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December 28, 2010
Today marks the first “big day” of our European trip, as we focus on what our primary goal of this trip is – to wine and dine! We have reservations at Paul Jaboulet Aîné in the morning, and a reservation at Pic at night, which I’ll go into great detail later – but first the wine.

Paul Jaboulet Aîné is one of the bigger brands of the Rhone Valley but unfortunately their vineyard is closed (for renovations or for holidays, don’t remember) but their wine cellar is open for free tasting – most of the wineries and tasting rooms actually offer free tasting around France, just to entice you to buy their wine. Paul Jaboulet Aîné’s wine cellar is called Vineum (vin is wine in French, in case that wasn’t obvious) and is located in Chateauneuf-sur-Isere near their winery at the famous Tain l’Hermitage region. The cellar is in a large cave like structure with giant wooden doors paired with automatic sliding glass doors, as seen in the photos.

Each of us got to try two reds and two whites (out of the 8 available on the dispenser for tasting), and all my friends pulled out their wine tasting notebooks and starting taking wine testing notes… me, I just drink… what a noob… haha. Their most famous red wine is “La petite chapelle” which was pretty good. Also tried some of their whites as well, which I’m not a big fan of in general. We couldn’t get a (paid) tour of the cellar because we only have a group of 4, and they need reservations of groups of 5 minimum.

The Vineum is located approximately 1 hour south of Lyon, and the girl driver drove this stretch as she notified me ahead of time I’ll have to do the drive tonight back home after dinner since she’ll be in heels :P. Despite not having to drive, I didn’t really want to get tipsy at 10:30am in the morning, so I ended up spitting out most of the wine into their spit bucket after tasting it.

After Paul Jaboulet Aîné, we wanted to taste more local wines, and pretty much “randomly drove around” following signs to local wineries. We ended up at a local winery by the name of Domaine des 7 Chamins. The gate was opened but all the doors were closed, but we drove in anyway. An old lady came out to see what we were doing (4 Chinese people! Good thing we were nicely dressed and not bum-looking), and with our broken French we explained we wanted to do wine tasting, upon which she fetched another lady to open up the tasting room for us. A this point, the experience is so local, everything is conducted in French with no expectation anyone can understand English.

After this ad-hoc wine tasting (and more spitting), we proceeded to the local town of Tain l’Hermitage, where all the major Rhône Valley wineries are located. The backdrop of the town are hills of vineyards with signs like “Paul Jaboulet Aîné” on them. We stopped by the HQ store of Valhrona, which is apparently a world famous chocolate manufacturer (claims the girl that spent 10 weeks studying at le Cordon Bleu baking in Paris). According to wikipedia, “Valrhona focuses mainly on high-grade luxury chocolate marketed for professional as well as for private consumption. Though considered one of the foremost chocolate makers in the world, Valrhona is in roughly the same price range as Godiva and Neuhaus.” so I guess my friend knows her stuff :). Like the Theo chocolate factory in Fremont, Seattle which I’m sure t.ha is familiar with, there’s free samples around the store. Maybe I’m biased, but I did find Theo chocolate to be slightly better than Valhrona – maybe just my personal preference.

After Valhrona, we walked around the small town of Tain l’Hermitage, posed for a lot of photo ops around town, and then went to another local restaurant for lunch across the street from Valhrona. It was a very local restaurant that looks like a house converted to a dining hall, and as we walked in, everyone in the ground floor dining hall stopped eating and stared at us 😐 – I guess a recurring theme of this trip is that the places we go to A) do not have a lot of Asians, let alone Chinese; and B) don’t have a lot of young people, so we definitely stand out. For whatever reason, the server led us to the dining room upstairs, where we had the entire room by ourselves, which is fine by us. The food was not bad – surprisingly good actually for a small town local restaurant, (just don’t get beef…) and it was another typical slow French meal where a 3 course lunch lasted us from noon to 3pm. Maybe it was the wine, (we ordered a cheap bottle of table wine) but we definitely loosened up and had a lot of fun in what we called “the upper room” by ourselves.

