"Chicken and granola bars used to be my favorite food, but then I became a vegetarian, so now it’s just chicken..."

Tonight for dinner with Madame we had artichokes with vinaigrette for dipping, cheese soufflés, fig and nut cheese with baguette, and apricot-pistachio tart for dessert.
No, really.

Meals like that are what I will always remember about France...
That, and Madame’s stories.

I think I have mentioned before my abhorrence of horses. I suppose that’s kind of a strong word, but I really don’t like them much, for a lot of reasons, all of which would offend the myriad group of friends I have, so I will refrain from mentioning all of them except these two: much though I can front like a mountain goat if you put me in a camp t-shirt and camo shorts, the truth is that I would much rather be in black jeans and a concert shirt, which is why I hate riding on horses– one inevitably ends up sweaty, sticky, sore, dirty, itchy, and smelly (like hay and horse poo– people who say barns smell good have obviously never been in one; the hay alone makes my eyes water just thinking about it). And the other reason is that the actual act of riding is so difficult, which means that when you end up on the ground instead, and you are already sticky, all the dust sticks to you, which is sick.

Despite my personal preference against all forms of equitation (the French word again), I still have been summering in Kentucky for long enough that bits (small ones) of the culture have rubbed off on me. Thus I know a lot of useless facts, like the farm where Kenny G’s mom lives in Lexington, and the multi-million dollar sale of the biggest horse farm in the city. And I have this idea in my head that when horses die, they ought to be buried (head and hoofs only, of course, which is really quite weird) in their own cemeteries, because that is how they roll in the LEX.
Now you have the framework through which to view the following anecdote. I don’t like ‘em, but I was also a vegetarian for four+ years, so, I mean, they rank way higher on my list than, like, spiders.

Over our artichokes tonight, we were talking about food in France as opposed to the US, and Madame said, I swear, "Oh, yes, we eat horse pretty often here."

At which point I made the same face I must have made when Beattyville’s own Ellie Mae Clampett told me once that "we ain’t lost no more, I used to come a-coon huntin’ round here when I was little!"

However, if there is anything I have learned in my globetrotting adventures, it is that when things like that happen, the last thing you want to do is be offensive about it, or act like you are totally freaked out, even if you are. (Summers in Beattyville, remember? Paris is not my first experience with culture clash.) So I have perfected this face that is interested and surprised without being shocked or prejudiced, in such a way that it prompts people to give more details without me having to ask. The trick in this situation is to make that face the default one, you can’t let even a shadow of disgust come through first, or it fails, the person clams up, and then you never get to know important details like, for example, how they cook the horse.

And Madame sees my face, which works unfailingly, and says, "Yeah, when I was little, my mom would buy ground horse meat and every Sunday we would eat it..." [wait for it, this is where it gets really good.] "...raw with puree poured over it."
I couldn’t make this up if I tried.

And then the other girl that lives here starts yammering about how weird that is, and how in the US that would never fly, blah blah blah, and undoes all my work of trying to find the details out. So I say, in an effort to let Madame feel the way I felt (which was to say, shocked and amused beyond belief), I say, "Yeah, but in the US we eat..." and then I realized I didn’t know the word I was about to use... so I improvised with "the little gray animals that eat nuts and live in trees and have big tails?"

Madame, who is old enough to not have to worry about making the appropriate face, almost fell out of her chair, and goes, "surely you don’t mean écurueil (squirrels)?!"
They don’t really have squirrels in France, so I guess they feel differently about them than in the US. I nodded, and she said, "Les écurueils... You eat them?" and I am thinking her objection must be that they are too cute to eat, when she says, "But... there’s not really very much meat on them." I laughed, and she said, "You’d have to make four or five per person at a dinner party!"

I considered explaining that the type of occasion when one eats squirrel is not really synonymous with black-tie or even sport coat casual, but thought better of it.
~B

P.S. Cliff is coming to visit! Which is so exciting because, well, he’s crazy. And he’ll be here all weekend to make me crazy, which will be awesome– I need some more mountain in my life.

"Be careful what you wish for..."

I feel I need to preface the following vignette with a disclaimer:
I am not that vain.

Because it occurred to me after the following incident that, in the last week, I’ve written about being asked out by French strangers three times. Which makes it sound like I am just writing to make you think I have this glamourous life where strangers and romance and brie and candlelight combine to make the most wonderful kind of youth.

But the real reason I keep writing about these incidents is because they are always so dang hilarious. Kind of.

See, the thing is, I am really bad at new romance. Some people are good at it, and can handle being asked out by a stranger– even one they are not interested in– with grace and tact. I have never been one of them. I pale at the slightest hint of awkwardness, and once claimed to a group of girlfriends that I was going to pass up the possibility of romance for an entire summer because "I didn’t want to have to deal with the details." Who says that? I am so useless when it comes to things like that. Add to this the fact that I am 21 years old and still completely oblivious to all but the most romantic of gestures, and you have a dangerous combination when I am put in the most romantic city in the world.

So I went grocery shopping today. I had absolutely nothing to eat in my little cupboard except a bag of Craisins and some chicken bouillon, neither of which is any good for nutrition. So I took my little wheely bag thing to Monoprix, and commenced to but the entire store out. Almost. My Monoprix has an entire mini-fromager inside it; it’s like the deli in a US grocery store, but all they have is cheese, and it is, of course, not in glass cases, but just sitting around on display. I’ve only bought cheese from the Monoprix fromager once, because I’m not exactly sure how to do it (do you ask for something not strong? Or a specific type of cheese? Or a specific wheel in front of you?), so it always makes me nervous. I content myself with the pre-wrapped bits in the fridge section. But today I decided I really wanted good, fresh brie and I am in France after all, so I might as well use the cheese bar, right?

Oh man. I am cringing as I write this, because now comes the part where my own COMPLETE LACK OF SMOOTHNESS is revealed for all to see.

So I walk up to the fromage counter, and before I’ve had a chance to properly look around, this tiny little woman walks out from the back and hollers to another employee that there was a customer waiting. So this guy about my age walks out from the back (now is when I should have gotten worried, based on all my OTHER interactions with French guys about my age), and asks what I want. I have this completely confused look on my face as I mutter, "Ahh, je voudrais un petit peu de brie, s’il vous plaît." "I’d like a tiny bit of brie, please."
He grabs his knife and hauls me with him to the other end of the thing and, I noticed just then a man coming at me riding on what was either a zamboni or a floor waxer, and since I was in my two-and-a-half-inch high boots, I immediately got nervous because I was not only about to be run over, but if I avoided that dire fate, I would be condemned to walking over waxy or icy flooring immediately after, and I am bad enough at that in sneaks, but in cheap peserk heels from a discount shoe store in Chinatown? No dice, man. I am thinking all of this when I notice the guy looking at me expecting an answer, and I say, lamely, "Pardon?" and he looks around for a second to make sure no one is around and then practically whispers, "T’aimes bien pshhherpsherpersherpernich?" Or at least this is what it sounds to my non-native ear. And remember also that there was a ZAMBONI approaching, so I’ve got the roar of the hockey machine in one ear, my earbud playing Incubus’ "A Certain Shade Of Green" in the other, and this guy standing in front of me mumbling something for which he wants an answer. I motion that I want much less brie than the mega wedge he is about to slice for me, hoping I’ve just answered whatever riddle he has posed me, when he looks up and I realize I haven’t. [At this point I STILL DON’T REALIZE I WAS BEING MACKED ON. How is it possible for one girl to be THIS oblivious?] So I mumble, "Ahh, I don’t know," since the question was obviously NOT yes or no, but I just wanted out as quickly as possible. He gives me a funny half-smile and repeats, "You don’t know, huh?" in this cocky way, but undeterred, asks in French, if I am English. I always say yes to this, and I don’t know why, because the French and English hate each other with this kind of imaginary loathing in the same way that Americans think Canadians are lame (ehh?) and Canadians think Americans are stupid. But for some reason I think it’s a huge compliment when people think I am English instead of American. But I decided to be honest with this guy (big mistake– where did I get morals all of a sudden?), and said I was American. He asks if I speak French, which is a valid question after how simple I must have appeared, due to the earbud/riding waxer combination. At this point I realize what was up, and he literally waited until his boss walked out of earshot, ducked toward me (Zamboni still roaring like a Beattyville 4-wheeler in need of a muffler), and asks for my number.

