Champagne!

After a few days in the office, we headed out Friday evening after work to drive to the Champagne region for our engagement anniversary. It would be our first France road trip! For a drink to be called champagne in EU law, it has to come from this region, so what better way to celebrate an anniversary!

Unfortunately we ran smack into the infamous Paris traffic as soon as I left work, even though we were just trying to skirt the outside of the city. So all in all it added about 45 extra minutes to get through that. Motorcycles are allowed to zip in the middle of the lanes, so they can fly through it just fine, but it does make changing lanes a bit of a nerve racking experience since you have to watch out for them.

But eventually we made our way to Bouzy to stay at a quaint bed and breakfast in the tiny (1000 person) village. Everything was closed already when we got there about 9pm, so our champagne adventures would have to wait until the morning.

One interesting side note is that I could actually understand some of the French the B&B owner was saying! Kara could understand most of it, but compared to Paris, it was like night and day. Apparently the Parisian accent likes to drop consonants which is party why I can't even make out individual words most of the time with my co-workers, but I could understand entire phrases with the B&B owner. Producing it is still very difficult though.

Oh and I finally got my Carte Blue. Apparently the bank didn't actually need any extra info (from my blog reading this is apparently a common thing where there are problems one day, and the next they all magically disappear), and the card was just sitting there waiting for me. So now I have a chip+pin card ready for any situations where that comes up.