In NZ, it is now officially the day the red and white man graces our chimney's and remains the only day that dressing up as a white bearded, glasses wearing fat man without getting heckled is totally justifiable. For me, it commences in around 7 hours! Unfortunately, there is not yet any sign of snow. But you never know...
In honour of my favourite day of the year (and for this year, probably the weirdest one yet), I thought I would include a little about my festive trip north.
On Wednesday we set off at the crack of dawn (it was still dark outside for a couple of hours) and headed for the astonishingly desolate metro bar the homeless and cleaners (who looked equally cold and dirty). We sucessfully made it to our train and settled in for the journey, watching the dark, cold countryside speed on by.
A couple of hours (and a bit more sunlight later) and we arrived at Amiens! Famous for its Christmas market (and not much else). It was a tiny town, (when we first got the map we actually thought we were missing half of it), probably comparable to the size of Timaru..haha.
Anyway, we headed straight for a coffee shop to get our obligatory morning coffee's and chocolat chaud's. We were instantly reminded of the best part of travelling outside Paris, everything drops about 10euro in price! Everything was substantially cheaper in this wee town (and probably their single bragging point considering the lack of anything else).
As we arrived they were just starting to open up all their Christmas booths and so we took our time walking through the town. We made it to the stunning cathedral which was about 20degrees colder inside! It was super eerie because there was hardly anyone else inside and we're all used to the busyness (business? buisness?) of Parisian churches. There were no tour guides, no information handouts, no audio guides, just the wide expanse of sight-seeing the beauty of an extremely old cathedral. For me, it topped the Notre Dame. It was so intricate and delicate and was actually in honour of the engineers that defended Amiens and supposedly saved it. Tres cool.
Following our history bout, we returned to the Christmas stalls and throughout the day almost ate our weight in food, trying everything that looked remotely interesting. My favourite was a tie between tartiflette (a kind of potato salad with extra yumminess and creamy goodness, scorching hot on the cold day) and a gauffres (a waffle that is made fresh and you choose what they put in the batter. I chose compote des pommes et cannelle, apples and cinnamon. Mmmmmm). Definitely a sensible breakfast.
We grabbed some hot cider and looked at the various activities as part of the market. My personal favourite was the bizarre but hilarious attraction that included giant blow up clear balls with a hole that children crawled into and then they were pushed down into a pool of water. The kids could then stand up and run around inside the balls but it was really hard to stand up and so they kept on falling over and face-planting. It was extremely entertaining. I really wanted to do it but unfortunately I was a tad too large (would have been interesting to see what happened though...)
The city itself was really cool. It was so far north that it had influences of Britain and Belgium and all the houses weren't very French, often red brick and with white shutters. Felt like we were out of France! There was even a massive tower in the centre of the city that seemed very German. But it was actually extremely ugly! They had tried to decorate it with Christmas lights and make it look pretty but it failed miserably and ended up looking like Santa threw up on it on his way back to the North Pole.
By the end of the day, we could barely move from all the food we'd eaten and we were completely drained and exhausted (from eating so much food, naturally). The train back was filled with laughter, banter and weary eyes, the conversation steadily decreasing from philosophical discussions into the ever-interesting inappropriate talks reserved only for train cabins and their walls.
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