After lunch we walked to another big Rhône Valley winery’s tasting room – Chapoutier. The wine tasting guide we had spoke proper English (with a small French accent, makes the experience all the more authentic) and we were able to try and experiment with a number of wines (again, for free), including Hermitage, Crozes Hermitage, Cote Rotie, etc. We even had the luxury of doing a cross-year tasting, where we tasted their Hermitage (I think) across a few different years, from 1990 (I think, this is where taking notes would have helped) to 2007 (selected years, not every year). There was definitely a noticeable difference in the bouquet and the taste of the wine – I definitely come to appreciate what it means for wines that are “not yet ready” for drinking. And while we’re at it, we tried some whites as well, and here I think I’ve found my favourite white (so far) – a 2006 Chapoutier Chante Alouette – (yes, specifically the 2006, we did cross-year tasting as well) – the bouquet was SO GOOD I just kept smelling the glass again and again.

After tasting a lot of wine (I was definitely tipsy at this point despite spitting a lot of the wine out), we left Tain l’Hermitage and left for our final destination of the day – Valence. Valence is the capital of the department (province) capital of Drôme, and is formerly known as the “Duchy of Valentinois” (for you Dominion players). We were pondering why Valence is so famous, so the cooking girl emailed one of her professors (who grew up in Valence) and asked – apparently Napoleon stopped over here for a night on his way back from exile or something, and that is a huge deal -.-!.

After some regular sightseeing (every European town has a palace and a church, we concluded) we headed to Maison Pic for our dinner reservation where the girls went in to change while I napped in the car. This is the night where we reserved a Michelin 3 star restaurant (Michelin stars only go up to 3) and is the fine dining highlight of the trip! We decked out for this dinner – as we should since we ordered the multi-course sampler meal, which along with tips and champagne (which we started off with, so classy) and NO WINE, came out to EUR €231.25 per person. The other guy friend in the group ordered the classic multi-course sampler which contains traditional favourites (and more exotic ingredients in general) and his bill came to EUR €356.25!

A little history on Maison Pic – the grandfather of the current chef opened the restaurant, received 3 Michelin stars but ended up losing it, and the restaurant was picked up by his son, who regained the 3 Michelin stars but ended up losing them some years later, and now the 3rd generation chef, Anne-Sophie Pic, regained the 3 Michelin stars again in 2007. She is apparently the female cook to garner this award for the first time in 50 years!

I’ll let the photos of this super expensive meal (hopefully the most expensive meal I’ll have in my life) speak for themselves. My overall thoughts were the dishes were very unique and “challenges your palette” as my foodie friend put it. It definitely worked on very unique and distinct combination of tastes in each course (though we found it was a bit “heavy-handed” in that regard) and… a lot of resemblance to Chinese food taste -.-!. In fact, when Anne-Sophie Pic came out from the kitchen to make rounds and chat with all her guests in this exquisite restaurant, my friend actually asked her if her cuisine has any Chinese influence 😛 (the answer was no). As she was going around the tables, I made the joke (to my friends only) that maybe we can ask her if we can get a photo of us… with her taking the photo, haha :P.

The dinner, being French, was insanely long, and clocked out to 5 hours, with lots of waiting in between courses. Dreading the 1h drive back to Lyon, I was prepared to leave past midnight, and when they took away our main course, and started to serve dessert, I was thinking “finally” only to find out there is pre-dessert and a cheese cart before the final dessert -.-!. Being true to our Chinese roots, we paid the entire meal – which came to over €1000 Euros – in cash :P. Someone in our group made the observation that this has been a day where our meals total value were exponentially increasing – we started off with €10 McDonald’s breakfast, and then €100ish for lunch (total bill amount), and ended our day with a €1000ish bill :P.

The drive back to Lyon was tough (you know me and food coma, which is why I typically drive in the mornings and pass the keys on to the other driver in the afternoon), but no stalling, and safe parking :P. We got back pretty late (at least 2am) and we’ve an early start tomorrow as we leave Lyon to continue in our wine and dine adventure!

Full review to come.

Thanks to my beauteyful wifey for the awesome Christmas present.

EDIT (1/21): Missing Photos added!

Sorry for the delay – I’ve been trying to do a pano stitch photo that didn’t work out with PS CS3 nor Hugin. I just gave up at the end, so no pano photo from Day 3.

December 27, 2010
After an eventful evening, we had a relatively late start (around 9am or so) as we walked to the local metro station to begin our tour of Lyon. On our way we passed by a local pastry shop (where we grabbed a small breakfast), a local supermarket (where we later bought supplies such as water) and a McDonalds (where we ended up getting breakfast for the next 2 days). We bought a day pass for the metro, and transferred to a funicular (tram) at the Vieux Lyon metro station to the Fourvière Basilica, a 19th century massive church with antique, classical and Gothic architectural elements and a Byzantine-style interior finish. Nearby the church is a Panoramic viewpoint of the city, although the weather proved to be cold and sucky and everything turned out to be somewhat greyish.

