Bonne année!

Apparently you have to say this to everyone for the first few days of the year and then on some particular day, it stops. I suspect epiphany might be that day - we'll see what happens when I go back to work on Monday.

We saw in the new year with a dinner party on our flat: 10 guests, 5 cheeses, 2 terrines, 1 risotto, several tarts, desserts and petits fours, 3 bottles of champagne, 6 bottles of table wine, one bottle of dessert wine, one bottle of port. At midnight we went running down the street to the pont neuf to catch what we expected to be a spectacular firework display. Turns out there isn't one in Paris: the large crowd on the pont neuf was in fact there to watch the eiffel tower start to flicker to mark midnight. We popped the champagne cork into the river and celebrated anyway. Hopefully some of the guests will post some photos to flickr..

Since then we've spent an excellent few days with jenny, julia, chris and mark, eating well (bistrot l'oulette was still the best), velib'ing to the Eiffel tower, and doing other tourist stuff like visiting the Rodin museum, which was great. There are definite advantages to a musuem dedicated to a single artist: you can see his style develop, see his study pieces, his antique collection (Rodin had lots of little Egyptian sculptures) and see which pieces of other artists work he bought (the only artist he had two paintings from was van Gogh).
The best thing there though was the Burghers of Calais - as well as being visually very powerful, it has a nice story behind it, both in terms of the original story and the story of the Calais council initially rejecting Rodin's proposal for the monument - which seemed to be a recurring theme of all of Rodin's state commissions. The original stands in Calais, but at the Rodin musuem there's a whole room full of studies, casts and trial versions.