i love reading the posts here for suggestions and recommendations, so i thought i'd give back. just back last week from paris (2nd time) and the burgundy region (1st time). here is a report on our activities...

paris - as usual, walked a lot but we made better use of the metro this time. by the end of the trip, i got all my bearings and there was less walking in circles.

opera tour - fantastic! a WOW moment... it was incredibly beautiful.

notre dame gargoyles - stood in line for 45 minutes, but worth the lung busting climb

seine river boat tour at night - nice perspective; great for our 1st night there, we were getting spacy at day's end

place de la concorde - recreated a pic from my dad's visit back from the late 50's

bastille sunday market - nice market, similar to grenelle, but i think a little bigger. we got scarves, soaps, tapenade & jams

eglise madeleine - big church in greek style. we walked in on mass. long homily! the "gift store" in the back was open for business during mass, which i thought was funny.

charlotte en ile - wonderful hot chocolate (dare we say maybe better than angelina) in a charming & tiny 5 table store front on ile st louis

fun & non-christmassy christmas window display at printemps. we also did more scarf shopping in front of galleries & printemps, but unfortunately our scarf lady got ripped off while we were there. it was a bummer.

passages jouffroy - neat shops in covered passageway. there's a patisserie in there that we need to go to next trip - their pastries look incredible & apparently they have hot chocolate too!

laduree on rue royale - what a treat! definitely a place to take mom - very traditional , proper place to have high tea. we went to lunch here one day. it was expensive, but very good and their famous macarons don't disappoint! we brought some home too

watched old men play boule in park near the invalides. they were fun & we became their groupies. fisherman guy let me rub his head for good luck. we named them; the others were dubbed magnet man (he had a homemade magnet that picked up his boule), ambassador & bohemian guy.

ate a lot. what else is new? lots of good places in the marais, where we stayed.

places des vosges - ate or snacked at 3 out of the 4 restaurants there.

jl poujourain boulangerie - went back the morning we left town. i had the petit fougasse w/olives and dee had the fig & nut bread & we both had madeleines again. yummy! as good as i remembered from the last time.

dijon - a very nice city. i liked it a lot. we did a walking tour with a map from the tourists office. a
really fun city to walk and explore. their buildings have lots of fun detail. you must look up a lot and my neck hurt but it was very neat to see all the neat signs and carvings. they have a good market, lotsa food mostly and olive wood utensils and basic housewares. the best boulangerie is paul, but we've discovered they are a chain and there are a couple stores in paris that we saw. good chocolates at a. boutreaux, with a crabby sales lady. it was in dijon when we all discovered we love "fromage blanc" as a dessert.

our gite near saulieu in the hamlet of champeau en morvan (what exactly constitutes a hamlet anyway?) - very nice! great, pretty, quiet, pastoral. lots of the white charollais cows that are so famous in burgundy beef. the owners spoke very little english, but they were very nice (they provided a nice bottle of aligote wine and homemade apple cider)! got lots of practise with my french, but of course, with a funny story to boot. i was trying to make small talk (hard to do when one's vocabulary is small) and while m. rozerot was showing me & dee where he kept the firewood, i asked if that structure was once a place for "les cheveux". he had a puzzled look and said, "comment?" i looked at dee, struggling for the word for horse, thinking aloud. then the m. said that the barn was for "les chevaux". at that time, i realized my mistake and we cracked up. we made dinner there one night and brought lunch in another day. and i was the fire master, making a fire every morning for breakfast.

auxerre - another fun medieval town with a good walking tour. great old clock tower in town center and neat painted statues scattered about. their market was mostly food, with a smattering of tube socks and undies. i felt like i was back home...

vezelay - beautiful, picturesque town! basilique madeleine was beautiful, very austere architecture with nice detailed column tops (whatever those are called). beautiful views of the valley from the back of the basilica.

avallon - bustling town, not as fun as auxerre. they also have an old clock tower and remnants of a fortress.

arnay le duc - stopped there on the way to beaune. the map said there were monuments and stuff, but the michelin green book has no mention of the town at all, which i thought was odd. it was another small medieval town. walked around and checked out the fun old buildings.

beaune - cute, fun & touristy. lots of wine shops, loads of places to eat. their market on wed is small, but we got mustards and more nougat from a funny nougat man! he teased me incessantly since i was the only one who spoke french to him. the hotel dieu is amazing, so beautiful, i'd want to be there if i were on my deathbed. the rooftop was amazing. good gargoyles at the eglise notre dame. our best, true french burgundian eating experience was at maxime's: a 2+ hour meal, starting with aperitifs (the girls had kir), then burgundy snails, boeuf bourgignon, dessert and coffee. all were very good!

flavigny sur ozerain - candy capital of burgundy! we went to the factory where they make my favorite anis pastilles, but i couldn't figure out if they were giving tours or not. cute cute town! i bought all the different flavors of pastilles i can't get in the states (for that matter, anywhere else in france), around 17 flavors! i came home with what seemed like 2k of candy. we also realized afterward that "chocolat" was filmed there. bonus: public toilette looked like it could have been dangerous, but voila! a new, modern system was put in not long ago. so the moral of this story is, when ya gotta go, you are gonna go looking anywhere even if it looks foul.

abbaye de fontanay - amazing, beautiful setting. more austere architecture, which i like. happy to have seen it in beautiful sunny weather (it only rained our very 1st day - in paris).

montbard - a working class town, with what looked like a lot of "new" construction homes. kind of a dud, only 2 restaurants open in the town centre. but lunch was good anyway.