I can only imagine the face I must have had at this moment. Trying to collect my wits after being surprise attacked in line at the CHEESE counter of all places, trying to figure out something to say, "No, wait, it has to be in French!" and trying to just get away as quickly as possible. In the US, I have the number of the Rejection Hotline, which is a number you can give out that SEEMS like a legit phone number but when you call it, it’s just a recorded voice telling you someone you met didn’t like you as much as it seemed, which is the easiest way out of a situation like this in the States, where everyone has a phone and you pretty much can’t claim you don’t.
Instead of making up a number (which is just kind of cruel), or even making up a boyfriend, I blurt "No." Just like that.

It wasn’t even like a coquettish, she’s-playing-coy-but-still-isn’t-going-to-cooperate kind of no– it was a complete declarative. I could HEAR the period at the end of the word. Which I didn’t mean to do, because that is kind of rude– so I try to make amends. This, in halted French, "I mean, uh, I don’t have a phone..." (Now notice how one lie begets another)
"You don’t have a phone?" he asks, in that way the jock in high school talks to the cheerleaders, which I immediately resent because have I ever been friends with a jock? No. But he sounds like he doesn’t believe me (maybe he was smarter than I gave him credit for), so I add,
"No, not yet."
"Not yet?" he asks, prompting an explanation.
"Yeah, not yet... because I only arrived a couple weeks ago... I haven’t had time..." and at this point I am floundering, and realizing that I just keep digging myself deeper when I could have just said "Je suis desolee, mais mon petit copain est la..." "Sorry, my boyfriend is right over there..." I have said that before too, which is really useful if you’re in a crowd and no one can tell who you are pointing at– just pick the line for the bathroom or something and you’ll be good to go. But for some reason that escaped me... and so I started with the lies. This guy was determined, though, I’ve gotta give him that– he had to repeat nearly everything he said, in part because he was whispering to avoid being caught by his boss and in part because I am so utterly incompetent at this language, and he still persisted. Let’s hypothesize a little, shall we?
What if he hadn’t struck me as slightly sketch, what if I had given him my number, and he had called, and we had gone out to dinner. Did he not realize that I am still not really capable of carrying my end of a young-person kind of conversation? Or did it just not matter to him?
This is, I’m sure, some kind of instant karma that I am getting because I spent Valentine’s Day wondering why I was single in the City Of Lights. Either that or Parisian guys really like moptops.

The worst thing to come out of this, though, is the fact that now I can really never go to the cheese counter again, which means I am condemned to a life of packaged cheeses in a city with 350 varieties at the counter waiting to be sliced and wrapped in paper for me.

Never thought the song was about me,
B

P.S. Disappointment of the week: was supposed to go to an Incubus show tonight (a band on the label I’m going to work for this summer, who happens to be awesome), and they cancelled! At 230pm on the day of! Which would be ok if I were going to be here when they reschedule, but I will be back in the US, which doesn’t help anything. And I understand that hand surgery is kind of a big deal and requires two or three months to get over, but still– I mean, you could have realized that BEFORE five hours before the show? And after all, back-up guitarist blah blah... the show must go on, right? Come on, it would have been fine with one what’s-his-name missing. Honestly.
Though when I called my mom to whine about it, she pointed out that "Honey, you’re going to be in LA all summer, you’ll be hanging out with people like that everyday!" Which is not quite true, but like Dane Cook says, leave it to Moms to remind you that life still rocks.

"Oh, yes, I have great insight. I would use it on myself, but I don’t have any problems."
~Alex Fletcher, Le Comeback

If you’ve ever met me, you probably know that in the US I don’t usually go more than 48 hours without eating Mexican food, and my life is slightly consumed by finding the best/cheapest/most authentic TexMex or plain Mex food in the SouthEast. (If you ever want hints, I know places in four states... honestly, why do you think I want to live in Cali so badly? It has nothing to do with the music industry and everything to do with the possibility of MEXICAN food at every meal.) Before college, I took Spanish classes for like a million years or something, mainly in hopes of learning recipes that would aid me in my Quest. Really, I never planned on doing anything with the Spanish except cooking...
Anyway, that is one thing France hasn’t quite gotten yet. At all. When I had been here about a month, I found a place in the restaurant district advertising itself as "Lolita’s Mexican Ristorante" or something, and so I went, mouth watering. We ordered nachos as an appetizer; they came with cheese powder on them (like Doritos) and tomato sauce instead of salsa. Like pasta sauce. It was bad. Ever since then I have tried (in vain) to put the whole thought out of my mind. But my American friend Laura and I finally gave in to our cravings and decided we were going to have a Mexican night.
Laura has her own apartment in Chinatown, so we went there to do our shopping beforehand, because, somehow unlike MY grocery store (in the so-called ritzy sixteenth district), her supermarket in the heart of Chinatown has a rack labeled, I kid you not, "American/TexMex." Now here is a cultural difference that makes me laugh. This (admittedly small) rack has on it nothing but chocolate-covered Oreos and Old El Paso brand mexican food, made somewhere in Europe based on the languages on the packages. Think of all the times you’ve had tacos, and all the ingredients you generally need. Everything we used was almost perfect but just not quite normal...
They don’t sell ground beef in France by itself; you have to buy it raw but already formed into patties, which we then had to dice up to make it saute-able.
There is no cheddar cheese here, ever, anywhere, so we used emmenthal (like a very mild swiss).
We couldn’t find refried beans, so we bought a can of black beans which I mashed with a spoon into something resembling bean paste.
We didn’t know how to make guacamole, so we bought two avocados (or lawyers, in French) and I cut them into chunks which we sprinkled with balsamic vinaigrette (I CAN’T REMEMBER HOW TO SPELL THAT IN ENGLISH! That is the French way, but it doesn’t look right... so I apologize but admit my stupidity) and then ate them like that.
There were no plain flour tortillas, so we had to use "salsa-flavoured" ones, which were orange and made with... I don’t know, red pepper or something.
We couldn’t find taco spices, so we bought a packet of fajita chicken seasoning, which we used on our ground beef.
Oh, and of course, they don’t make sour cream here, so we had to substitute creme fraiche.
For dessert we had homemade café liegoises– hot chocolate, steamed milk, and Bailey’s. Not exactly Mexican, but the best dessert either of us could think of.
Despite the fact that any self-respecting Mexican person would not even recognize what we ate as "their" food, I have never been more satisfied in my life. We ate in Laura’s kitchen, leaning against the stove and the fridge, gobbling like the college students we are, listening all the while to screamo bands like A Change Of Pace and The Acceptance, which are also not Mexican at all... we had to keep the kitchen window open to let out the smell of ground beef that permeated everything, and every time I am there and we do that, I can’t help but wonder if her neighbors hear the things we say in her kitchen, and if they are upstairs somewhere, washing their dishes and laughing at the ridiculous conversations of the American 20-somethings below.
We laid around on her couch afterward, sipping our café liegoises and nearly falling asleep, until I realized it was nearly 2 am, and if I didn’t leave RIGHT THEN I would miss my metro home... I made the last train, which is always an odd thing to do, because the last hour of trains is always nearly empty, but the final train of the night is always packed to the gills with people like me who have lost track of time.
Today and tomorrow are "Printemps du Cinema," springtime at the movies, and so it’s only 3,50 to see a movie anywhere in the city (instead of the usual 9Euro), which means my friends and I are hitting up all the movies we’ve been meaning to see (read: all the ones that our friends were raving about three months ago– primarily Le ComeBack and Les Infiltrés, which in the US were called... "Music and Words" and... "The Departed," I think.)
Tonight I met up for dinner at the best Greek restaurant of all time with Rachel, my best friend from high school. She and I discovered this place back in October, and we’ve been back together and with other people a lot since. Tonight we walked in and the waiter said "Ahh, Mesdemoiselles, you’ve been here before, no?" We’ve become regulars. But they brought us complimentary dark pink greek wine before the meal, so I guess that is what you get when you become a regular somewhere. After dinner we were going to go hunt down a gelato place we had heard about near Notre Dame, which is only a few blocks away. We trekked through the restaurant district and crossed the Petit Pont (literally the "little bridge" that connects the mainland left bank with Notre Dame), and no sooner had we set foot in the courtyard plaza area of Notre Dame then (or than? I CAN’T REMEMBER and I HATE looking grammatically stupid in a language I should know!) the skies OPENED and it started hailing.
No, like, literally.
I mean, one minute we are dry, and then there was no intermediate rain stage, it just started hailing. Rachel got out her umbrella and we tried to squeeze under it, but the wind blew it inside out, and we gave up just as she yelled "RUN!" and we took off for the dark alley next to the Cathedral. To be fair, it’s not really an alley– during the day it’s tourist shops and overpriced cafés, but it was about 10pm by now, and everything was closed. So we rushed for shelter in the inset doorway of a closed restaurant, where we stood waiting for everything to blow over. So we’re standing there, looking at Notre Dame no more than 3 metres away and the gargoyles spitting water down in our general direction, rain flying diagonally through the yellow light of the street corner lightposts, and my hair is dripping in my face, pea coat collar flipped up in a vain effort to shield the wind, and I remembered someone telling me in a letter just before I left for France that they could just see me "standing on street corners in golden streetlight at night, looking chic and living glamourously, just like in the movies." And just as I am recalling this, two figures came running from the same direction we had just come, coats pulled over their heads to try to not be hit by the hail. They squeezed into the doorway with us, took off their coats, and we saw they were two guys about our age.
We quit talking (no reason to alert them to the fact we are American) and put on our tough faces subconsciously, without even thinking about what we were doing, squeezing toward our side of the large doorway and wondering if we were better off in the hail.

