King's Day

King's Day, a.k.a. L'Epiphany, took place on January 6th. This is another one of those celebrations that I never really paid much attention to until we arrived here. It was just a few days after we had arrived here, so we were still a bit disoriented. However, we decided to get the cake and celebrate the traditional way. According to the tradition, you buy a special cake called the Kings' Cake which has a small toy hidden in it that's supposed to bring good luck. In French, they call it La Galette Des Rois. Then, while someone cuts it, the youngest child gets under the table and says who each piece is for. It might seem a bit weird, but it's supposedly because it's such a great honor to get the toy that they want to make sure that nobody cheats. The youngest in our family is Audrey, and my mom was cutting the cake. She didn't realize that the cake was supposed to be cut into equal pieces, so she started out small, and then the pieces slowly got bigger and bigger. Mom had just cut a very small piece, and we were joking above-table that Darcy would get that piece when Audrey shouted out "That piece is for Darcy." The pieces were getting rather large to accommodate the size of the cake because we had to eat it all to find the toy. The last and biggest piece ended up being for Audrey. The cake was okay, nothing great. Audrey, having the best chance of all of us, actually did end up getting the toy. Funny how statistics sometimes work out. The toy was a small porcelain baby. Audrey got to put on the crown, too. All in all, I would say that King's Day was pretty fun.

Paris, France

Our first impression of France was Paris viewed through a thick pink fog in the very early morning. We drove in an overcrowded taxi to the Hotel de Louvre, which is right across the street from the Louvre. All we wanted to do was collapse, but Dad insisted on dragging us around to view Paris. Paris is populated mostly by pigeons and fashionable ladies with very small dogs. After lunch at a small cafe, we visited the Louvre, which is miles long. We saw 'Winged Victory' and the 'Mona Lisa' among many other things.

New Year's Eve in Paris

We arrived in Paris on New Year's Eve, bedraggled and tired from the plane ride. It was pitch black and freezing cold with a thick layer of fog covering everything. We caught a taxi and drove to our hotel. After wandering around the city for a while, (which my weirdo sister Darcy will cover in her own time), we ate at a restaurant called Le Palais Royal, which was the only place not chock full of reservations. Our reservation was for 7:00 pm, which is about normal French eating time, but we were the only people there besides the staff. The menu was not anything like I was used to coming from the United States. Out went the hamburgers and in went the Foie Gras and Escargot. There were three courses, and each course was a choice of weird mystery meat with some sauce and sprigs of rosemary. It did NOT help that the menu was in French. The weirdo ate escargots, and she SAID it tasted like pencil erasers with garlic and butter sauce, but I don't really want to believe that the French would eat something as gross as that.