Lyon is a 2000 year old city with Roman roots, and as we walked down from the hill we passed by the Roman theater, remanant from the Roman city of Lugdunum. My friend commented how Roman theaters always appear to have a lot of historical significance but always ends up being a really boring sightseeing spot.

We walked by down to the Vieux Lyon metro station, toured the area a bit (including St. Jean Cathedral) and ended up walking into a bar where we all grabbed a hot drink since it was freezing cold walking around outside. I ordered a vin chaud (hot wine) since it seemed special on the menu, and it literally was heated red wine that is a French specialty which I find to taste like… Chinese herbal tea >.<

Taking the metro back towards the downtown core of Lyon, we followed our Lonely Planet guidebook to a famous local restaurant called Restaurant Léon de Lyon. We arrived at 11:30am, and they don’t start serving lunch until noon, so we ended up walking around the area and discovered a few gems like the Museum of Beaux Arts and this frozen fountain in front of the Lyon city building.

Lunch at Leon de Lyon was very fancy – the decor inside was very nice and the waiters were dressed in very nicely tailored suits (all of us had that same thought about our waiter’s suit). The entree (which is our appetizer) was very good, but their plait (which would be our entree) was a little disappointing – I ordered some form of beef and it tasted like food from Hong Kong’s Cafe de Coral.

After lunch we walked around Lyon a little bit more and then subwayed to this section of time along the Rhone River where there are buildings with giant, life-sized murals painted on their exterior walls. After a few photos we got a call from Hertz and headed back to the hotel so we can get our rental car.

Hertz actually contacted us at lunch and suggested they will send us a cab to take us to the Lyon airport to get a replacement rental car. However, when booking hotels I noticed the airport is actually at least 30 minutes way from downtown (which is where we’re staying), so we suggested if we can pick up a car from the Hertz that is walking distance away from our hotel instead. For whatever reason, they settled on asking us to pick up a new rental car from the train station instead (I think other Hertz locations don’t have a large enough fleet of cars for us to take one on demand). So while the 2 girls rested and napped, the other guy (who couldn’t drive stick but the rental is under his name) and I hopped onto the cab and went to the train station on the other side of town (and river), which is still a good 20 minutes away.

Hertz at the Lyon train station was not ready for us to pick up the car at all – apparently they weren’t notified we were going to come and take a car from them (which seems extremely odd considering Hertz sent us the cab to pick us up from the hotel). After waiting around for things to be sorted out, we requested for an automatic car (although secretly the girl driver and I admitted to each other that we wanted to keep driving manual so we can get practice and be proficient at it), upon which the Hertz agent immediately said they have no automatic cars available. After checking her inventory, she found out there is an automatic car available but it is 3 classes above our booking. While we don’t mind paying the additional cost, 3 classes above our booking would mean a very large car (we booked one class size above a Compact already), so we ended up sticking with our original class size and got a Hyundai i30, which is a hatchback that looks very much like a GTi on the outside. (I did notice hatchbacks are extremely popular in Europe) After some struggles getting the car on reverse, my friend suggested he take some practice runs around the parking lot since there aren’t any cars around, and so I let him drove a few laps. Apparently this older car (33000+ km on it) was a lot lighter and had an easier shift (and has a handbrake!) so he drove around the lot with minimal amount of stalling, and next thing I know he drove towards the exit and started heading out to the big streets! And thus began the expedition back to the hotel from the train station where I lost 10 years of my life :|. With traffic around us and not sure where we’re going, we ended up heading into a shopping center because we entered the wrong lane, and I was super freaked out as cars crowded around us on those steep steep on/off ramps to the parking lot, and my friend over-gasing upon starting in 1st gear and then abruptly braking to avoid ramming into the car in front of us – not to mention the poor downshifting giving me occasional whiplashes. After a good 30 minutes of driving in rush hour traffic, we finally made it back to the hotel in one piece, at which point we obtained the key to the garage, only to have him scratch the car against the side of the garage spot when parking >.< Frustrated, I told him to get out and I ended up parking the car successfully. A note about European parking - the spots are incredibly tight, and to our amusement cars that are parked in the garage have foam padding hung to their sides to prevent scratches and dents. How someone can get into their car is beyond me. Also, throughout the course of this trip, we had to do numerous parallel parking at the sides of the streets, and we truly were fascinated by the superior parallel parking skills of the Europeans at first. The spots were incredibly narrow and there was minimal space left between cars. We would later discover and witness their parking secret of slowly backing until their wheel physically hit the curb, and then they would know to stop and readjust their parking. For super tight spots, they would even ram the car up the curb and park with one set of wheels on the curb, which was something I ended up mastering a few days later in Dijon ;). We would also witness live that cars also physically back into cars behind them before they know when to stop in parallel parking :).

