Champagne!

Did you know champagne grapes are not for making champagne? Trader Joes probably calls them that because the grapes are just really small. Champagne is made from Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and/or Pinot Meunier. Did you know that champagne requires 2 sessions of fermentation? Between the two they pop the cork and let some sediment explode out before injecting in some extra sugar and a couple ml of reserve champagne.

Well it was these tidbits and many other factoids that we learned on our latest trip to the Champagne region of France. The champagne region is a large watershed around the Marne river with the two major cities of Epernay and Reims (pronounced with no S and a whole heck of a lot of throat clearing). It was my first weekend back from Champaign Illinois, so what better time than to pick up our old American friends Jamie and Ryan who are spending their summer traveling through Europe with their friends Richard and Julie, and head to Trelou-sur-Marne - in the better Champagne.

We moved into a 3 bedroom AirBnB tucked away up a random street in this sleepy champagne town. There wasn't a single store in the immediate town, just a few small champagne operations and a community center that was filled with dancing people every night. Across the Marne river was a larger town where we did our grocery shopping. And out our front door was a road that led up into the vineyards, perfect for our friends' morning jogs, and for our put-Lilah-to-sleep walks.

Full-Day One we set out during lunch hour to taste champagne in our small area. Whoops! We already forgot that the extended lunch hour is the French siesta. So we kept driving to Epernay and booked a reservation at Moet et Chandon and sat down for lunch (Jamie's 3rd tomato salad of the trip [it's hard being gluten intolerant in France]). Back at Moet a charming tour guide in a formal black suit lead us down into a cave (cellar) with a 28km network of tunnels housing the entire collection of fermenting Moet et Chandon, including Dom Peringnon. It felt a little bit like entering a bank vault. As we walked down the tunnels we'd pass cul-de-sacs filled to the ceiling supports with stacked bottles covered in dust, and numbered and dated with a tiny chalk board. Our tour guide described the process in great detail, while the other English-speaking tourists among us hmmmed, ahhhhhed, and chomped at the bit for a chance to finally taste the champagne at the end. And that time came. And I got to say, it is pretty boring champagne. Good and clean, I could definitely drink a lot of it, but not much going on there.

After the tour we went to a bar in town and sat down for a full round of small pours. These champagnes were much more flavorful, I was getting hints of hazelnut throughout and everyone was looking at me like I was crazy.

Full-Day Two we set out to a small town midway between our house and Epernay to a family-owned small champagne house (Philippe Martin) recommended to us by one of the tour guides at Moet et Chandon. This champagnery (not a word) was interesting because a couple of their champagnes were aged in oak barrels just like in the old days (pre-1950). We ended up buying three bottles from this wonderful Maison De Champagne (what they are actually called), one of which was absolutely incredible (their most expensive obviously). It tasted like diamond butter on our tongues. We drank it that night and played Bang! into the wee hours.

It was Ryan's Birthday, so Kimmy made him a pie.

Beautiful unripe chardonnay grapes

Our AirBnB host gave us a tour of their family's cave and a champagne tasting

"Ze bubbles come from ze bottom of ze glass, where zere iz a small scratch."

The holy grail of Champagne

She is so cute.

We really enjoyed the coolness of the cave. It was a very hot day.

Posing in the bank vault of champagne. See each little nook extending both ways off the tunnel behind them? That is a lot of champagne.

Looking down one of the cave cul de sac nooks.

Contents under pressure! We were warned not to touch the bottles for they could explode.

The big tunnel running under Rue de Champagne.

Cheers! The tour ended with two full glasses per person.

Vineyards surrounding the Marne river (I swam in it)

Our group, taking a group shot by way of my new camera remote!

We drove up a random rode outside Philippe Martin to get this view of the valley.

Vines and cattle outside our BnB.

Copenhagen & Malmo

The life of Lilah - being toted through Europe in the baby carrier.

After leaving Germany, Jessie, Lilah and I flew to Copenhagen.  We heard from multiple people that we would love it there, and we certainly were not disappointed.  Copenhagen is a really beautiful and very friendly city. We stayed in Frederiksberg, and were able to walk everywhere we wanted to go. We enjoyed many food markets, did some shopping, hung out at Tivoli Gardens (a large amusement park in the middle of downtown Copenhagen), walked for miles through the city, canals, shops, parks, and saw the little mermaid statue.

Boats and brightly colored houses lined the canals

With my little lady at the little mermaid statue

Feeding the ducks at Tivoli Gardens.  Jessie had a slight obsession with this duck.

