La Charité sur Loire

Soon after the Fête des Lumières, my family showed up :)

They drove all day and finally arrived, and I met them by the cathedral and brought them back to my Hobbit Hole for some hot leek and ham shepherd's pie.  I think they enjoyed it, though we barely all fit in my tiny apartment!

During the week that they were here in Nevers we did a lot of exploring, though the weather wasn't exactly cooperative.  On the Sunday before we left for Paris, we took a day trip to La Charité sur Loire based on a tip that one of my colleagues gave us; there was a Christmas market and book festival going on, so of course we couldn't pass up the chance to go to there!

Like most French cities, La Charité is just...sooooo....old!  I can never get over how ornate the buildings are and what a great mixture of architecture there is based on who was building what and when, nor can I stop guessing when they were built, who lived in them, what they did, who they loved.  It's an astonishing timeline, and we miss so much of it in the states because life there is so NEW! 

The Christmas market was in a cavern underneath a bunch of other buildings, including this gorgeous Cathedral.

It was exactly what you'd expect from a French Christmas market: regional specialties, vendors selling homemade goods, stands with cotton candy (?) and roasted chestnuts and vin chaud, my family's new favorite drink.  There were people selling Christmas cards, hats and scarves, jewelry, candles, wooden toys, stained glass....

...and a sax-playing Santa!

At first glance, I thought this was a giant meringue!

 We even found one man selling little scenes of French life painted on escargot shells. 

Only in France :)

If these aren't the best souvenir of France, I don't know what is...unless you get to eat the escargot beforehand :)

After we left the Christmas market, we found ourselves in the old centre ville of La Charité.  The city is known as the City of Words, and they prove that identity all over town with quotes from French authors and poets printed directly on the buildings. 

"And it's sometimes in a look, a smile, where hide the words that we never knew how to say."

We found a fun, quirky café called Babette et Eva, where we had some vin chaud (hot spiced wine) and enjoyed a live musical performance by a one-man band called Rotor Machine. 

Rotor Machine, whose CD we own if anyone is interested ;)

I think this was right before I spilled my vin chaud all over Mica :P

A dresser straight out of Alice in Wonderland. 

The music was loosely classified as French folk rock; we spent hours there, enjoying the quirky café and the great music.  It was a great rainy-day little foray into the Chritmas spirit of France :)