Raclette, Wine, and Bike-Sharing

After another marathon day at work, I ambled home and got ready to head over to a colleague’s house for dinner. She was planning to make raclette, so I went to the somewhat upscale-looking wine shop across the street from me and asked for some recommendations. I left with a bottle of red wine of the Côtes du Luberon appellation (from the south-eastern extreme of Rhône wine region, east of Avignon), along with a bottle of Burgundian wine for my own consumption. I can’t tell you how glad I am that I’m back in the land of cheap and high-quality wine. Those two bottles cost me 24€ in total, and each one would easily run $40-50 in the US.

I headed over to her place and had a great dinner with her and her husband and a mutual friend of theirs. At one point, their friend annoyed me with a rather crude deployment of the Paradox of Voting to support his complaint that the voting masses (in this context, read: Americans) are stupid. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to articulate my rebuttal really well in French, which I guess shows me that I need more practice in academic / argumentative French. Also, it didn’t help that he was constantly calling me an American—despite my frequent corrections—and would make comments like, “I don’t much like that art exhibit, but it’s good enough for an American,” with this tone of voice that implied that he thought I would be delighted to hear this. Ugh.

Anyway, as I left after dinner, my colleague told me that there was a Vélib station nearby. Since she lived at the top of a hill in the 19th arrondissement, I could just grab one of those bikes and coast all the way home, rather than schlepping to the nearest subway station. I wasn’t sure if my year-long subscription had gone through yet, but when I dropped my Navigo card on the little card reader next to one of the locked bikes, the light turned green and the bike was unlocked. Yay!

The ride home was indeed super-easy, taking maybe 5 minutes to coast downhill. It took a few minutes to find the Vélib station closest to my place, but eventually I did and headed home. My project for tomorrow: take the Vélib home from work.