a short list of food

Here is a short list of things I have eaten since I got here. I am pretty sure I would feel way too awkward to be one of those people who takes pictures of my food before I eat it, so for now you're going to have to imagine these for yourself.

A Short List of Things I Have Eaten in Paris, All of Which were Ridiculously Good in a Way That Does Not Make Any Sense:

1. pain au chocolat (less than a euro!)

2. pain au chocolat with candied orange peel (exactly the same price as the regular kind, but with extra stuff in it? There seem to be economic principles that just don't apply here.)

3. Chevre sandwiches from three different bakeries. I went on a mission to figure out which one was the best. The answer: two of them are equal but not identical (cheaper but without tomatoes, more expensive but with herbs and purple cabbage and good tomatoes), one is far inferior (too much mayonnaise - they've got a thing about mayonnaise here, but I'll get into that later - and rather unfortunate tomatoes).

4. Some kind of pastry filled with coffee-and-hazelnut flavored cream. I despise coffee, and this was still amazing.

5. Salmon and spinach quiche. This was actually a mistake, I asked for a cheese and broccoli one, but the girl behind the counter appeared to be at her first day of work and clearly didn't really understand what was going on. I watched as one of the other people showed her how to magically turn a piece of paper into a little pastry holder and she stared in complete confusion with one of those expressions that says "Oh no I am totally not absorbing any of this," which I recognized easily because this is what I spend much of my life thinking. When she took my order there was all kinds of confusion, because I have a funky accent and probably pretty bad pronunciation, and those glass food-cases block sound like nothing else. So I didn't feel like complaining, and it was pretty good anyway. Once again, I have never had a quiche that I liked in America. This confirmed my suspicions that we're just doing it wrong.

6. A Canele Bordelais. I actually had no idea what this was, and got it because it was the least expensive of the desserts at the above bakery, and it turned out to be one of the best baked goods I have ever eaten. The idea is a small cake (Wikipedia tells me they are flavored with rum and vanilla; the one I got mainly tasted like all the best qualities of an angel food cake) baked in a little fluted mold, with a very dense, moist interior part and the outside caramelized into a dark, chewy crust.

7. Mirabelles, aka tiny yellow plums. According to my host family it's been a good year for plums because there's been a lot of sun, and while I have not been here long enough to confirm this, the plums were definitely incredible.

8. Figs! A kind of shameful fact about me: before this trip, I had never actually had a fig. To be honest, I'm not sure I'd ever seen one. But they're everywhere here. So, in a move that required a lot of mental and temporal preparation (tip: check the store hours, they are not intuitive), I went to the nearest produce store and bought two figs, opened them with my pocket knife because I am a ten-year-old boy, and ate them sitting on my windowsill. Guess what - I like figs. I like them a lot.

And, of course,
9. cheese, and
10. bread. I actually did my required oral report on bread and why it is important in France, and can now spout off a few random facts if anyone starts to seem interested. Did you know that a baguette is approximately 250 grams? That the average French person eats 58 kg of bread in a year? That there are over 30,000 artisan bakers in the country, and they produce 70% of the bread, and the price of basic bread is fixed so that everyone can afford it and people from Algeria bake their bread differently from French people and France is the fourth producer of wheat in the world and and and bread riots! The French revolution! tHE BREAD DECREE OF 1993!

Bread, guys. It's serious business.

ne pas nourissez les chats errants

With most of my weekday schedules filled in from around 8:30 AM to six or seven at night but the weekends left jarringly empty, I'm quickly becoming a big fan of solo tourism. Taking the other people out of the equation makes the planning go much quicker, and all that's really lost is a few brains for navigating and someone to turn toward when you point at something and go "look, look at that thing, do you also see it." And despite me being a navigationally-challenged individual living in a city that looks like it was organized by starfish, it's not that hard to find your way around as long as you've got a small map and a functional short-term memory. With this in mind, and with nothing planned until four in the afternoon, I decided to spend an Unscheduled Friday in the Cimitiere de Monmartre, which was within reasonable walking distance of my apartment.

