Christmas dinner in

P1010211, originally uploaded by sindlinger.

While there definitely were plenty of restaurants open - Japanese ones, in particular, were all open - we opted for dinner in. Grabbed some pasta, prosciutto and vegetables from a market down the street, along with a bottle of totally non-descript bordeaux. The one bonus was dessert - we picked up what I think officially qualifies as a yule log [clarifcation: this is someone else's yule log, standing in as a proxy for ours, which we dug into right away without bothering to photograph ... maybe next time].

The woman at the boulangerie/patisserie was friendly enough, which I appreciated - bearing with my minimal/non-existent french-speaking capabilities. I think I've landed on a decent new approach for getting by in shops without any real french. It goes like this:

's'il vous plait ... parlez vous anglais?' 4 out of 5 times this will prompt either a 'oui' or even an 'of course', in which case we're off and running. However, a few times I've gotten an unsure 'c'est depends' or 'un petit peu', in which case I follow with what I hope to be a disarming, empathy-eliciting 'je vais essayer en francais, mais je ne parle bien' ... then I just really start pointing ... je voudrais cette ... et aussi cette, etc. Anyway, the woman seemed to give me the credit for giving it a shot and adopted the demeanor of someone who is ready to deal with a 'slow' person - think the scene from Can't Buy Me Love where the girls at the dance see Patrick Dempsey doing the African Anteater dance, and declare "aww, he must be in special ed".
Also, I suppose the fact that we're getting ready to spend money doesn't hurt either.