Bonne Année 2019

The French have a tradition that I really like.  Instead of sending Christmas cards, they send New Year’s cards.  They can send them any time during the month of January. If you tip a service person, you put it in your New Year’s card. So what happens is that here in France people prepare for Christmas with the presents and the parties and going to Galleries Lafayette to see the windows without the fuss of writing Christmas cards. Then, after you take the tree down, put it out on the sidewalk for pick-up, you have the rest of the month to write cards. People are still saying Bonne Année to me. It’s nice. I feel like I’m slowly moving into 2019 with the daily reminder to make it a good year.

The French have a tradition that I really like.  Instead of sending Christmas cards, they send New Year’s cards.  They can send them any time during the month of January. If you tip a service person, you put it in your New Year’s card. So what happens is that here in France people prepare for Christmas with the presents and the parties and going to Galleries Lafayette to see the windows without the fuss of writing Christmas cards. Then, after you take the tree down, put it out on the sidewalk for pick-up, you have the rest of the month to write cards. People are still saying Bonne Année to me. It’s nice. I feel like I’m slowly moving into 2019 with the daily reminder to make it a good year.

I spent New Year’s Eve in the town of Annecy in the Haute-Savoie region of France. Annecy sits at the north end of Lac d’Annecy, a lake that has a 32 kilometre circumference that one can walk, run or bike easily.

My friend, Barbara, and I spent four nights there. What for me is the most amazing part of traveling at any time of the year in France is the transportation. Annecy is southeast of Paris, about an hour south of Geneva. By car, the fastest driving route takes five and a half hours if you don’t stop. By TGV (fast train–often going up to 200 km per hour), the trip is a bit over three hours. Marseille, in the south of France, is just over three hours. Bordeaux is two hours. Even the small towns along the Côte d’Azur where the train stops at every famous spot, one wouldn’t spend more than five or, at the very most, six hours on the train. These are comfortable trains with tables to write at or play games. There are always one or two “Bar” cars that sell sandwiches, drinks and sweets. There is every kind of discount card imaginable. A senior card that often has first class fares that are lower than second class fares for the under 62 years old set. A weekend discount card, a weekday discount card, a youth discount card, a student discount card.

To go such a distance for only four nights is easy. Our AirBnB was a five minute walk from the station. We spent one day just walking around the town of Annecy, especially Le Centre Historique and Vielle Ville with cobbled streets, winding canals and pastel-colored houses. The Marché de Noel was alive and well and open until January 6. We took a bus ride up to La Closaz, a ski area, hoping to ride the chairlift to the top of the mountain. We were told that the winds were quite bad that day and the lifts weren’t operating while we were there. So we took the bus back and went to a movie!

On our last full day, New Year’s Eve day, we started on a walk down the west side of the lake. We stopped for a coffee in Sévrier, about 7km south of Annecy, and ended up eating lunch. We walked out of the Café to blue skies and a warm sun, the first we had seen of the sun during our trip. It transformed the lake and everything around it. We now could see what everyone was raving about when they told us how much we would love Annecy, how beautiful it is. Indeed, with the sun bouncing off the snowy white mountains and reflected in the lake with it’s multitude of sailboats, it was dreamlike.

We stopped in a store as we walked home and Barbara asked about fireworks. The salesperson looked at her and said “This is Annecy. We don’t have fireworks here.” “Completely calm and quiet?” Barbara said. “Oh yes.”

We leaned out the living room window just before midnight and heard people counting down the minutes to midnight at the top of their lungs. At midnight, we saw a few fireworks very far off in the distance. It was hard to tell if it was a suburb or where they were originating from. After a few screams and yells, a siren or two, all was quiet by 12:30am!!

As we got off the train at Gare de Lyon the evening of January 1, 2019, Barbara and I looked at each other and said almost at the same time, “This is so easy. The train ride flies by in no time. I got so much done!!!” And we both went towards our separate routes home. The metro for me and the train to the suburbs for Barbara.

Welcome to 2019. I hope to see you in Paris this year.

A bientôt,

Sara