But they looked friendly and non-sketchy, so we stayed. Pretty soon one of them said, "Wow, nasty weather, isn’t it?" in French, and we answered, small talking for a few minutes. I kept waiting for the typical French guy invitation to go get a drink, or at least a request for our numbers (how cocky does that sound? It’s just that French guys in general never pass up a chance to ask for a girl’s number... and I was with fluent-in-French Rachel, so it was much easier to cover up my own foibles). But they are just being friendly, asked where we were from in the US and told us they were from Tunisia, of all things, and we had a good laugh over a Scottish man who walked by in a kilt, a word they taught us in French (for the record, Scote). I murmured something about how he was missing his bagpipes, in French, but when I got to bagpipes, I realized I didn’t know the word, and so I just said, "he’s missing his instrument," and flapped my elbow around the way bagpipe players do, and the younger of the two laughed and said "Yeah, I don’t know the word for that in French, but in Arabic it’s..." and taught us to say it. Apparently it’s an Arabic invention, the bagpipe, and not Scotch at all.

Anyway, eventually they told us they were leaving when the hail had quit and it was just pouring, and they dashed off into the night. Rachel and I looked at each other, amazed that they hadn’t macked on us. (The thought that they might have girlfriends, or that we could have looked less-than-appealing after our shrieking run through the Notre Dame courtyard in the rain didn’t occur to us... perhaps because we are conceited Americans or perhaps because neither of those things have ever stopped French guys here before.) We waited a few more minutes, debated our next plan of action (coffee at Café Panis), then left the cover of our awning just in time to run into the younger of the two guys, walking back in our direction. When he saw us he said, in French, "I know you are probably busy right now, and so are we, but if you would like to have coffee tomorrow afternoon or something..." and Rachel and I exchanged pointed glances– he is a real French guy after all. "It would be great to practice my English with people who speak it," he smiled, and I realized, suddenly, after all this time, my Endless Quest For A French Friend who speaks no or very bad English has been fulfilled, under an awning on the Ile-de-La-Cite. (When they had left our awning the first time, the younger one said to us, in slightly accented English, "it was nice to see you this night... no, you see nicely, yes, you nicely.")

I got street savoir-faire,
B

"Sneef," Fabrice said when I asked him who his favorite team "du foot" is. We were practicing questions, and I was trying to make it interesting, incorporating soccer everywhere I could, since I know the kid lives and breathes it.
"Sneef?" I repeated, having no idea what he had just said. He looked up at me with his little blond face and said, "Oui, sneef," which is probably spelled "sniff," and is, as I know now, the sound you make when you are sad.
"Comme, sneef sneef, quand tu pleures," "Like, sniff sniff when you cry, you know?"
"Oh, right..." I said, laughing. Then I realized he is a great source for useless knowledge like that, so I made him tell me what all the animals I could think of say.
"Le Chien (Dog)?"
"Wof Wof."
"Le Chat (Cat)?"
"Miaou." This sounds the same as our ‘meow,’ but I’ve seen it written out before, and this is always how it’s spelled.
French cows are the same as in America. Boring.
The word in French for "frog" is extremely different for me to pronounce (look at it and tell me you could do better: grenouille), but I asked anyway, and just got a look from Fabrice. So I said,
in French, "Umm, grenouilles? You know, they are small green animals that live in... [here I realized I didn’t know the word for pond OR lily pad]... lakes and they jump?"
"Fish?"
"No, they jump?" (Imagine me making Mitch Hedberg-esque frog motions, realizing there is nothing else I can say to better explain it, since my ‘grenouille’ is not working, and I mean, honestly, what else do I know about frogs? Not much except that I am rapidly becoming one.)
Eventually he figured it out and began the french version of "ribbit ribbit," which sounds like "Quok Quok."
The chicken noise he made for me was completely different from the English one too, but I have no idea how to even begin to spell it. He was boggled that ours is as simple as "cock-a-doodle-do."
So how did you spend Tuesday morning? Because I spent it sitting on a couch making animal noises for an 11-year-old foreign kid.

After that I went straight to my architectural design class, where I sat being intimidated by my prof the whole time, because this week we were supposed to draw a plan of a Baroque façade he showed us, but the catch was that the photo of it was at an angle, so we had all this PERSPECTIVE to deal with, which threw me off completely. The professor is... well, if you just passed him in the supermarket or something, you would KNOW he is a college professor, without a doubt. But I have had a lot of art history professors, and I wouldn’t have pegged him as that– I’d have thought upper-level math (not MFD) or perhaps some weird science class, like
Global Earth Systems or How Things Work or something... He seems like the kind of guy who would be best friends with my brother’s namesake, who is a college math prof, but happens to be much less intimidating. So anyway, this prof is balding on top, but there is not enough hair for a combover or even to style it, so the random bits of hair on top fly around in tufts that appear to have never seen a brush. His hands are always covered in chalkdust and red ink, he speaks faster than any French person I have ever met, and his hands are always fluttering in front of him like a butterfly he can’t control. He is constantly making fun of the students only half-jokingly; there’s a German guy in the class that is always late, and one day he walked in ten minutes into the lecture, and the prof stopped everything, stood up, and said in French, "Ahh, long live Germany!" and then bowed to the student. He’s always in a sports coat, which he never removes, no matter how warm the room is. When it’s cold, he shows up in a trench coat and scarf with his briefcase, and despite the fact that the room is equipped with an LCD projector, he only uses slides. So now you have an idea of what he is like... and this incident will be much more meaningful.
I am leaving the class to make my frantic trans-Paris commute to my next class, when I pass him and notice he is wearing white Nike sneakers with black polka dots.
I stopped walking and just stood there for a second staring, thinking I must be imagining it. The German guy behind me bumped into me hard, startling me from my reverie, and I got a grip on myself and walked out of the class giggling out loud.
~B

P.S. Everyone in the US is always saying to me "Oh, don’t find yourself a man and decide to stay in Paris forever!" and "Promise you won’t find some frenchman over there and get married!" and things like that... I just want to throw this thought out there:
It might not take a guy to make me like Paris enough to want to stay forever.
I’m only 21, marriage is the last thing on my mind, right behind the effect of chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone layer and the latest publicity stunt Britney Spears has pulled. But Paris... I could live here forever, even if the only way was to be a nun in an orphanage a la Miss Clavel in the Madeleine books.

