And we STILL didn't get the key to the church

Today, Lannae posted a thoughtful summary of her trip to Burgundy, and yet again, it reminds me of some asinine adventures I had within the same setting...

My sister E. and I found ourselves in France in the summer of 1997. Every two years, our family has a reunion, usually in Germany. We had flown into Madrid, and made our way slowly across Spain and France before the familial festivities began in stodgy Deutschland.

We stayed in Dijon, because we fancied ourselves wine-aficionados, or, maybe just winos. We quickly fell in with a crowd of students. A few of them were North African dudes studying at the university, and they bought us drinks and politely asked us how we liked Dijon.

I should point out that, when drinking, my sister and I have an exaggerated notion of our foreign language skills, so we replied (en Francais), "Because we are WIVES! And we would like the key to the church."

We asked several people, as "wives," for the "key to the church" before someone pointed out our error.

Nevertheless, the guys bought us dinner and put up with our super-crap French before endlessly haranguing us for a date the next night.

We finally agreed, just so they would leave us alone, but secretly planned to ditch them.

The next morning, we went to Beaune for a daytrip. It was exceedingly beautiful country. There were flowers among the vineyards, little rocky hills and gorgeous old trees. The city of Beaune was picturesque. Having no idea what to do, we wandered around until we found a playground and rode on the see-saw and took pictures of each other.

After dicking around in the vineyards, and making up a song called "Everything in Europe is a Bloodstain" (referring to the intense history of this region, and our own extreme ignorance of that history), and laughing so hard that we both peed our pants, we found a little restaurant on a side street that served us the Best Lunch I Will Ever Eat.

No, I don't know the name of the restaurant, I could never find it again and I'm not even clear what we ate, but there were so many courses, and so many sauces and cheeses and tender cuts of meat, I can't imagine any meal will ever compete with the casually perfect nature of that feast. We were the only patrons the whole time we were there. Maybe the pee-smell warded off others.

We then wandered into one of the many wine cellars in the center of town, and were immediately ushered into a wine tasting tour.

The tour leader gave us cute little books in which to take notes about these wines.

The first thing we noticed were the tureens into which people who tasted the wines would spit after they sloshed it around in their mouths for awhile. WHY, people? What is the POINT? You would get wine into your mouth, and then spit it out? Weirdos.

We determined to swallow every ounce of wine we could get our mitts on in that cool cellar filled with history and beverage. AND we would keep a record of our impressions, for sure.

Things degraded rather quickly, as our impressions of the wines show:

"Smooth, oak-y taste. Kind of nice."
"Good. But not so good we'd pay that much for it."
"Dangerous, but safety conscious"
"Popular, yet unattractive"
"Sexy in an obvious way/Saxophone player"
"Unassuming, but well-hung"
"Like the black cougar from that one episode of 'Fantasy Island'"
"Afraid of clowns"


You get the picture. Other people started copying off our our notes, we were that good. So if you see a wine tasting guide to that region with suspiciously similar notes, you know they were ours.

Of course we don't remember catching the train home, but we must have, as my next recollection is waiting for our dates to arrive...

We had struggled all day with the guilt -- those guys were so nice, they bought us dinner, they didn't mind that we were wives and we wanted the key to the church. We owed it to them to go on another date with them. So we half-heartedly cleaned up and dressed up and waited outside our pension. For an hour.

They blew us off! Les Scoundrels!

So E. and I retired to the gyro place around the corner. It had a glass-fronted window, so we could see if those guys happened to materialize.

The next scene will forever play in excruciating slow motion in my head...

Me: Je... uh... voudrais deux gyros.
Gyro guy: Avec mayo?
Me: Huh? Oh, uh, oui.

By the next morning, I wanted to die. The mayonnaise had been spoiled. My vomiting sessions had already clogged the fragile toilet in our pension.

But we had already pre-paid for reservations to Munich that morning. We also preferred to get out of that barf-filled pension before the proprietors realized what their neighbor's rotten mayo had done.

E. was miraculously unaffected by the mayo, so she let me lean on her all the long walk to the train station. We sat on the platform in Dijon, waiting for the train, while I continued to barf all over the pavement.

E. repeatedly refilled our water bottle and attempted to clean up the vomit from the platform. We were trying to be nice about our gastric difficulties. But all the French people in the station gravitated TOWARD me. People started sitting on the bench with me, they were standing within a yard of me, and inching slowly closer to the Danger Zone. Why?

Mercifully, the train arrived, my stomach was fully empty, and we found our own air-conditioned cabin bound for Germany.

And that's when my sister's bowels began to rumble...