things europe does better: fruit

If you know me, you may know how I feel about fruit. Or you may not, because this is one of those things that most people would try to avoid going around talking about too much. I am a big fan of fruit. Like, seriously. Like I could eat fruit three times a day and never feel like it was too much, partly because there quite possibly more fruits in the world than there days in a year. Since I was maybe thirteen one of my major life goals was to eat every kind of fruit there is.

I thought this was going pretty well, until I got here. Americans, you may not realize this, but your country is bad at fruits. This was a revelation to me. A revelation totally obscured by the variety of fruits suddenly available to me. Let us not expound on the ways that fruits became even more awesome when I got to France.

1. Plums. What, you say, we have plums in America. Yes, we do. But we do not have these plums. Our plums don't have names like Reine Claudes or Mirabelles. And while this might seem like by-any-other-name territory I'm venturing into, believe me, there is a difference. I'm not sure what it is. But a Mirabelle is not a "strangely tiny yellow plum." It is a Mirabelle, and it is probably grown in the gardens of magical fairies and then if you eat one you can never go back to the human world, and I ate a tart made of them. Sorry, humans.

2. Figs. I said this one before in my General Food Post, but I am going to reiterate. I had never eaten a fig before I got here, mainly because I had never actually encountered a fig before. I remember, as a child, reading a short story in a Highlights magazine in which a kid visits his grandfather and they have mundane male-bonding adventures like drinking buttermilk (?) and eating figs, which is apparently a male-specific activity, the reason given being that "girls don't like figs because they're weird and squishy." Figs, not girls. Though from my experience the description fits the girls better.

Anyway, I remember finding that oddly fascinating, because I had never seen a fig, and it was tricky for my mind to come up with a fruit so unpleasant that an entire gender would reject it. As it turns out, whoever wrote that story was just a crazy person because figs are neither squishy nor unpleasant, though my mother did once describe them as "weird." They are like mulberries except huge, and except for the fact that fig sap is mildly irritating and once when I ate one without washing it my lips were somewhat numb for the rest of the day.

3. Juice. I love juice (I'm pretty sure everyone does), and being here is making me suddenly realize just how limited the juice selection is in most US stores. Apple. Cranberry. Grape. Orange, tangerine, grapefruit, orange-tangerine, orange-tangerine-pineapple. And maybe one lonely pomegranate. I remember wondering why nobody made peach juice, or straight pineapple juice. But here it's another thing entirely. Apricot! (apricots are everywhere for some reason) Kiwi! (a freakish green color that I haven't tried yet but am looking forward to) Apple-raspberry-lychee! Something called "seasonal fruits" which had a picture of a fig and a pear on the front! Boggles the mind.

4. Applesauce. Well, this probably doesn't count so much, because the applesauce was pretty much applesauce, I don't think there's a lot of room for error. But: applesauce in little juicebox-type pouches that you suck out through a tube! I can't decide if I feel like a five-year-old or an astronaut. Also, once I came home and my host father was like, "Oh, hi, I made applesauce." As if it was something that you just do once in a while. Maybe it is, I have no idea, but it was pretty awesome.

So there you have it. In addition to bread and cheese, I now have fruit to be mildly disappointed about when I get back home. Do you think a fig tree would grow in Maryland?

Chenonceau

An Italian queen paved the floor in monogrammed tiles,
and now I walk over the eroded remains of her name in my worn sneakers.
In the spiral staircases the half-loosened soles catch the dip
where the king would have stood, where his feet and mine
took pieces of dust as souvenirs.
They never refinished the painted floors--
the gold cowers in the corners, backed up against walls,
defending itself against time--
but the front tower is shrounded in canvas
printed with its own image, and if you look hard you can see through
to the scaffolding bones where they remake, remake.

Now it is october and the vines on the arbor over the terrace
are going yellow and sparse,
and I am thinking from beneath them that this
is how it should be.
I am wearing yellow and still the smaller fish flee from my shadow
as I walk by, and this is okay,
the way the water climbs up the white bricks and descends again
with a grain or two of stone to remember this day.

Maybe someday the rain will come in the windows
and collect in the hollows of someone's initials,
run down the stairs in arcs and turns, a spiraling, carved-out throat,
and catch in the basement,
fish weaving through the window bars.
I think of the swallows' nests hanging lobed and papery
under the lips of the high towers--
will the pigeons huddle in the rafters in Louise's bedroom?
Will they nurse their children on her tears,
knit the crowns of thorns into nests of tapestry fiber?
Someone has scraped their initials into the sand in the garden path,
and now they are gone, and so will be their signature,
and they do not mind this.

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.

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.