My gemela was here this weekend– Clare, my best friend from high school. She’s studying in London for the semester and came to visit. This is what happened to me on Saturday while trying to show her around: I got felt up on the stairs up to Sacré Coeur, asked out in the Louvre, and stopped in front of the Musée d’Orsay to help an Anglophone tourist.
Sacré Coeur: Incidentally, my brother was mugged on the same stairs... my family really ought to stay away from that place. Maybe the guy was just looking for my wallet... I turned around and nearly kicked him in the crotch– it would have been easy, since he was two steps below me, but then I realized that he was standing there with three [large] friends who were not French and probably not legal, and I was with just my gemela, and nothing good could come of me knocking him temporarily senseless, even though it was the middle of the day. So I did what I always thought was the sleaziest response to something like that– I whirled around before I realized what had happened, emitting death rays like Mr. Freeze from my eyes, and then just kept walking because I was too freaked to do anything else, and was mad about it all day long.
Musée d’Orsay: A woman was trying to ask the ticket-takers if "that painting of the man and the woman holding the pitchfork" is at the museum. I handed the woman my ticket and interrupted in English, "American Gothic? No, it’s in Chicago," which I happened to know only because I saw it there a year or so ago. The lady thanked me and turned back to the guard (who spoke no English) and said, "And what about Starry Night?" This one I knew only because I have been to the Orsay a million times and have never seen it. But I asked the guard in French for the lady, "La Nuit Etoilée, est-ce qu’il est la?" The guard said to me, in French, "No, it’s not. Is that all she wants? I can’t understand anything she says!"
Louvre: Now this is a great story. After showing my gemela into the Mona Lisa room, I went to find a security guard to ask where the nearest bathrooms were. I found two guards standing together, and asked in French. One of them was about 25, heard my accent, and said, in an exaggerated mocking way, "Ahh, oui, ouiiiii," which is what Americans in France always feel is a funny thing to say when asking about the bathroom. For the record, it is not. So I ignored him and turned to the older man (50ish) standing with him, who gave me directions. Clare and I
walked down the hall like he told me to (if you’ve been to the Louvre, it’s a LONG hall), and we had made it a hundred yards or so when someone grabbed my shoulder– given what had
happened that morning at the Sacré Coeur, I was unnecessarily jumpy, so I whirled around, prepared to kick some French butt, only to see the security guard, who told me, in French, that we had passed the bathrooms, like 75 yards ago. I don’t know if it is standard procedure for security guards to leave their posts to go chase wayward femmes down the main gallery of the
Louvre to give directions to the nearest bathroom, but apparently for this guy, it was... So I say thank you and turn to walk back in the direction we had come from. Clare was a step ahead of me now, and then the guy says, as I am turning around, "Mademoiselle, I just wanted to let you know, I’m going to such-and-such club tonight, would you like to come along?" All of this was conducted in French, but he was so polite about it I didn’t feel like I could just say, "Actually, no," which is how I usually handle things like this (in Paris it is not uncommon... guys randomly ask out girls all the time– it’s happened to me in cabs, on the Metro, at restaurants, and in line at a crepe stand, and it’s not because I’m just so wonderful... it’s, like, the French way– we have THE AMERICAN DREAM, they have THE FRENCH PICKUP), but this guy was so nice about it (and gutsy– my best friend was standing right there!) That I didn’t want to be rude to him, so I politely said I couldn’t but thank you anyway.
I related this story to a European friend later that night, who was shocked I said no, given that all I ever do is whine about wanting French friends who speak no English so I can practice conversing.
But rest assured, I remain, faithfully yours singly,
B

"Won’t you come and rock and roll with me?"
~The Killers
Last night was THE KILLERS concert– remember? The concert that I bought the ticket for in NOVEMBER? Yeah, that one. So when I bought my ticket, I was planning on going alone– no one I know here likes them. BUT then my Swedish friend heard one of their songs and decided she wanted to come with... and then told, like, all of our friends from church, and so we ended up being a party of 12 or so, representing 6 or 7 countries, hanging out at the Zenith last night to see the coolest band ever to come out of Vegas.
As it turns out, I was the only one who was an actual fan– all the rest had only heard a few songs... which was fine, but made me feel really hardcore and a little bit weirded out since I
knew all the words to, oh, all the songs. Five of us got to the place about an hour before doors opened to start queuing, and the rest met up with us later on. The five that went early were me
(an American girl), an American guy, a Swedish girl, a French girl, and a girl from Cape Verde raised in France. The rest of the girls went to McDo(nald’s) while the American guy and me waited in line, talking quietly and trying to be inconspicuous English-speakers. (He is fluent in French). Then the three Europeans get back with three HUGE bags from McDonald’s, filled with as many hamburgers and fries and a couple Happy Meals that they could get for 15 Euro. Which means a lot. We sat on the ground to picnic it, and the conversation that went on was amazing– we spoke mostly English (or at least a weird mix of Franglais), which means only 40% of us were speaking our native tongue, and thus no one ever really knew what anyone else was saying. Suddenly Anais, who is the coolest French person I have ever met and who lived in the US for 6 months on a turkey farm, making her possibly the coolest person I have ever met, says,
"I have three favorite English words: random, whatever, and seldom. But I always forget what seldom means."
"It means not often," I say, "pas souvent."
"Oh right. Like you can say, ‘I seldomly go to see the Killers.’"
In a fit of me forgetting that I was speaking to a girl whose second language is English, I said, "No, because you can’t add a suffix to seldom. It’s not that kind of word." They all just looked at me, except the American, who understood, but couldn’t think of a better way to explain it. So we gave them a lot of examples, but all night the non-anglophones kept saying, "I seldomly get this sweaty on a Monday night."
"I know what seldom they are saying."
And, my favorite, "I would seldom want to get my tongue pierced because, you know, it might get pulled out or something."
"Who pulls on your tongue?"
So eventually we get into the show and somehow end up in the front row of the seated section– we decided to hit up the pit after the show started. So now it’s down to me, the American guy, and Anais, who was complaining about how Americans say "possum" instead of "opossum."
"Yeah, when I was in America, I say to people all the time ‘I want to see an opossum!’ And they all say, ‘what you are talking about?’ and I say, ‘Un-OH-puh-some! I want to see one!’ but no one could understand me!"
To which I replied, "Why would you want to see a possum?"
At which point the other American interrupted and said, "What’s a possum?"
Anais and I just turned and looked at him.
Anais said, "You don’t know what unopossum is?!"
"No..."
"Do they not have them in Colorado?"
"No... are they nice or bad?"
"Bad," I explained, "They’re rodents. Like big rats, but they hang from trees and hide in your steel wool," I explained.
"Like raccoons?" he asked.
"No, they are rodents," I responded, which may or may not be true, but it seemed in my head like the most plausible thing.
"We have raccoons in Colorado."
"EVERYWHERE have raccoons" Anais interjected.
"Wait, you actually wanted to see a possum?" I asked, perplexed since most Americans spend all their lives avoiding them.
"Yes!"
"Don’t you have them in them in France?"
"NO! Why you think I want to see one!?"
At that point the conversation incorporated the Canadian guy who had just arrived, and turned to the concert. Anais had never been to a concert, the American guy had never been to a big one,
and the Canadian had never been to one outside of Canada, so suddenly I was like the go-to girl, because they all think I know all about this stuff since I was the one that found the tickets.
"What do you think is under those big black sheets on the stage?" someone asked.
"It’s the instruments and the amps for the band," I responded, confident because it was an easy question.
"I don’t think so. I think it is a TIME MACHINE! Like in Return To The Future!" Anais says, and no one bothered to correct her on the name of the movie.
"Do people get in fights in the pit?"
"No, especially not at a Killers concert..."
This from the American: "How do you know?"
Me: "Because... it’s The Killers... If it was 30 Seconds To Mars, you’d have something to worry about... or Eminem or something– then you’d probably be knifed. But here they are all going to stand out there trying to act posh and mod and like they are too cool to be really excited."
"Will people crowdsurf?"
"No, it’s not really that kind of show, plus crowdsurfing is going out of style... headwalking is the new cool thing to do."
Anais: "If someone walk on MY head, I punch them in the face!"
"I really feel that would not be prudent. There has to be a better way to handle things."
"I’m not scared! I know karate! And Andrew, he is in the military, and you, Blair... you can... you can pray!"
Even here, a continent and an ocean away, I’m still forever the unathletic one.
Eventually the band came out, and I swear it was the best show I’ve seen in... well, possibly ever. They played for almost two hours, all the good songs and some of the unreleased ones– and a couple that were only released in America, meaning who in the audience knew them? Oh, yeah, ONLY ME, so I had to quit singing so loudly so that I wouldn’t be heard. We went down into the crowd as soon as it started, and spent the whole time jumping around and sweating through our clothes... By the time we left my voice was gone, and remained gone all day today.
Possibly the best conversation of the night, in the Noctilien (the night bus) on the way home:
Blair, to the Swedish girl: "Lydia, is Bjorn a Swedish name?"
Lydia: "Yes, a man’s name."
Blair: "That is so cool... I wish I knew someone named Bjorn."
Anais: "Blair, you weird!"
Lydia: "Yeah, but in Swedish it means beer."
Blair: "Wait, Bjorn means beer? And people name their kids that?"
Lydia: "Yeah, all the time!"
Andrew: "It really means beer?"
Lydia: "Yeah, you know, beer, like this," [waves arms around in the air.]
Blair: "Wait, what does that have to do with beer?"
Lydia: [roars]

