Wednesday, February 14, 2007

It was supposed to be a surprise...

The best laid plans...

Last week I decided I would try and do something a bit different for Valentine's Day this year. I rarely do anything special because it's only 3 days before Desney's birthday and it gets overly complicated and such...

So this year I thought that instead of the annual bouquet of flowers, which is always incredibly difficult to get properly delivered, I would take my wife out for lunch. I thought it would nice to surprise her with some time for just the two of us and break up her busy and stressful day.


I started looking around for restaurants near where she works (La Défense) last week and had difficult determining if any of them were a fancy restaurant or a simple café or anything in between. Finally I decided to ask for some secret help and I spoke to people I know who work in the same building as her and asked them to recommend a really nice place which was really close. After quite a lot of suggestions I decided to go with La Safranée which is a very fancy-looking place specialising in sea food. Desney mentions that we don't have fish that often so I thought this would go well. I gave them a call and reserved lunch for the two of us for Valentine's day at 12:30.

Then Monday night, over dinner, Desney just happens to mention that she's having lunch with a friend of hers on Wednesday. "Wednesday?" I reply. "Valentine's Day???" I add trying not to seem overly interested. However it's obvious that she's made plans and that she's not going to be available. I decide the only way to get out of this is to blow the surprise and just go for whatever it takes to get the same final result: a lunch for just the two of us on Valentine's day. After a bit of discussion she says she'll let me know if she can reschedule. Finally last night she confirmed that she has rescheduled her lunch with her friend and she's available.

Of course the photos of the place look beautiful, the terrasse looks peaceful and green and everything is just inviting. In reality the restaurant may be lovely... but the day itself is just plain grey, wet, cold, wet, windy, wet, cloudy, wet and just plain wet. Luckily our table was indoors.

We had a very nice lunch and it was a great moment to sit around eating and talking as just of the two of us adults without having to be hosts, or polite friends or parents.

A Valentine's moment which I'm sure you'll see in a Hallmark advert some day...

PS: I apologise for the overuse and abuse of the word "nice" in this post but I was simply not inspired...

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