through security just so that I didnt have to pay that crazy charge. I looked ridiculous, but $125?! Seriously?!

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: Jetlag. It is so great to be back with Blake in Stockholm, but we really cant sleep on normal Stockholm time. The earliest we have woken up all week has been 1 pm. This is getting out of control!!! And we are sooo tired!