Blair: [hyperventilates laughing so hard; nearly wets her pants.]
Andrew: "BEAR! YOU MEAN BEAR! Like the animal!"
Lydia, pouting and laughing at Blair’s reaction: "That’s what I said... baaaair."
The three-piece suit is the new black.
It’s indie rock and roll for me,
Mademoiselle Brightside.

"A day without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye."
~French proverb

This morning I went to tutor Fabrice... and for the first time felt really stupid while doing it. We spent almost the entire hour asking each other questions so that he could practice– because in our stupid language instead of doing inversion like in French or just adding a question mark like in Spanish, we have to make things all complicated and stick the subject in between the two halves of the verb.
Example: What is she doing in the kitchen?
Try diagramming that sucker and you’ll see what I mean.
And so I keep making up answers to imaginary questions, and Fabrice keeps formulating questions like "What she is doing in the kitchen?" Or "What is doing she in the kitchen?" Or sometimes "Where is she doing in the kitchen?" And as unqualified as I feel about this job, the truth is that, considering I am completely uncertified, I am still remarkably qualified to be teaching him this, because I know now what it is like to struggle and struggle with syntax, making the sounds that your tongue just can’t seem to form, or untranslatable concepts like the
word "dont" in French. So I am always patient with him; I kind of feel like when the two of us work on grammar, if anyone has the right to be impatient it’s him, with my simple-minded
explanations of complicated concepts. The problem with learning a new language is that you have to know your own backwards and forwards before you start on another. It is absolutely
crucial that you understand the grammar of your language– the reasons you say what you say– before you attempt to figure out a new one. Learning French has drastically changed the way I
write formally. When I write letters now, or papers, or whatever, I write much more properly– if I can’t figure out how it ought to be said in French, I rethink the whole sentence until it can be put into another language. Which is good. It rids my writing of idioms and stupid things that shouldn’t exist anyway, like dangling participles and the passive voice.
But enough grammar– this is what happened at Fabrice’s: He has this sheet with pictures of a bunch of animals on it, and the names of the animals in English so that he can learn them. I am supposed to be quizzing him on them. But since I only learned French in college, my animals are not as good as they are in, for example, Spanish. Having lived here this long, I am still fairly proficient in the basics, but his sheet has a picture on it of a giraffe (???) and... get
this... a camel. So I leave those two till last, and then point at the giraffe and make him tell me the word in French and English. Fortunately, he knew it. Then I point to the camel and ask him the word in French, and he says, "chameau," and then rattles off about sixteen sentences in this mumbly middle-school voice of which I understand only about two words. I ask him to repeat the small chronicle he has just founted, and he says, again, in French, "I think it’s chameau, but that might be the opposite, chameau might be the kind with only one hump, and this animal has two, so I can’t remember what it is. What is it in English, Blair?"
If my life were a sitcom, which I am often suspicious that it may secretly be, this is the part where I would turn to the camera, AC Slater-style, and wait for the laughtrack to subside.
Does it look like I am going to know the answer to this? No. No. No.
First of all, I didn’t know there were animals with only one hump, and if I had seen one standing next to a two-humped one, I probably would have just thought they were both camels and one of them had a goiter. But Fabrice is looking at me expectantly, awaiting the name, in French, of a one-humped mammal, and all I can think of is "dromedary."
Dromedary.
What is wrong with me? I mean, I realize that it is a word that kind of applies in this situation, but who in their right mind has that pop into their head? And I am not about to use the word dromedary to an 11-year-old foreigner, so finally I say "uhhh... Llama?" And he goes, "Isn’t that a whole different animal?"
Just for the record, I realize that llamas have no humps, unless they have a goiter or a small child in their dorsal cavity, but what else was I supposed to say?
So if you know the name of a hoofed mammal, preferably that fits into the genus dromedaria, please let me know. In any language, I don’t really care.
Then we get to this sentence that says something like "What would you like to drink, sir?" And Fabrice says, in French, "Is that a title, Blair?" And I was like, "Well, yes...? I mean, what do you mean?" And he says, "In English doesn’t ‘sir’ mean you are a knight?" And I said, "Well, in this case, it is just a term of politeness, like saying ‘Monsieur’ when you speak to someone."
"But Blair, how do you know? Maybe the person is a knight!"
"You’re right, he might be a knight, but the thing is that I don’t really know much about knights because we don’t have them in the États-Unis."
"Yeah, we don’t have them here either."
"So I guess in general, it could be a knight that they are speaking to, but probably it is just a normal person– you know, an adult man."
"Whatever you say. English is so difficult..."

Eventually I left his place to go wander the gardens of Luxembourg till class; I passed a man who told me I needed to find God, and the only thing I could think of to respond with was, "Look, Mister, I’m just trying to find a café in the Latin Quarter that will sell me a coffee to go without making me pay extra for the paper cup."

I didn’t think that was the response he was looking for, so I decided to keep my mouth shut.

I went to class afterward... I had my architectural design class today, and as always I spent the entire hour and a half praying the prof would not come over and pick up my paper to show to
the class. So far I have lucked out. Today, not so much.

