Lac Leman Part 1

Last week, I had to admit defeat in my effort to make plans to leave Paris for the long weekend, but fortunately a labmate saved me by inviting me to spend the weekend with her family, an invitation which I happily accepted. Of course, Paris has Paris-Plage and all the museums, but when half of the town is out of town, one feels like one must be missing something. So I, being one of the luckiest people on the planet, spent the weekend on the shores of Lac Leman, often known to English speakers as Lake Geneva, in the Alps. It was really great. The photo below, taken by my labmate's father, shows the lake and the villages of Thonon (the part which sticks out into the lake) and Evian (the part where it looks like someone took a bite out of the coastline is the harbor.) Evian is the source of the famous bottled water, and receives money from each sold, so they have a cute lakefront garden walk. They were also having a festival of mechanical street organs while we were there. My pictures from Evian got lost in cyberspace somehow, so you'll have to trust me. I'll keep on posting pictures from my trip in the coming days.

Parc Asterix

A couple weeks ago, when it was still hot an sunny but starting to cool down, I went to Parc Asterix with a couple friends from the lab. It is a theme park based on some comic book characters called Asterix and Obelix. The stories are set in 50 BC and they tell the tales of these two warriors as the travel throughout Europe and North Africa, revealing a lot of tongue-in-cheek caricatures of cultural stereotypes. The humor is typically French, but has found a broad audience through translation into Spanish, Italian, and, to a very limited extent, English. In fact, Disney bought the rights to distribution of a few of the Asterix and Obelix movies, but I think it will take a genius to make French humor translatable to Americans, who have a whole different set of stereotypes about Europeans. Anyway, I had a really fun day, even though I wasn't converted into being a fan of the characters. The most fun parts were 1. Spending time with my friends, 2. The roller coaster, although reminded me that I'm getting old because I didn't seem to enjoy it as much as I did when I was a teenager, and 3. The Dolphin Show, because dolphins are so beautiful, although of course I don't feel good about dolphins in captivity.

La Cuisine de la Canicule: Gazpacho

Ordinarily, I am not a gazpacho fan, despite how much fun it is to say the word. I have had only bad, inedible experiences with it until now. Tropicana makes gazpacho you can buy in a carton, and I bought it last week when it was so hot that I had no desire to cook or eat anything above room temperature. It was perfectly refreshing and light. So, for all of my friends on the East coast of the US, if you can't stand the heat, serve your soup cold!