After that ordeal, I was extremely exhausted, but alas it was dinner time. Half asleep at this point, I followed everyone back down the street to the metro station and we ended up somewhere at downtown Lyon again. We wanted a taste of local (rather than touristy) food at Lyon, which apparently is the gastronomical capital of the world. We ended up at a side street with lots of homey local restaurants. A lot of them were closed due to the holidays, and of the ones that were open, the first one we tried was already fully booked for the night. So we walked further down the street and tried another one – we walked into an empty restaurant except for 2 men smoking and having coffee. Apparently one of them was the owner/chef, and he told us he was having coffee with a friend and asked us to come back in 15 minutes :|.

Since the restaurant is local, the bill came out in French handwriting that we could not read, and we couldn’t guess if the bill included gratuity. The owner/chef was nice enough to explain that in France, restaurant prices including taxes (VAT) and gratuity already. Anything beyond the bill is “extra tips” :).

Despite being super tired after dinner (food coma), we subwayed back to the hotel and walked along the Rhone River (which is conveniently next to the hotel) to captures some night views before heading back to our rooms for a good night’s rest for the exciting day ahead!

A bit early for my first day, sitting in the food court. I suppose a 55 minute commute is going to be the average, not completely terrible. I don’t think I’ll be bringing my laptop everyday if I can help it though.

Here goes!

Dec 26, 2010
We woke up and headed downstairs for breakfast at the hotel – one of the girls assumed the breakfast was complimentary, but it turned out it wasn’t and costed us 15 euros each, although the buffet breakfast was really good (I don’t think I’ve ever ate that much meat at breakfast). We then checked out, got our car, set our GPS to Marseille and I was the first driver! After successfully manuvering through the narrow lanes of Barcelona (without stalling), we were on the highway heading to the Spanish/French border when we noticed the GPS arrival time estimate was significantly higher than the one in our plans (by approx. 2 hours). Not thinking too much of it, we ended up taking the “scenic route” through small towns (including many stop lights and hills) until we realize the GPS is set to avoid toll roads – after fixing that 1.5 hour later, we were on a much better time estimate and driving was much easier for me as I don’t have to go through small towns anymore :). In the meantime, we stopped at a McDonalds for a bathroom break and I successfully ordered myself a Pistacchio ice cream (specialty in French McD?) in French!

Since we were somewhat behind schedule due to avoiding toll roads, and Marseille is a little out of our way (our hotel is actually at Lyon, Marseille was just a small detour we’re taking on the way), we ended up opting to stop by smaller towns that are along the way to Lyon, under the argument that these small towns are not accessible by train and since we have a rental car, we should take advantage of it. So we ended up stopping at a bunch of small towns – and not grabbing lunch at all :|. These small towns definitely gave me a first taste of France, and they include:

Narbonne

Béziers
This town was literally on the top of a hill and this is my first major failure driving stick in Europe – I stopped uphill at a stop light and couldn’t start on a green, with a queue of 5-6 cars behind me :(. After failing enough times that the light went from green back to red, I ended up struggling to pull the car aside to a little alley to let cars pass, and then backed out and successfully started again. I blame the lack of a handbrake for this failure 😛 I opted to switch drivers when we left Béziers.

Montpellier
We arrived here at sunset and was rushing to get shots with the last light of the day. The photos turned out quite amazing – definitely one of the better ones from this trip artistically speaking (I’m sure there are comparable ones later on :P).