[I have this insane fear of this because last spring, I took an upper-level French class at Emory for which I had not taken the prerequisite, and the administration made an exception for me so that I could take the class and go abroad in the fall semester. But the prof was totally against them making the exception and didn’t want me in the class (she told me this on the first day). She was completely intimidating; once called me out in the middle of class, in front of everyone, for yawning– mouth covered. I was so upset if I had known the words in French I would have ranted at her about how if she had been up since 7am that morning after writing a paper in another language until 330am the night before and was going to have to go nanny four children across town immediately after class let out, I wouldn’t complain about her yawning but instead just be glad she had shown up at all. Anyway, she used to always put up our papers onto the overhead projector with the names crossed out and make the rest of the class correct them anonymously. She would only pick the really bad ones with lots of obvious errors, and since I was a semester behind everyone else in the class, guess whose always got picked? And twice, TWICE after ranting at how bad my grammar and spelling and analysis of Proust’s work (read in the original French) was, she moved the paper around and realized she had forgotten to cross out my name, and the whole class saw that I was the stupid one. So now I have this (quite rational) paralyzing fear of French teachers showing my work to the class.]

He walked past my sketch pad (I spent 10Euro on a sketch pad to do work I don’t even want to do for this stupid class. If I could have found a gum eraser, I would have bought that instead. Way more fulfilling.) and looked down, and of course my left hand has smudged up my lines, so it’s not as clear as it should be, and he picks up my pad, heads to the front of the room, and points out something about my weight-bearing walls and how the window is cut out too much so it looks like a hole in the wall. Then he picks up another girl’s pencil, who sits in the front of the room where he was standing, and darkens the space for me. This wouldn’t have been so obvious that it was mine except that there are only about 14 people in the class, and everyone witnessed the whole thing. A few minutes later, he walked by again, and this time decided that
if he colored in part of my design in pink chalk, it would help me understand... something... better. Your guess as to what it would help is as good as mine. But again: I am left-handed. And I have never learned that complicated boyishly left-handed way of holding my wrist all crooked to avoid touching the part of the paper I have just written on, which means I’ve never been any good with pastels and as soon as he colors it in with his stupid pink chalkboard chalk, my whole design is, pretty much immediately, tinted rose because I can’t keep chalk in one place
to save my life. He came back again later and mumbled something about how the point of the chalk was to emphasize the area where he put it and not the whole drawing. I wanted to ask if the purpose extended to emphasizing the lower three inches of my left-sleeve, but refrained... mainly because I couldn’t remember the word for sleeve at the time.

But I feel like my designs are becoming better, though I still have no idea what I am doing– but at least my lines are straighter and I have a better grip on perspective now... I think.
~B

P.S. I find it strangely comforting that the art history professors in France don’t know how to use the slide projectors and LCD machines any better than the ones in the US.

"I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair..."
~Sandi Thom

I got my haircut yesterday. I went armed with a picture because the idea of explaining it all in French seemed so complicated. This time I took a picture of a girl, in hopes they wouldn’t remember me as "that girl that brings pictures of boys with her..." Unfortunately, I now have a mop top.
I look like what would exist if Davey Havok had a child with one of Warhol’s factory girls. Since if you are under 45, you probably don’t know who Warhol’s girls were, and if you are over 29, you probably don’t know who Davey Havok is, I present you with an object lesson:

Exhibit A:Prospective father, lead singer of AFI, alias Davey Havok.



Exhibit 2:Potential mother, silkscreener in Andy Warhol’s Factory, alias Mod Girl:

Exhibit D:Paul McCartney, bassist for The Beatles. Relevant to the case at hand because he is the only person alive who can wear a mop top and make it look good.

Exhibit 5:Blair, alias Tadpole, alias Gypsy, freshly moptopped.

A: Taking pictures of yourself while not looking at the camera is not only kind of weird ("is there something happening off to the left that I am not aware of?") but grade A emo. But people who live in LA are supposed to do things like that, so there you go. Just getting in my practice.

B: The subject’s reaction upon realizing she looks like the spawn of a woman from the 70's and an asexual vegan rock star who has been known to wear mesh shirts and use words like "imbrue," which, for the record, does not exist in the English lexicon.

None of this is to say that I would not want to look like Mr. Havok, or Warhol’s slave, or even a knight of the Realm of Britain (I saw a knight once. There’s a cool fact. He was old and read the Bible to me– no kidding), but in combination?
I mean, I also like macaroni and cheese, millefeuilles, foie gras and truffles, but that doesn’t mean I go eating them all in one bite, now does it?

But last time I got it cut I thought it was a euroemomullet until I washed it and fixed it myself... perhaps that will happen with this one too.Anyway, I am not too worried about it... it always grows out.

~B

"Don’t wanna be an American Idiot!"
~Green Day
Well, this has all the makings of a good anti-American rant, so prepare yourselves.
Living in another country, if nothing else, will make one so much more aware of one’s own background. I’ve said before that I never felt particularly American until I showed up in Paris, suitcase in hand (or not, as it were), and suddenly realized that everything I do and say and see and feel is through the framework of an American. And at first I resisted that completely, telling myself I was as European as the rest of them, but I’ve come to realize more and more that it is a flaming lie and I am, truly, American. What that means to me, however, is now significantly different from what it used to be, and probably even more significantly different from what it means to you. (Here’s a hint: politics are not involved, but musical tastes, food preferences, educational background and manners are.)
In the process of me becoming much more aware of myself as an American (and thus, as Lily Moscowitz’s parents would say, more self-actualized), I’ve also become acutely aware of other people as Americans here in Paris. And hardly ever in a good way. Because, despite the fact that I identify more than ever now as an American, I still use it to refer to things pretty much only pejoratively. (Oh, that girl’s ponytail is so American/ Those boys pour wine like such
Americans... etc.) So between suddenly having this framework revealed to me as clearly as Neo in The Matrix, and then also living with a woman "of a certain age," my views on life have changed drastically in the last six months. (In France, the polite way to refer to people over 60 is "of a certain age." I think it’s the cutest thing ever. I made the mistake of referring to someone as old once, and you’d have thought I suggested we euthanize the person based on the reaction I got.)
I mean, think about the cognitive dissonance this has caused me: I spent the last two years solid living with only people my own age– 40 girls on a floor; 9 co-eds in a bus; 8 camp staffers in cabins... none of us above the age of 24. And now all of a sudden I am cohabiting with a woman sixty years older than me? Ridiculous. But I adore Madame. Because there is nothing I could ever say bad about her. I love that woman, and I have so much respect for her and so much admiration and so much appreciation for everything she’s done for me.
(Here’s a tearjerking example: she barely speaks English, and when she met my mom, I interpreted back and forth the whole time, since they couldn’t communicate at all. At the end of our tea, my adopted French mother said, in broken English to my very non-French biological mother, "I will try to be good mother to her while she is in France." I don’t cry about anything, and I nearly started sobbing.)
Monday I was sick and spent all day in my room feeling sorry for myself and reading a stupid book that some previous student had left in my room– at 1130am, there was a knock on my bedroom door, and I answered it to see Madame standing there with a vase of daffodils for me. "These are for you," she said, trying not to act surprised that I was still in pajamas, "because, you know, it is springtime in Paris, you should enjoy it!" So cute! Then tonight we had another cooking workshop here, but this time her friend that usually leads it with her was out of town, so she asked ME to help. ME! This may not sound like a big deal, but I was extremely flattered.
Because the cooking workshop, as previously stated, is not like a big cooking extravaganza– the way it works is that Madame and her friend prepare and cook the meal for the 5 students, explaining the whole time everything that they are doing, and then at the end they give copies of all the recipes to the students and we all eat the meal.
So her asking me to help was huge. Before all the students arrived, she and I went through and set out all the ingredients, made sure all the quantities were right and everything we needed was clean, etc. She got out two aprons for us– big long red-checkered ones that came to my knees– and she soon had me chopping onions, peeling apples, beating egg whites, etc. after everyone else arrived. I had so much fun doing it, and even more fun preparing for it with her– I just love to hang out with her– I’m sure it’s kind of boring for her, listening to my oversimplified stories, and constantly trying to make sure I understand whatever it is she says, but to me it’s fascinating. This time, for example, she threw into conversation as we were tying the aprons around each other, that the painting hanging over the piano in the dining room is of her family in 1910. This painting is of a Victorian-era looking woman with a man in a suit and three kids in knickers sitting at dinner. Her brother, sister, cousin, and parents. She is 20 years younger than her oldest brother, so she wasn’t born yet, but it’s still the coolest thing ever. (There’s another painting in the living room of her alone at the age of 3 or 4, painted by someone her mother hired. I think
the money she comes from is old.)
She told me about the time she went to the US to visit New York– before she went, she decided to practice her speaking English with tapes in her car, which for some reason emphasized to
death one single sentence, and sent her to New York City knowing only how to say "I have lost my fishing license."
She didn’t really know what it meant, and she must have said it to someone there, and so a few weeks after she returned she received in the mail a Santa Claus doll fishing, with a note that said "he has his fishing license."

