Valentine's Day in France

This was by far the best Valentine's Day I've had in a long time! Spent the day in Chamonix with Olivier and his wife Fernanda, who both work at the French office. We arrived around 11 AM and walked around the village a little bit. It is a quaint little alpine town/village, pretty much devoted to tourism, so very attractive and open to visitors. We had a snack at a patisserie; I had a raspberry and chocolate tart (mmmmm, delicious!) and hot tea to warm up. Walked around some more and then took the cable car from Chamonix up to the top of Aiguille du Midi.

The cable car goes up in two stages. Each stage takes about 10 minutes, and the cars hold ~40 people. I didn't have any problems with the height or vertigo, thankfully! The first stage is pretty easy and doesn't seem too steep. The second stage though...as you reach the top the cable car basically climbs up the rock face of the mountain. The face is at probably an 80 degree slope (you can see how steep from some of my pictures, but I think all of those are posted on my Facebook) and if I looked directly at the slope, my brain would start thinking we were going to go right into it. Needless to say, I kept looking down instead! At the top are two observation decks, one overlooking Chamonix and the other closer to Mont Blanc. Though clearly, you can see the mountain from both! There is also a small exhibit of how the Mont Blanc was first ascended, and how the cable car to Midi was built. We did not stay very long at the top because it was freezing! Not sure of the temp, but probably -20 or -30. You can see how bundled up I am, and by the time we left the top my fingers and toes were frozen. I'd love to go back sometime in the summer when it's a little more tolerable! Supposedly in the summer there is a restaurant/cafe at the top!

After we got back down to Chamonix, we had a late lunch at a restaurant that serves a traditional fondue. Apparently this is the region in which fondue originated, and the standard "recipe" is 250 g of cheese per person (1/2 lb) melted together with 1/2 glass of wine per person. We had French bread to dip, plus a patter of cold meats (ham, prosciutto, and a local sausage) and steamed potatoes. As an American, my mental image of fondue is Wonder Bread dipped in melted Velveeta, but this was delicious and incredibly filling. Finished dinner, I bought some souvenirs, and we headed back to drop me in Samöens.

In the evening I ate dinner at the hotel. They had a 5-course meal for Valentine's Day. 1: Squash (or maybe pumpkin?) soup. 2: oysters and crawfish (I ate the oysters, but if I'm going to eat something that LOOKS like a lobster, it's going to actually BE a lobster and have enough meat to be worth it!). 3: filet minion in mushroom sauce with gratinée potatoes and roasted tomatoes. 4: cheese course - they roll a cart up to your table with 8 or so different kinds of cheese and you pick out what you want (I have no idea what any of them were, but the one I had was pretty good!) 5: dessert. They had to make me a special dessert, because the planned one had pistachios in it. So instead I had a mini chocolate lava cake with a tiny little scoop of strawberry ice cream. Delicious!