Anyhoo...happy New Year, I guess? I will now try to sum up everything that's happened since last I wrote.
In early December, we had a ginormous and delicious Thanksgiving extravaganza, in which our dear neighbors baked six different pies. For 12 people. (It was an awesome sight to behold...and to eat.)
Three days later, I had an actual birthday celebration with as many of my nearest and dearest as I could muster. It was the big 4-0, after all, so I made everyone schlep up to Felsenegg, where, after our arrival by cable car, we were greeted with glühwein and snacks on the terrace, and then we headed inside the quaint, cozy restaurant for some pretty decent fondue. (Only good thing about a winter birthday: fondue.) This is the view from their terrace after dinner, when all the drizzly clouds had finally blown away.
Ned discovered that this little footstool is actually hollow.
Stewie flat-out refused to play Santa this year.
I finally got to go see Pokey LaFarge, who played without his band--just him on that stage--and was charming and marvelous.
We went to the by-far best Google Zürich Christmas party ever. The DJ was fantastic--played everything from Bollywood to Bon Jovi to Europop to music from 'Grease'!--and there was sparkly confetti. Yessssss. (My man put this thing together. He's got skills.)
Spent a few days in Denver before Christmas and, as is necessary, went to Twisters for breakfast. That, friends, is enchiladas rancheros: cheese enchiladas topped with two fried eggs, cheese, and red and green chile, with the best beans and fried potatoes. (Oh Twisters, how we love you!!)
We had a little time to kill one evening before meeting up with some friends for dinner, and discovered a genuinely remarkable place: the Forney Transportation Museum. Somehow we missed this place entirely during the 5+ years we lived in Denver...and just wow.
This place is essentially a giant warehouse full of various types of vehicles from various eras. It's enormous.
Since it was Christmastime, they naturally had a small display of antique sleds. (You just know this is what Santa drives!)
An actual car belonging to the actual Amelia Earhart! (It's a 1923 Kissel "Gold Bug." And the creepy/goofy wax figures were adopted after the closure of the Denver Wax Museum in 1981.)
Front end of a 1913 Cadillac.
BUBBLE CAR!!! I am so, so taken with these things. This one's a 1955 Messerschmidt.
Front of the Forney's Union Pacific "Big Boy" 4005 locomotive, built in 1944 (...I think...). This thing is unbelievably big: it's 11 feet wide, 16 feet tall, and 133 feet long. (That's 3.4 x 4.9 x 40 meters, for my European friends.)
Here's Mike, for a little scale. The front of the locomotive is just shy of that wall at the far end.
A 1923 school bus! The driver's seat was a chair from said school, affixed to the bus's floor.
This is a 1909 UNIC taxicab, made in France, and used during WWI (as many of these were) to shuttle soldiers to the front, and then to bring the injured back from the front on the return trip. The Forney has left it in its original, unrestored state.
Wall o' penny farthings and antique bikes!
As luck would have it, our visit coincided with this spectacular exhibit on American cars of the 1970s. I couldn't help but love how outlandishly oversized and of-an-era these were!! (Here, a 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood Eldorado in a fabulous "Firethorn Metallic" finish.)
PURPLE GREMLIN!!! For no good reason, I've always loved the ridiculous shape of the Gremlin. It's just so goofy. (And to paint one purple...be still, my heart.)
Without a doubt, though, my next car--at least, if I got to choose from things at the Forney--would be this insanely pink 1970 Dodge Challenger convertible.
Hello, gorgeous.
Its nearby friend in black.
Oooooh, hood ornaments! In the mid-20th century, these things were absolute works of art.
After Denver, we headed home to NM for a few days, and then ran into this rather nasty blizzard as we were trying to get to Houston. (It turned a 1.5-hour drive to the airport into a 4-hour one, and then we sat around for an additional 4 hours because of high winds in Houston. Go figure.)
When we finally returned to Zürich, we kicked off the new year with an evening at Herzbaracke, where the Red Hot Serenaders' Orchestra was a rollicking good time...
...attended an all-you-can-eat raclette pop-up, decorated chateau-style, at the Widder Hotel...
...and then I took up cross-stitching. I chose this as my first pattern because it's two puns for the price of one. (Haaaaaaah!)
At the end of January, it was off to Paris for a long weekend because Cake.
Yes, the entire reason we took the 4-hour train ride to Paris was to see a band that was popular in the 1990s, but is, apparently, still popular enough to sell out their entire tour (from what I can tell). Good for them.
We arrived on Friday afternoon at our hotel near Gare Saint-Lazare, outside of which is this very cool clock statue...
...and then grabbed a very late lunch at the impressively Art Nouveau restaurant Mollard, just across the street. (My French onion soup and escargot and Mike's scallops were outstanding.)
And cripes, is that building gorgeous.
