Dijon & Beaune

So the next stop was Dijon which is famous for the mustard, however we found out that the mustard seeds actually all come from Canada! In fact most mustard seeds in the world are grown in West Canada. The style is Dijon though and it didn't stop them from selling mustard at every souvenir shop in town.

Anyway, not sure if this has been shown in Australia/UK or not but a while back Obama went out and ordered a burger. Yeah, a burger. And basically most of the US news channels televised this. We saw it on John Stewart's show where he recapped the coverage. One of the channels showed the footage for over five minutes with the most pathetic commentary ever. So now there is a Dijongate scandal because Obama like 'French (or Canadian' - depending how you look at it) mustard better than American mustard. They even edited out him asking for Dijon! Madness.

Anyway, mustard aside, we went for the wine! Dijon is part of Burgundy and they are famous for their wines. We took a day trip out to Beaune which is part of the Cote d'or region. Our first stop there was Marche aux vins (or 'wine market' in English). They had a cellar tour and tasting where you basically walked through the cellar and every so often there would be a barrell with a bottle on it. When you got to the bottle you just helped yourself. Nice! Also they used a tastevin instead of a tasting glass which was pretty cool. Here's one of our stops...

It took us a while to get around as I think there was about 15 wines to taste. And then there were some liquers at the end. Did you know that Creme de Cassis also originates from around here?

By this stage everything had closed for lunch (which is very common) so we had no choice but to have a two hour lunch. And there's no better place to do that than in France. I had 4 courses for €22 and Nate had 5 courses for €28 which we though was pretty good value.

To start with an amuse bouche...


Nate had salmon carpaccio...

And I had the escargot but we ended up sharing because the snails were so good.

For mains Nate had rabbit...

And I had Coq au vin with tagiatelle...

Then Nate got a cheese course which I obviously helped him eat...


And then for dessert there was that nougat ice thing again...

And Nate got something we can't remember but here's a picture...

Then we tasted some more wines and it was a pretty good day all up but I think I fell asleep on the train back to Dijon.

The next day we had a segway tour booked!! We had wanted to do one before but they'd always been over €50. This one was €16 for some weird reason. Then when we rocked up in the morning we were the only people on the tour! He asked if we wanted to do the historic part or go to the park so we opted for the park. After we got there he let us crank up to 15km per hour from the basic 6km per hour. He said he wouldn't usually let people do that so we were happy. Anyway, here's me on my segway...

We stopped at this man-made beach thing for a bit of a break. Here's Nate at the beach (there were heaps of planes leaving vapour trails in the sky so it looked cool).

After that he let us crank them up to 20km per hour and we went for a lap around the lake. It was so much fun! Nathanael reckons he wants to give up walking and just get a segway. As if! Anyway, here's a picture of Nate and his segway.