So at maybe ten in the morning, I wandered out into the suspiciously empty streets and headed in The Direction. The thing about looking for something as large as a giant cemetary is that you don't really need directions, you just need one direction and if you make sure to stay on track you'll find it eventually. This is pretty much what happened to me - I started out being like, "Well I will go right on Avenue de Clichy until it bears right and I see a metro station and then take this road and then the first right..." What actually happened, after I stood on the sidewalk and twirled around in confusion a few times (I probably didn't literally do this, but you can imagine I did if you want), was that I said, "It's on this side of the road," and that was the Direction and I followed it until, eventually, I ran into a large stone wall.

This was, of course, my destination, but I had, ended up rather far from the entrance, which in my defense wasn't marked on the map. After skirting the perimeter for a while I discovered a bridge and my first view into the cemetary.

The quest to find the entrance was similarly tedious, involving me looking suspicious/like an idiot as I tried opening a large door which turned out to be locked (later, on the inside, a man would ask me if it was possible to exit through this gate, and I would for once be able to emphatically say that no, that door was not useful for going anywhere), but finally I found my way in. I was greeted by a few large signs telling me about the history of the cemetary, famous people buried there (Emile Zola, some singer I'd never heard of, others whose names now escape me), and various small pictograms depicting things you are not allowed to in the cemetary. Do not walk your dog. Do not sit on a bench and drink a bottle of wine. Do not... pour a bowl of cat food for a cat? I had to pause and read the text for that one. "Do not feed the wandering cats."

:D

WANDERING CATS.

The cemetary is filled with cats.

They are everywhere. This is honestly true and not an exaggeration, and despite being in the presence of several dead famous people and a weird microcosm of French architectural history, I found myself most interested in a lot of angry looking cats. I suppose they live inside the tiny-house tombs (What are these called? I like them, and while wandering around I contemplated insisting that one be built for me when I die, just because I like the idea of people coming and sitting in my tomb to get out of the rain.), and I did see one woman who had clearly come in just to feed the Wandering Cats, as she was carrying a huge jar of cat food. I don't know who thinks cats really need to be fed, because they're pretty much designed to eat anything smaller than they are, and while I was there I saw one climb up a tree, which was seriously impressive.

Later on I watched a slug squeeze into a hole in the sidewalk. If you are reading this hoping for helpful recommendations for entertainment in Paris, I remind you that I am not the best judge of "interesting."

But! Enough of that. Onward to the pictures.



Who is this guy, and why is he dead on top of his own grave? Whose idea was this? It just strikes me as an odd way to be memorialized. Like, "Here's Bob. He died. We want you to remember that."




Oh hello there Zola.


And, to conclude, I'm not sure what this is but I really like it.

"sometimes people say my head is too big for my body"

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON from Dean Fleischer-Camp on Vimeo.

eeeeeeeeheheheheheeeeheeeheeeee!

salut

WELL I have been in Paris for one week now, and I figured it would be a good time for a Blog Revival (hallelujah!) in case anyone's interested in the exciting story of me being slightly lost and confused in a foreign country. So here you have it - marvel as I eat bread with every single meal (true), gasp in shock as I forget to properly set my alarm clock and miss my first orientation class (also true). Sit riveted in suspense as I try to figure out where the post office is (it's around here somewhere, I know I've seen it).

The family I'm staying with is lovely and very friendly. They have a large dog named Rimbaud who has hilarious, gigantic dog-lips the way dogs do sometimes, and who likes to sit his head on the furniture. Sometimes when I pet him he smashes his face into my torso exactly the way Nessie used to, though he's probably ten times her size.

Lorraine, who is my host mother, (which is a suspiciously detached title if you ask me, and I avoid it) is a professor who talks exactly like a professor. This is something that kind of freaked me out before I found out what her job was, because without that information it was just as if she was always trying to inform me of something very important, and there was an odd quality to her voice that kept making me feel like I needed to pay close attention. But that all made sense once I figured it out - teachers and future teachers take note: once you become a teacher, you never stop being one. We can tell, you know.