Speaking of gorgeous buildings: we next checked out the rather remarkable Nissim de Camondo museum, a lovely 19th-century palace full of 18th-century French art and furniture. (We had wanted to go see the Caravaggio exhibit at the Jacquemart-Andre museum, but the line was down the block, and so instead, Mike found Nissim de Camondo, just around the corner. And what a find: the place is beautiful, and large enough to be interesting, but small enough to be approachable, and a little off the beaten path.) Here, the amazing, round, wood-paneled library on the first floor.
View into the small, but gorgeously landscaped, garden and grand patio.
Ground-level staircase from the first floor.
Massive, high-end range in the large kitchen...
...which also contained this huge rotisserie.
The "downstairs" staff dining room, just off of the kitchen...
...which also had this very 'Downton Abbey'-esque buzzer system.
Passed this pretty pretty place (the church of Saint-Augustin, apparently) on our way to dinner at Le Bistrot du Peintre, where Mike's Dauphine cheese ravioli with green beans and chorizo really stole the show. (My veggie-ful salad with goat cheese was excellent, as was Mike's roasted chicken and the Cafe Gourmand we shared for dessert, but that ravioli...!!)
The next morning, on our way to find coffee and pastries, we rounded a corner in a swanky spot not so far from the Champs-Elysees, and discovered ourselves nearly alone on the streets. And then we saw a couple of gigantic barricades (sealing off whole streets, braced by massive trucks) and actual hordes of armored riot police, and finally figured out that there was an impending yellow-vest protest that day! (It is utterly bizarre to see the Place de la Concorde, above, ENTIRELY DEVOID OF LIFE.)
I'll freely admit that the presence of so very many heavily-armed police, weirdly empty public spaces, and inconveniently sealed-off metro stations was not my favorite, but I am happy to say that we made it into and out of the Musee d'Orsay (and, indeed, all over town that day) without running into said protests. (Although we did hear them coming, shouting and firecracker-detonating all the way, and the tension in the air was enough to stand my hair on end. Mike, unsurprisingly, was 100% unfazed.)*
Anyway, the museum. What an extraordinary collection.
I'm absolutely one of those people who likes to see artworks by people they've actually heard of, so behold! A lovely still-life from Cezanne, 1889.
Something unexpected: one of a series on the main facade of Rouen cathedral by Claude Monet (whom I usually think of as just the gardens-and-water lilies guy, 1892).
As we all know, I love me some Toulouse-Lautrec, and there were two of these huge panels he created for a cabaret dancer's outdoor (!) booth at a Parisian fair in 1865. (These 3m x 3m /10ft x 10ft panels are way larger than his more famous posters, and are magnificent.)
And then we discovered the Central Europe/Northern Europe/Scandinavian Art Nouveau collection. I love seeing how different cultures developed their own versions of this particular style! Among lots of other varied and incredible pieces was this gorgeous vase of Bohemian manufacture, from around 1900...
...as well as this amazing buffet created in Russia around 1903.
Possibly the most surprising international iteration of Art Nouveau, however--at least, to me--was the "neo-Viking" element that emerged in Scandinavia around the turn of the 20th century. Pardon the heinous photo, but this chair was glorious.
Next, we discovered the full exhibit on French Art Nouveau, starting with this unbelievable room, and just...wow!! Both Mike and I took about a jillion photos; him for al of the astonishing woodworking, and me for the lovely, swoopy, organic, floweriness of it all.
Yeah...I'd have this room in my house. (Dining room designed by Alexandre Charpentier in 1901.)
Oooooh...one of the original Paris metro signs! (Hector Guimard, 1910.)
A freaking unreal "electric ceiling lamp" by Hector Guimard and Langois & Cie, around 1912. (Waaaaaaaaaaaant...although our ceilings are far, far too low for this sort of drapey grandeur. Foiled again by low ceilings.)
Detail of the elegant "Nenuphars" bed by Louis Majorelle, made between 1905 and 1909.**
A pitcher by my man Gallé, 1895.
Here's something you may have seen before. Can't tell you exactly why, but I've always loved this painting. (Van Gogh's bedroom in Arles, 1889.)
Ooh, look: it's a slightly less hallucinogenic 'Starry Night.' (Van Gogh painted 'Starry Night over the Rhone,' seen here, in September of 1888; the most famous 'Starry Night' was finished in June of 1889.)
As we were reaching the limits of our art museum tolerance (yes, it happens...don't judge), we took a quick dash through a room full of Realist portraits, and there I was positively mesmerized by this rather large piece. This is a portrait of Madame Pasca, a French stage actress, painted by Leon Bonnat, in 1874. I think it was the life-sized scale and striking realism that drew me to this painting: the light, shadow, and depth are incredible; her face is so individual, and the fabrics of her dress are unbelievably lifelike. It's gorgeous and stunning, and almost like she's standing in front of you.
Next, because Mike had never Sainte-Chapelle, and because I hadn't been there since my first (very unpleasant) trip to Paris in 2000, we went.
