May 22, Beaune

It is now 12:15 p.m. in Beaune, and Eunice and I have just finished lunch. This morning, we did a little shopping--bread, wine, a potato, and creame for our coffee. We buy a package of 10 little creamers that do not have to be refrigerated. The coffee is so strong that even I take cream in my coffee. Eunice usually makes the coffee, and she has adopted the French way of making very strong coffee.

Then we came back to the apartment and left our purchases before going to the wine caves of Patriarche, pere et fils for some serious wine tasting. As luck would have it, Patriarche is located directly to the east of us, so we just walk about 2 blocks and turn left. At some point in our tour, we read a sign that said that we were passing under the streeet on which our apartment is located. We were given a little taste-vin, which was ours to keep. We're really feeling pretty official now, but then the wine has just about worn off. Some of the wines that we tasted were 40 euros per bottle, so we're not likely to buy any wine of that quality, and I'm not sure that our taste buds are soffisticated enough to appreciate such wine--but we did like it.  We were surprised that we were just turned loose with our little stainless steel taste-vins to walk through the caves, stopping from time to time when we saw a bottle on top of a barrel with an electrified candle. The whole place was very dark. I will include photos of the place when I am home and can manipulate my camera and my computer better than I am able to manipulate this *%&@$#! tablet. Back to dark and spooky: at some point Eunice drew a comparison between the Catacombs in Paris, which we visited 1 1/2 years ago, and the caves. The big difference, we agreed, was stacks and stacks of bottles instead of stacks and stacks of bones and skulls. So, I guess you could say that we enjoyed our wine tasting adventure more than we enjoyed the Catacombs. We often talk about our adventures and ask each other if something or other qualifies as an adventure.
After our wine tasting, we came back to the apartment and I fried some more thinly sliced potatoes in butter, then made an omelette in the same pan. We devoured this fare with one of the baguettes and plenty of butter. I am determined not to leave behind very much of the butter, which is wonderful. We left quite a lot in Florence, a bit less in Paris, and we're well on our way to finishing the butter that we bought here in Beaune.

I just read this to Eunice and she suggests that I mention the cafe where we ate breakfast the first morning here and stopped again today after our shoppping for a cafe au lait. It is clearly where the locals come to exchange gossip. One man was there at one of the sidewalk tables with an English Mastiff. We noticed that the huge dog was drooling from his dewlaps and decided that neither one of us would like to have such a dog.