Festival de Lumières, and other excitement in Lyon

I can't even say that the holiday season is fast approaching...it's already here.  It's sort of unbelievable that I am two days away from Christmas break and three days away from flying back to CA, although I am more than ready for it.  The past few weeks--and really the whole fall--have gone by really fast, but I think it will be good for me to go home and fill up the tank a little bit.  Things have been fairly intense lately.

For one thing, there has been a lot of travel.  Coming on the heels of my weekend in Paris and then in Tours, I went back to Lyon last Friday to visit with Clara and see the Festival of Lights, an annual celebration in the city that centers around the 8th of December, the day on which--legend has it--the Virgin Mary saved the city from the plague during the middle ages.  Traditionally, the Lyonnais put candles in the windows of their houses to mark the occasion, but in the last hundred years or so, the festival has morphed into this huge outdoor spectacle featuring electric light shows that lasts a week and draws crowds from all over France (and, indeed, the world).  It was a sight to see.

so all these photos are from Therese.

Once again, I forgot my camera

I was glad to have gone, although I think that if I lived in Lyon, it would not be something that I would go out for every year.  I was somehow under the impression that it would be displays with candles, the way it was traditionally, and the displays of electric lights, while many were impressive (and some were truly bizarre--see below), were not really to my taste.  Having grown up with the luminarias of Albuquerque, I prefer lights that flicker to those that strobe.

Does this look like a giant desk lamp?  That is what it is.

I think that I was also less able to take in the glories of the light displays because it was the end of a long day.  The weekend was so packed with activities that we actually wrote out a schedule for Clara, me, and Therese to follow (I get a neurotic pleasure from checking things off lists).  Everything we did was absolutely worth doing, but the total impact was somewhat more than we had bargained for, especially since some of the individual events proved taxing.  Not everything went according to plan, but we did manage to do everything we meant to.

Case in point: part of the day's activities included cooking a fabulous dinner of new (tajine) and traditional (souffle) French recipes.  The piéce de résistance was to be the desert, crème brûlée.  Although our attempt this time was more successful than our previous efforts, there were still a couple setbacks.  More specifically, the torch Clara had bought for brûlée-ing turned out to be a bad bargain, since it refused, either to light easily or stay on more than a few minutes at a time.  We exerted ourselves, however, and discovered that, even when the sparker was not working, the butane was still coming out, so we were able to jury-rig a technique whereby we used an electric lighter and the torch with a two-man approach that worked, in a Macgyver sort of way.  Despite the unorthodox flaming, the brûlée ended up tasting delicious.