Good day yesterday, despite the rain.
Our school load is real but simplified enough here that I’ve been able to work with Simon in the morning and Leo in the late afternoon. And yesterday was the last workday! So when it was over I packed up all the schoolbooks into the rolling carry-ons.
Also some extra books we picked up on the way.
Mark wasn’t quite done with work but there were no more meetings, so I talked him into putting some of the work off till tomorrow so we could have another evening out. The kids opted to stay in, so first Mark put on his raincoat and rain pants and went to fetch pizza for them while I did some pre-packing.
Mainly, that was to lay out my clothes for the next three days, and to pack nearly everything else. I checked with the kids on their clean-clothes status; Leo had just done his laundry, but Simon needed to do a load of wash. He gathered it up for me and I put it into the combo washer-dryer along with a few odd things of mine.
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A side note.
Did I overpack? Not really, although I underestimated the hot weather/cold weather ratio. We did have both, but a lot more of it was hot. Autumn blew into the mountains only a couple of days ago. I also overestimated how often I’d need to dress up, so to speak. I expected to need at least one kind of dressy outfit in Menton, it being the Riviera and all. But it turned out to be pretty casual. Tees and sundresses and gauzy cotton pants everywhere. I did already know that Chamonix is the kind of place where people wear performance fleece and approach shoes out to dinner.
So, like, this purple wool dress is about as dressed up as I get here. With the turquoise puffy, very appropriate for around here. I happen to have a scarf that has both turquoise and purple in it. It makes me feel pulled-together.
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After Mark returned and the kids got their pizza, I put on my raincoat and we went out into the wet evening.
The mountains were entirely hidden by clouds (“socked in,” Mark said), and the light was fading, but the restaurants that were still open glowed in the mist. We walked almost to the other end of town before turning around. It was a pleasant walk even with the rain. Occasionally we stopped and looked at a menu board, but we both were thinking specifically of getting beef carpaccio, and we ended up at the same place Mark had fetched the pizza from.
Simon and I had had lunch there in the first week. The pizza is good, and it has a familiar, family-Italian-restaurant vibe. The interior is paneled with knotty pine, giving it an ambiance I associate with the north woods of Minnesota, and the dessert menu is printed on the placemats.
We ordered to share, a lettuce-and-tomato salad and a smallish beef carpaccio, topped with artichokes, oil, parmesan, and lemon, that came with a side of hot crispy fries.
(American Italian restaurants take note: Carpaccio with a side of fries needs to become a thing.)
We also ordered a 46-cL pitcher of red wine. Why 46, we wondered? The choices were 25, 46, and 100. (FYI, 75 cL is a bottle.) It was a pretty stoneware pitcher. After we’d drunk most of it, with a little still in our glasses, the next time the waiter came by I asked him why. He indicated that he had no idea and that it might have been 44 or 47 and it didn’t matter. I joked “en tout cas, le vrai problème, c’est qu’il est vide,” and turned the pitcher over to demonstrate its emptiness, which caused him to take it away and bring us another one. We decided not to object.
We considered dessert but Mark wanted more real food so we just got another carpaccio-and-fries instead. This is pretty normal behavior for us, fries for dessert. And at the end of the meal when the waiter came back I told him that it was lucky the pitchers were 46 cL because it turned out that 92 cL was the precise amount of wine we had needed to drink. Four-twenty-twelve!
I tipped the waiter well on the credit card machine because he had complimented my French and had read my mind about the wine. Back we went, still in the rain. A little darker now.
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