Noël

I feel incredibly blessed and lucky pretty much every day I'm here, but Christmas was overload on the blessings and luckiness. My friend Rach and I had planned to be alone in Paris on Christmas when our friends Luigi and Clement invited us to spend the holiday with their family in Paris. We were looking forward a good meal and some familial vibes. What we got was a full-out Christmas, complete with a walk down to the major department stores to see the holiday lights, presents--THEY GOT US PRESENTS!!, and a massive delicious home-cooked meal. And, as if things couldn't get any better, there was an adorable giant dog (and you know how I love giant dogs), we played French Taboo (and you know how I love Taboo at any time in any language), AND they gave us each a scratch-off instant-win lotto thing and I WON 100 EUROS! To top it all off we had an encore meal the following night complete with oysters (les huitres) and lamb (gigot d'agneau). It still sucks that I couldn't be home, but this was seriously the best possible surrogate Christmas imaginable.