chateau de tanlay - very cool (literally - it was colder inside than outside) - how did they keep warm at night anyway? it was a nice short tour given by a nice french lady who didn't speak english. we got english pamphlets describing each room, full of furniture, personal effects, etc. of course i tried making chit chat again, only to find out that the current owner of the chateau has been married 3 times. if i spoke more french, i could have gotten more dirt.

saulieu - "biggest" town near our gite. kinda small, a statue by animal sculptor francois pompon, a former resident of saulieu and once a student of rodin, and basilica st. andoche. as we were taking pictures of the church, an older lady asked if i spoke french. i said no (thinking she was gonna ask me something really complicated), she said "tant pis", then started telling me that the basilica is under renovation and that there is a relic in there of charlemagne and then asked if we were going to st. saturnin. i told her no, she said "quel dommage" (she actually said my 2 favorite phrases in one conversation!) and that the bell tower there is made of wood shingles. what a nice lady.

we contributed nicely to their economy. there was a nice cheese man at the fromagerie and nice lady at the traitreur/charcuterie. bought stuff from the local stores and boucherie. ate at 2 of 3 patisseries and had dinner at 3 restaurants in town. one of which was another interesting experience. it was really a formal kind of place, a little fancy, unbeknownst to us. lots of cutlery changes, with forks i've never seen before (for fish). and we think with wait staff in training. the girl who brought our coffee was so shaky i was willing her to put the cups down without spilling. whew!

semur en auxois - a cute picturesque medieval town. there's a great view of town as you drive in from saulieu. they have 4 towers still intact. the eglise notre dame there has really funny gargoyles. my favorite is the pig gargoyle.

we had a funny experience at a place where we stopped for hot chocolate. we walked into a salon de the and propmptly got stared at. then someone was told to get us menus. we all ordered hot chocolate and what we thought were chocolate biscuits. instead we had hot chocolate with a biscuit bottomed chocolate mousse cake. oof! choco-overload! if that wasn't enough, the lady there ordered the pastries from a local bakery (she did that with everyone who ordered pastries), then ran out to get them and then brought them in to us on plates. oh, and the shop was also a clothing store. there was a rack of clothes on sale too. i think at the end of the night someone figured out we had 3 desserts that day within 10 hours.

chateau d'epoisses - a really neat chateau! apparently the building was 3 times bigger but during the revolution, 2 of the buildings were destroyed. the property is cool because you can really imagine the moats full of water, since the walls are all intact. the town itself is famous for their epoisses cheese. didn't have any but would have to liked to.

post with any questions or comments.
tina

I loved the positive, informative style of your report. Nice way to lay out your impressions. Easy to see you had a great trip.

Thanks for sharing Tina. Lovely images.

You just got back? Great! How was the weather? Still "Fall" over there?
Did you find any difference between the people in Paris and the citizens outside the city?
I was in Burgundy last year...loved it

I absolutely love Burgundy and am glad you had a great time. Did you visit any of the wineries?

Thank you for your trip report. I have a friend who has a vineyard near Chablis and on my first trip to France over six years ago he took me to many of the places you visited in the Burgundy area. You brought back some good memories.

hi all,
thanks for the nice feedback. the weather was great, between 50-60. when i left paris last tuesday, it was sunny in the 60's! the fall colors were ablaze in burgundy. we stayed near saulieu, which borders moran regional park, so it's a very forested area. the drives were really pretty.

suziec, i thought the main difference between parisians and "country folk" was that parisians were more likely to speak english. outside of dijon & beaune, we found very few english speaking folks, even is they are in the tourist trade. however, i felt wherever that if i tried to speak french, people were almost always nicer. probably true just about anywhere.

to loriny: no, unfortunately we didn't get to the wineries. we had so much fun roaming around the towns that by the time we even thought about going there, we were pretty done for the day. my friends had local wines at dinner (i can't drink alcohol, so i can't elaborate) and always enjoyed them. their favorite wine was a cote de nuit, the area just south of dijon.

hope to go back sometime soon! i loved it there...

What hotel in paris did you stay in?

Great report-thanks!!

hi lornamd-
i stayed at the grand hotel malher in the marais. it's so convenient to everything, right off the no.1 line, a block to the st. paul station. very basic, clean, a 2 star hotel. i would stay there again, for sure.
tina

Thanks for a great trip report. We also love Burgundy (and Paris too!) We stayed in Vezelay twice and really loved the basilique, etc. Also, saw Semur and Epoisses. We are planning another trip for next fall and are hoping to return to Burgundy area for a couple of days. Thanks for good suggestions on other villages to see - we definitely want to see Flavigny - wished we had gone there after seeing Chocolat.

Where did you stay in Saulieu? Is there a website? Was it a good place to stay and easy to see the other villages?

Thanks for sharing!

hi blh-
we stayed in a 4 bedroom gite (country house) outside of saulieu. i love staying in country homes; it gives you some independence and also can be very economical, since we stayed for 6 days.

here's their website. we stayed in the larger gite. the owners have a smaller one as well, but unsure where that one is. probably around the same region. it should be noted that the owners do not speak english.

http://gitesenmorvan.chez.tiscali.fr/

we ate at a couple of places that had lodging attached: hostellerie de la tour d'auxois and hotel de la poste. i think both have websites and the hotels looked pretty nice and reasonable in price and both restaurants were very good.

saulieu seemed pretty central to the towns, depending on where you want to go... although it always took us an hour to get anywhere, since you can't drive too fast on those roads. semur looks to be a good, central town to stay as well.