Malmo is just across the Oresund (a small waterway) from Copenhagen, it was under an hour on the bus and was a really pretty drive.  There was another post doc opportunity that Chris had been excited about near Malmo, so I wanted to see where we could have ended up!  I was surprised how much I loved it there – it’s a very quaint and friendly town bustling with shops, restaurants, sculptures, a castle, and tons of personality.  I am very happy we ended up in Versailles, but who knows, maybe Malmo is next on our list (avert your eyes, grandmas).

This is the only picture I took in Malmo.  Probably because Jessie's husband is performing in Oklahoma the musical this fall, so we had been singing the Oklahoma song a lot (I had been singing it, she had been rolling her eyes at me), which somehow always turned into the Music Man's 76 Trombones around the second verse.  So naturally I thought it was hilarious when we encountered this marching band statue!

Berlin, Hamburg, and Auntie Jessie

My middle sister Jessie came to visit!  She, Lilah, and I spent about 10 days traveling to Germany, Denmark, and a quick day-trip to Sweden.  We were probably the least prepared two people for this adventure – we had our plane and train tickets purchased along with airbnb reservations in all of our locations, but aside from that had planned nothing.  We even forgot our travel books and camera in France, so we were definitely flying by the seat of our pants the whole time.

We started off in Berlin which kind of felt like what Seattle probably felt like in the 90’s.  Authentically grungy and hip tattooed and pierced people in an artfully-graffiti’d city.  We stayed in Friedrichshain, which is in what would have been East Germany.  We didn’t really realize this until we were at the Berlin Wall and figured out which way was East (I’m not kidding when I say we were unprepared).  I was sort of anticipating a noticeable difference between the two sides of the city, but aside from a small cobblestone path designating where the wall used to be, you would never know this city was once so divided. 

The old Berlin Wall.  The distant wall was the internal wall, and the larger closer wall was the main Wall.  The area in-between the two walls was known as the 'death strip' because even if you got over the first wall you might be shot down by guards (see guard tower in the upper left) on your way to the main wall.  

These pieces of the Berlin Wall are now part of an art exhibition. 

We visited the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, which is about 40 minutes North of Berlin. Among the buildings that are still standing were the Jewish barracks, the isolation cells, and the ‘medical center’.  The grounds and each building are very well maintained and sterile, so it’s hard to fully grasp the horrors of the place when you walk around.  But seeing the cremation ovens, autopsy tables, and readings the details of the types of medical experimentation that went on while standing where it all happened was very intense. Leaving the camp on our own free will was a chilling and sobering moment, we both felt pretty lucky.

This is the front gate as you enter the concentration camp.  The translation is: 'work will set you free'.

Autopsy tables in one of the medical examination rooms

One of the walls of the camp - three tiers of electrified barbed wire leading up to an electric fence in front of a stone wall.  At the very end of the picture is one of the guard towers.  We learned on the tour that many people committed suicide by flinging themselves into the barbed wire.  But if a prisoner ran onto the black stoned area, the guards were instructed to shoot them down - so the guards who successfully shot a prisoner before they electrocuted themselves were rewarded.

After Berlin we headed North to Hamburg to visit one of our old Au Pair’s.  Ute lived with us in 1996, and the last time we saw her was in New York during Jessie’s college graduation.  It was really wonderful to catch up with her and meet her very adorable 3-year-old daughter Nele.  Lilah and Nele loved each other, so that was also really fun to watch.  It was great to have Ute show us all around her home town.  I am always curious to see where my former au pair’s lived!

Jessie, Nele, Ute, me and Lilah in Hamburg

More adventures with Auntie Jessie in the next post! Stay tuned!

Brussels

Town Hall in the Grand Place

We arrived in Brussels on a Saturday afternoon in time to see the Grand Place alive with people, a small market, cafes, and shops.  We spent the evening meandering through the narrow streets lined with waffle stands, chocolate shops, beer, pomme frites, and mussels.  It was a little overwhelming at first, the whole city seemed like a glutton's paradise, and everything kind of looked the same so we felt a little lost at times, or like we were having déjà vu walking through the streets – were we just on this street or is this a new street with delicious things everywhere?  

Buy one of these sticks with your choice of chocolate, and you get a cup of hot milk to make your own hot chocolate.

We made our way to the famous sculpture Manneken Pis, and it lived up to it’s very low expectations, I think Lilah may have been bigger than the little peeing man.  We encountered some very drunk older men in suits – one of them fell on Wilson, another was lying in the middle of the street (and we are pretty sure we saw an ambulance headed his way), and a third one was dancing with every women he encountered at a very crowded bar while knocking himself and his dancing partner into tables and patrons.  There is something about seeing completely obliterated 50+-year-old well-dressed men that is just hilarious.   