After grabbing dinner at a local cafe at Montepellier (some yummy French food), we started our 3.5 hour drive towards Lyon. I was half napping in the backseat when I felt the car “stalling” – although it was really bizarre because the car was going around 130km/h (the speed limit for major highways in France is 130km/h) in 6th gear, and so I thought “how do you stall in 6th?”. Apparently the car just abruptly lost gas, and downshifting to 4th did not help “revive” the accelerator. Thankfully this was around 10pm and there was sparse traffic on the highway, so with the momentum of 130km/h, we successfully made it from the left lane to the right shoulder safely. After restarting the car and experiencing the same thing a short distance later in 2nd/3rd gear, we gave up and parked the car at the shoulder and called Hertz. Since having a rental car breaking down on the highway in a foreign country is not common experience any of us have, we ended up making a number of mistakes that required multiple calls.

Call 1: Our car broke down on A9 and south of D59, we’re at the right shoulder of the highway, cannot see highway markers nearby.
Hertz: We’ll send a tow truck with a mechanic to check out your car. (At least they spoke English)
<5 minutes later>
Call 2: We called a few minutes ago requesting a tow truck, and was wondering if the tow truck will be able to fit 4 people plus our luggage. (This was after I recalled the last tow truck experience with sadd3j’s mx3 in Scarborough when only 1 person was allowed to ride in the tow truck)
Hertz: No problem, 4 people can fit.
<5 minutes later>
Call 3: We called before about our rental car broken down at A9 and south of D59, but we provided the wrong address – we are actually on A7 and South of D59. (To be fair, A9 feeds into A7, and A9 does not intersect D59 at all)
Hertz: We already dispatched a tow truck, you’ll have to call 112.

Call 4 to 112: (same as above)
112: … we eventually gave up and hung up.

In the meantime, highway patrol did stop by to check on us; after reassuring them a tow truck is on the way, they left, only to have a second highway patrol car drop by another 10 minutes later, and this time they offered to stay behind us (with their flashing lights) until the tow truck arrives so we are more visible.

30 minutes later, the tow truck / mechanic arrived but he only spoke French – so we struggled to explain the problem to him, and he eventually towed our car… with all of us on board on the back of the tow truck! It was like a rollercoaster ride going through all kinds of backroads and frankly, a little disconcerting since we have no idea where he is taking us. During this time, we also theorized that the problem was possibly because… we’re out of gas! This was because throughout the day I was commenting on how odd the fuel indicator on the dash was, that the tank was still full after driving 200+km (from 10 to 2 at least). (The fuel indicator did slowly start to go down afterwards) So, we thought maybe the fuel indicator was broken and we were in fact out of gas, which seems somewhat consistent with what we experienced (I’ve never ran out of gas with my car so I wouldn’t know what to expect).

The tow truck finally stopped at a garage (apparently the tow truck driver is the garage mechanic) and after explaining how we may not have enough “l’essence”, we fueled up the tank and the mechanic took the car for a test drive, only to experience the same issue twice. He eventually gave up diagnosing the problem, and we called Hertz. Since the car cannot be fixed on the spot, Hertz offered to send us a cab to take us to the nearest town and pay for our hotel for the night. However, we told Hertz that we have a hotel prepaid in Lyon already, so Hertz offered to give us a cab ride to Lyon instead. We waited another 30-45 minutes for the cab to come to the garage to pick us up, and by the time we got into the cab, it was around past 1am, and we’re still 1.5h to 2h away from Lyon.

Almost 2h later, the Rhone River was in sight and we arrived at Lyon, with a whopping cab fare of 480 Euros – probably the most expensive cab ride I’ll ever have in my life! We stopped in front of Hotel du Simplon (which apparently was famous enough to make it to the list in the Lonely Planet guidebook – more on this later), worried that the hotel would be closed already and we would have to wait outside in the cold for the morning before we can check-in, but alas there was someone waiting for us at the reception and we checked in successfully to our rooms. Fortunately the itinerary tomorrow was to tour Lyon using public transit, so we didn’t need to use our rental car in our plans anyway – but not that we cared at this point since we were so exhausted.

A word on Hotel du Simplon – this hotel used to be someone’s mansion, which was converted into a hotel with 35 rooms or so. The interior was antique looking (so old and classy but not dirty) – the elevator was a dinky one (it could only fit one person+luggage) and had a gate which you’ve to close manually before the elevator moved, just like in old movies :). The rooms were definitely clean and comfortable, which was assuring because we made reservations to stay here for 3 nights! Being a classic hotel, they had one strange rule where you have to leave the keys (fancy looking mechanical ones) at the front desk before you leave the hotel, and every time you come back you’ll have to ask for them again at the receptionist.