The first leg of our French journey was spent at Annecy. I felt a little anxious about this because I had bought the Geneve to Annecy train tickets online (and stupidly bought a specific connection rather than a normal point to point) but when I remembered about the Lausanne-Geneve tickets the day before, it was already too late- I never learnt to use the ticket machines and just queued up for physical tickets everyday in the SBB ticket office. So we got up really early on the day and had to wait for 7am for the office to open. Luckily, at the ticketing office, I found out that we still had plenty of time. To be honest, I could not remember much of the attractions at Annecy because it was so small a place and nothing stood out in my memory. Even going through the photos, I did not think Annecy was that different from what we had seen at Switzerland. I think we snapped exactly one photo of Château d’Annecy (or what I assumed was the Chateau) and then bridges and colourful houses and a big mountain range at a lakeside park (forgot the name). For dinner, I ordered roasted bone marrow for Mum (Mum eats beef bone marrows which is a Chinese dish) and BBQ pork breast for myself. Unfortunately, the bone marrow happened to be coming from a big mutton bone and was too fatty for Mum’s taste whereas my BBQ sauce had a tomato base and tomatoes are not part of my usual diet because I’m born with an aversion to sourness. Epic food failure contrasting with my initial high hope for French cuisine.
The second day at Annecy was given to visiting Menthon-Saint-Bernard and Tallories. We got to the bus stop without mishaps but I was trying to find bus line 60 to no avail. Luckily, there was a Sibra (the bus company) office right nearby and there I found out that the line 60 no longer exists and has been replaced by line 20 which does not come until 11am (we had already missed the 9ish one; this bus runs for about 2 hours and then there’s a break of about 2 hours until it starts running again). We boarded without mishap but there was really nothing at Menthon-Saint-Bernard except the Chateau and we could not find a way to access it on foot (we kept coming to a sign that pointed to a car-only path towards it) so we did what we did with all the castles we came across: snap a photo of it from below and zoom in with the photo. It started raining in the afternoon so we gave up going on further to Tallories and just returned to Annecy by bus. We ordered half a dozen snails in croquilles (pastry) and meuniere perch fillet for dinner. The snails were okay but out of the four that I ate (Mum was already down with the cold and had a smaller than usual appetite), I only tasted one with a definite meat texture (which I felt was a bit chewy and akin to calamari meat) while the rest just tasted like the whole dish was just creamy garlic sauce. As for my meuniere perch fillet, I guess I had too much expectation for it but being used to steamed fish, a slowly cooked pan-fried fish was not that special. Sure, the fish meat was soft but not a style of cooking that I would be falling in love with.
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