Mannekin Pis

We spent a few hours at a bar called Delerium Tremens (this wasn’t actually a Huyghe Brewery bar, but Chris was still very excited to be in the land of the Delierum Tremens), and enjoyed some Belgian beers we’d never tried before.  We made friends with two French guys who lent us their Yahtzee set and then ended up gifting it to us before we left.  Lilah was a great sport, she seems to really love being in new places and people watching – which is great for us! 

Typical street view

On Sunday we met up with our friend Stef for the day – she is Dutch, we met her while we were all living in Honduras.  We overlapped in Europe for a few weeks before she moved to Australia so Brussels was a good half-way point for a quick rendez-vous before she left.  We had a pretty authentic Belgium lunch at Fin de Siecle, which had a great atmosphere with good beers and excellent food (Chris and Stef had sausages and stoemp, and I had carbonade flamande), and then went to check out another area of the city, home to Mini-Europe and the Atomium.  I think Europeans have a thing for mini things, we've heard of a Mini-France, and now this. The idea is that you can walk through a scale model of the whole continent, and see all the main attractions of every country.  But it was was closed, so we turned around and headed to a very NON-mini molecule looming on the horizon.

The Atomium (should be called The Molleculem)

The Atomium was built during the World's Fair of 1958, and is composed of multiple silver spherical rooms, connected by diagonal stair-wells in the shape of a molecule. After buying our tickets for the observation deck in the top atom (102 meters up) we discovered that we'd have to wait in an hour-long line for the elevator. So we opted to go through the ‘museum’ of the Atomium instead, which gets you up into a few of the lower pods.  The exhibits were terrible (dusty dated history exhibit), and this place should never be visited by anyone.  If you ever find yourself in Brussels, just enjoy the Atomium from the outside, but don’t waste your time going here!  Regardless, we had a very fun and hilarious day exploring with Stef.

Thanks for meeting us for a long lunch!

Brouwerji Huyghe - Belgium

A couple weeks ago the whole family piled into a tiny rental car and and drove to Brussels, Belgium. The EU has open borders between their countries, so we drove right through the border crossing which had fallen into a state of disrepair and resembled an apocalyptic stronghold. We took a wrong turn, which would have been potentially disastrous due to road-signs being in a strange language and a data plan restricted to France, but miraculously we wound up on the right street and drove straight into Ghent. Apparently the medieval city/castles of Ghent are a popular tourist destination but we didn't know this, and besides we weren't here for culture, we were here for beer.

Huyghe Brewery

Ghent (well technically Melle) is home to Brouwerji Huyghe where they brew Delirium Tremens, one of my favorite beers (the best beer in the world actually). It is a tripel, a strong champagne-like beer with a very mild fruitiness rounded out with a golden warmth. I think it has been getting popular in the US in the last few years; I seem to spot the pink elephant at more and more beer venues. We donned hairnets and began our tour, and were a little surprised when the tour ended up being in Flemish. So we didn't get much information, but now and then the guide would step aside and give us some explanations in broken English. We saw the copper stills, a complex filtration system, the bottling plant, and the warehouse. There were stacks upon stacks of creates headed all over the world.

Lilah is very embarrassed by her mother.

bottling plant

Then the tour came to an end, and the real fun began... beer tasting. For the 7-euro tour admission we got unlimited beer pours from a trio of adorable Belgians. We were probably there for 2 hours and no one was rushing us out. They even filled up a giant, over-sized Delirium Tremens chalice for a guy dressed up in a lion costume on his bachelor party. We tried all the beers on tap, and both decided that La Guillotine was actually a far superior beer to Delirium Tremens. Also on tap was a Floris Kreik cherry beer, which Kimmy really enjoyed. The bartender saw this and took it as his cue to open up the private reserves hidden in a fridge behind the bar. He brought out an assortment of fruit beers (Floris & gluten free Mongozo), ranging from mango, apple, raspberry, honey, and passion fruit. We even enjoyed a coconut beer out of a coconut shell. Bizarre! This treatment solidified my opinion that Delirium Tremens is the best.

Apparently it was completely normal for the Bachelor to be wearing a fur suit.

I love my drinking partner (She's holding a draft cherry beer that wasn't sweet)

The Bar... the best, sorry I didn't get the bartenders to pose.

Lilah absolutely loves coasters. It gives us a solid 15 minutes of freedom.

Coconut beer might sound gross, but I thought it was great. I mean there is a time and place for coconut beer... but it worked here.