Now it’s time for the rant. The other students showed up for the cooking workshop tonight, and it was a lot of fun. One of the guys worked for a caterer in the US for awhile, and has great manners anyway, so he was constantly helping carry heavy dishes and opening and pouring the wine (which I appreciated, because when it is just me and Madame, the wine always falls to me, and not only am I completely inexperienced, but I’m also just bad at it. She has a DeGaulle corkscrew [this may be the French name for it, but I don’t know. It’s the kind with the wings that come out... the French call it DeGaulle because he was always raising his arms in victory. The French call a lot of things after DeGaulle, though, like, for example, every major intersection in the city of Paris. Not unlike the fact that every American city of over 10,000 inhabitants has a Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.], but I am still completely ungraceful). And the girls that came were fine... but one of the guys showed up stoned out of his mind.
Who does that? He knew he was coming to the thing, and not only is it terribly rude, but it’s just stupid. I mean, he didn’t even have the decency to try to lessen his bloodshot eyes with Visine or something– and although I am pretty good at picking out when people are stoned (I didn’t live in a frat house for a year and gain nothing), this kid would have been spottable a mile away. At the end of dinner, one of the other girls said to him, out of earshot of Madame and in English, "For awhile there I thought your eyes were just going to start bleeding out of your head or
something..." Oh, yes, it was quite that bad. I don’t know if Madame noticed, because his French is bad anyway, so it’s not like his speaking was seriously impeded, but honestly. That’s not even living up to the stereotypes, that’s, like, worse than the stereotypes. Not to mention that I’ve known a fair amount of potheads in my life, but I have yet to meet one who was that outrightly RUDE. If you’re going to go out in public stoned, then fine, I disagree with your lifestyle, but if you’re going to, like, a Barefoot Manner concert or something then at least you won’t be in the minority. But if you are going to an old woman’s house to have her cook you dinner for free? Honestly, I can think of nothing ruder.
Anyway, other than that (and the girl who was completely freaked because I separated the eggs the French way, using my hands instead of the shells) the dinner was delicious– avocado paté
and then chicken curry and cheese plate and moelleux au chocolat. In the US I am kind of indifferent to Indian food... except naan, which is this RIDICULOUSLY astounding bread that, during finals week at Emory, I have been known to live off of. It’s cooked in a clay oven until it
falls off the walls of the oven into the ashes, and then you know it’s ready, or something, but that is irrelevant because we didn’t eat it tonight, but curries here are nothing like in the US. They are fruity, sweet, not very spicy, and never have weird cheese in them. This one was banananana, apple, golden raisins soaked in some kind of alcohol, and chicken breast cut into lumps, served over white rice with finely grated coconut and mango chutney, which the French call "mawngoo shootnay," instead of, like, "confiture des mangues," which is what it would be
translated into French. Ahhhh, so good. And moelleux au chocolat... is always to die for. This is not the same as gateau au chocolat– chocolate cake. Moelleux is a word that doesn’t translate into English, really– we don’t even have a concept that really matches it, but the best I can tell you is imagine something that melts in your mouth, is airy like a soufflé but moist like cookies fresh from the oven, and made with two huge bars of dark chocolate. Ok, you’re imagining that? Now, whatever you have in your head, double the deliciousness and there you have, almost, a moelleux au chocolat. (Pronounced, in case you are curious, mmm-wall-uh oh show-ko-law.)
Also, Madame was the first person to see the new haircut, and she loves it... all afternoon as we were getting ready for dinner, she would stop me in the middle of doing something and say, "Oh, I just can’t get over it! Your hair is so lovely!"
Probably she thinks this since she was alive the FIRST time moptops came in... maybe I can bring them in again... but the Beatles were never that popular here (in comparison with the rest of Europe or the US), so I don’t know... maybe they just don’t realize that the trend is up.
(True story: the Beatles used to go sightseeing around Paris on foot, unbothered. However, everyone acts like this is such a big deal for them... but they are from only, like, 2 hours away by train. They probably are as fond of Paris as I am of, like, John’s Pass.)
With Love From
Eleanor Rigby

"I’m going to make Hollywood wherever I go..."
~Noxzema Jackson

Friday night after church I went to Le Chevalier Bleu (The Blue Horseman) with some friends– while sipping our wine and eating our cheese and chocolate, we looked out the window to see... I kid you not... Willy Wonka walking down Boulevard Rambuteau. Which is called a Boulevard but is really more like an alley. Anyway, this man was walking toward us in the dark and the rain, wearing a knee-length tailored purple velveteen coat– the kind that flares from the waist, Mr. Darcy style, with a top hat so dark purple it may have been black, black cigarette trousers sticking out from below the coat, pressed so stiffly I was curious how much starch he actually used in them, and a cane.
I think it might have been Johnny Depp himself, who lives in Paris somewhere. I don’t know what Johnny Depp does in France, because I am fairly sure he doesn’t speak French, but there are a lot of things I don’t understand about Johnny Depp, for example, why he is the only person ever to come out of Kentucky without an accent.

After our close encounter with the celebrity kind, we went back to our Beaujolais and moelleux au chocolat and pretty soon two older men sat at the table directly next to us. Wouldn’t be weird except that this was a typical Parisian café, meaning that the tables are about six inches apart (sorry, 30 centimeters) and there were empty tables all over the place. So why in Heaven’s name do they have to pick the table next to ours?
Ohhhh, right, so that they can commence picking us up in some weird variety of broken Franglais. The other two girls I was with speak absolutely no French; the two men (one of whom was older than my father, the other was probably at least 45) spoke a very meager amount of English, which means that suddenly I am thrust into this weird position as interpreter... Because we were in the corner and only halfway down with our Reblochon; we couldn’t leave yet, and suddenly we were getting, "Oh, where are you from, Mesdemoiselles?" And this part was in English so one of the other girls says we’re from the US, and the men say, "Oh, California?" I’ve noticed, now that I am about to claim Cali as the next place I am living, that when people find out I am from the US, their automatic next question is "California?" Which may be because my French is spoken with the rapid clip of a true Valley Girl or perhaps just because California is the most well-known place in the US, but either way it has happened 3 times in the last week. So I say, "No, je viens de Floride." ("No, I’m from Florida." I never know when I open my mouth to tell someone where I am from what will come out– Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky... California? But with French people it’s usually Florida because it’s the easiest to explain.) And not only was it a mistake to say this in French because now they know I speak it, but also then I just get, "Ahh, Miami! You live at Miami!" But it wasn’t spoken like a question, just an exclamation; a declaration, and how are you supposed to explain that, although you spent the first half of your life living in Florida, you’ve never been south of, like, Sarasota and definitely never been to Miami? AND then he says, in French, "Ahh, you know David somethingsomething." Again, not a question, but a statement. I know no Davids from Florida. But he is convinced I do– finally the really old one steps in and says, in French, "You know, the basketball player."