Sainte-Chapelle is a smallish chapel built as part of the Palais de la Cite, of which only this chapel and the Conciergerie remain. (The palace served as the royal residence and seat of power from the 10 through 14th centuries, but was eventually abandoned in favor of safer locations.) Sainte-Chapelle itself was constructed between 1242 and 1248, but, structurally-speaking, had to be drastically restored in the 19th century after great damage caused during the French Revolution. This not-unremarkable lower chapel served the palace staff...
...but it's the 15-m-high stained glass in the upper chapel that are the real draw. There are 15 windows--most of which survived the Revolution!--depicting 1,113 scenes from the Bible, the history of mankind, and the story of the relics that used to be housed here (from the Passion of the Christ, purportedly, and now they're at the Notre-Dame cathedral).
Next, onto the Conciergerie! After the royal family moved out, the Palais de la Cite took on a more administrative, and then penal, role: the Parliament of Paris met here between the 15th and 18th centuries, and parts of the building were eventually converted into a prison. The vast, Gothic Salle des Gens d'Armes (hall of the soldiers) was built in 1302 to serve as a refectory for the palace staff of around 2,000 people.
The Salle des Gardes, also constructed in the early 14th century, was used as an antechamber for the parliamentary meeting rooms, which became the seat of the Revolutionary Tribunal during the French Revolution in 1793.
In some of the rooms upstairs from here, we got to peer into a few of the remaining, very tiny, prison cells, but the most striking area in the prison was this chapel, built in 1815 on the site of the cell in which Marie Antoinette herself was held for 76 days before her execution on October 16, 1793.
Robespierre, it seems, spent his final moments here, as well.
And with that, it was off to dinner (after getting stuck in the smack-center of Paris due to the continued closure of many relevant metro stations and then somehow managing to flag down the only empty cab in the city!!) at the marvelous Le Hide, a tiny restaurant around the corner from the venue of our Cake concert. No idea what Mike ate, but my crawfish ravioli and beef bourguignon were excellent, and then we dashed off to catch our concert!
Or so we thought.
We arrived at the venue just as the doors should have been opening, only to find a line that was so long, it took us 5 minutes to walk the length of maybe two-thirds of it. We gave up when it started raining and made a mad dash to the nearest awninged restaurant, where we huddled with a few friendly youngish French people who told us that the lead singer could possibly be sick, and that the concert might be off. Might be. We waited for another 20 minutes, then bailed out to go find a drier place to await the official determination (...mayhap with cocktail in hand). A full hour after the concert was supposed to start--that is, two hours after those poor early arrivals had begun waiting in line!--we finally found out via rumblings on Facebook that, indeed, the lead singer had gotten laryngitis, and the concert was off.
Well.
At least we'd had the opportunity to enjoy ourselves in the city beforehand, and at least we hadn't come from so far away, but I know lots of people weren't so fortunate, and had traveled further, and with less convenience. It was both a crummy way to handle the decision-making process by the band (...you KNOW you have no voice, why prolong the agonized [and damp] waiting of your devoted fans??) and to handle the official announcement--i.e. no official apology or info from the venue or ticket vendors until days later, and even then, it was still weeks before we found out whether refunds or reissues of our tickets would occur. In the end, the concert was rescheduled for October, and our tickets will still be valid, and while I do really enjoy Paris, we've already made one trip there this year specifically for this event. Yes, we'll probably go again...just with some grumbling involved.***
So we got no concert, but we did have this view from our hotel window. Jeez, but this city is gorgeous.
Next up: a trip to a place that involved zero grumbling whatsoever. At long last, Madrid.
*Look, I know that protesting is just about the most French thing one can do; that the number of protesters had already decreased greatly since the previous march; and that not all of these protests devolve into violence, but I don't think it's unreasonable to steer as clear as possible, just in case. (Discretion and valor and all that.)
**Ughhhhhhh, Louis Majorelle... The one time we visited Nancy, France--the home base of French Art Nouveau--I hadn't heard of his iconic home, the Villa Majorelle, which has since become sorta the unreachable mountaintop for me. (It was appointment-only that first time--and we didn't have one, or speak enough Frenc to make one--and has more-or-less been closed for maintenance ever since.) Upon a visit to that visual wonderland, I suspect, I would probably succumb entirely to Art Nouveau-driven ecstasy, but what a way to go, eh?
*** "Ohhhh, poor us, we have to go to Paris again," is how I'm sure you're hearing this in your head, but it is a four-hour train ride at considerable expense, involving at least one night's stay, and so the reasonable cost of the concert ticket suddenly becomes about a tenth of the overall price. And we'll have to do it all again in October, if we want to see Cake live and in concert...which, now, we really, really do. (It was, as became apparent, the concert that neither of us knew we desperately wanted to see, until we had tickets in hand, had planned our weekend in Paris, and started listening to their music on a loop for a solid day in advance of the proposed concert. Ugh, it's just so good!!)