[insert "duh" look from Blair here. Basketball. As though I know ANYTHING about this, even when I live in the US, where it is actually played. As though I CARE anything about this, at all, ever.]

So I make up an excuse for not knowing him, we try to ignore them, but we keep getting awkward questions like "why are you in Paris?" which leads to "Where are you studying?" and as it turns out, the old one is, like, head of something at my university– the third-world internment camp one– where the riots of last year were centered. Oh, great. But I couldn’t tell if he was the guy locking the students out or the one trying to get rights for them... either way, WE HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON, you know, given the generation gap, language barrier, etc.
My friends and I are feeling more and more awkward, and more and more cornered. Being picked up by Frenchmen is not an odd experience here and I have kind of just gotten used to saying, in French, as I push my hair back with my plain silver ring-clad left hand, "Oh, I’m waiting for my boyfriend, actually..." or "I’m here with my boyfriend, that guy right over there," at which point I gesture vaguely in the direction of a small crowd. I am really a very good liar when it comes to doing so in other languages. But there is no lying to these guys, as we are clearly alone, and since we are in a back corner of the café, there is no way to get away, except to down the rest of our wine and jet. Which is, being good city girls that we are, what we decide to do. As we start pulling on our coats, suddenly the younger of the two (who was, I remind you, still middle-aged) passes me a business card with his name and number scrawled on it.
It wasn’t even his business card, but the other guy’s.
And honestly, does he expect any of the three of us are going to call? There was an age difference of over 20 years. In some states coughKentuckycough that is like two generations! (I say this with no disdain, and keep in mind I choose to spend, like, all my vacations there. Plus Johnny Depp and 40% of the Backstreet Boys hail from that fair state, so please take it not personally.)
Awkward awkward awkward.

Saturday morning I met up with a friend to go to my favorite market in Paris, at Avenue Sachs. This market only goes on Thursday and Saturday mornings, and it’s amazing. It’s a couple blocks long, set on a street that faces the gold-domed Invalides, and they sell everything from freshly dead [whole] octopi to homemade grainy lavender honey, "100% genuine, mademoiselle" jade bracelets, and the best dates I’ve ever tasted. She decided to get an herb and feta sandwich from this Lebanese booth, and we stood there watching them make it fresh, when the guy turned to me and asked what I wanted. Not a particularly big fan of... herbs, I told him I didn’t want anything, and he said, "Oh, you are going to share this one?" And I laughed and said no, and he said, "Mademoiselle, please let me make something for you!"
I shook my head again, and he asked me (thanks to my accented French), where I am from. I said the US, and his first response was "California?" very hopefully. To avoid an explanation, I just nodded, and he said, switching suddenly to heavily Lebanese-accented English, "I dream to voyage on your Road 66... in Washington to California." I told him that was my dream too, and he said, "Oh, mademoiselle, please don’t you want to try a sandwich? Can’t I just make you a little one?" (We’re back to French now.) And finally, because he seemed hurt that I didn’t want one, I gave in, "But only a very little one!" So he sliced a small circle of dough out of one of the full-size pieces, spread it with some kind of herb-olive oil mix and tons of feta, then tossed it onto a convex griddle, folding and twisting it extravagantly. He finished, wrapped it in waxed paper, handed it to me and said, "for you, mademoiselle, it is no charge," and then he bowed.
It was the highlight of my day, because for some reason he was so much less sketchy than the old men from the night before.

After the market (the same market where I was once scolded when I asked for a handful of dates from an Egyptian vendor. "A handful? A HANDFUL? Mademoiselle, you can not eat a HANDFUL of these dates! These are the most superior dates ever grown! You cannot eat a handful, you must eat only one, and savor it!" At 27Euros a kilo, which is about $17 a pound, I realize he was right, but I wasn’t going to EAT them all at once, and anyway shouldn’t he be glad I am taking them off his hands? It’s not just anyone who’s willing to pay that much for dates, despite the fact that they are as big around as my fist and a handful is probably only 3 actual dates. I’m afraid to go back to his stand now, so my life is consigned to second-rate dates. Funny how that statement seems to relate to so many areas of my life...), we went to the Catacombs.
The Catacombs.

Now, I have had this weird and morbid desire to visit the Catacombs ever since I got to Paris, but they are hard to find, keep weird hours, and I just never searched it out till yesterday. I had visions of torch-lit chambers where the Bible was translated and early Christians hid out... despite the fact that, oh, yeah, Paris wasn’t actually POPULATED until, like, the 3rd century. Or at least visions of that guy from Indiana Jones, the one who keeps the grail but can’t leave the room...

That is not what I got. My first clue should have been the sign in the ticket window that "viewers who are pregnant, claustrophobic, or subject to nervous anxiety should not attend." That and the fact that it’s forbidden to people under the age of 13. A word of history about the Catacombs: in the early 1800's, the French realized that their cemeteries (most of which had been around since the 3rd century when the city was founded... not really, but definitely since the Plague times) were overcrowded. But cemeteries are not like school systems, and you can’t have residents move out of them in order to reduce crowding. At this same time, there was a huge danger of the Left Bank of the Seine caving in from too much digging out of dirt from underneath it to build stuff, so they decided to kill two birds, if you’ll excuse the death reference, and take the bones out of the cemeteries and put them underground where the banks were about to sink. This was apparently not too difficult since not only back in the day they didn’t use coffins in Paris, but also since the majority of the exhumed bones were from bubonic plague victims, they were in mass graves with no identity anyway. So they dig up the bones and put them underground somewhere else, only, in typical "why make it ugly when you can make it pretty and then charge people to see it?" French mentality, they hired bone artisans to come arrange the bones underground. We’ll get to that in a second.

I went with two girlfriends who I talked into going at the last minute, one of whom is seriously claustrophobic. I was going to go by myself. Had I done so, you could probably find me stuck down there still now, the newest addition to the place. So we’re standing at the top of the worn down stone staircase, and the other two appoint me to lead, since, after all, it was my idea. "Fine," I say, "I’ll go first. I’m half pirate. I can handle it." I spent the whole time down the staircase fronting like I wasn’t scared, because, honestly, my school’s unofficial mascot is a dead guy who has been buried in the library for a couple hundred years... he appears at school with 8 bodyguards on special occasions to create mischief or welcome visiting celebs like The Roots, Jimmy Carter, or Howie Day. If I can handle Dooley, I can handle this, right? Apparently flashlights are recommended for this tour. We were not aware. The staircase is worn down from hundreds of years of use, and spirals so tightly that when we get to the bottom I am dizzy. About halfway down the staircase, I realize there is a conspicuous silence behind me, and I turn around to see that they are not there. The claustrophobic one has just noticed the picture of a skull on the front of the brochure the man handed us, and she looks up slightly pale from her position 10 stairs above me and says, "Blair, what’s an ossuaire?" It’s the french word for ossuary, a room made of bone. I tell her this, and she says, "That’s it, I’m leaving," and whirls around like the lion in The Wizard Of Oz. The other girl (bringing up the rear) grabs her arm, much like the TinMan, with a warning of "Oh no you’re not! Come on, Jeanette, you knew we were coming to the Catacombs, what did you expect?"
"You told me it was Catacombs, not a room made out of humans!" she hissed back. Already none of us were talking in normal tones of voice. We convince her to keep going and continue tiptoeing down the stairs, weird shadows cast on the walls like in the Beast’s dungeon when Belle sneaks in and grabs the live candlestick by accident. I’m lost in the likening of my life to my favorite movie when, a moment later, the claustrophobe whispers declaratively, "I smell death." I snorted, to which she replied, and this is a direct quote, "Don’t you dare snort at me, Blair, I have exceptionally keen olfactory senses and I am telling you, I SMELL DEATH." By this time we had reached the bottom of the stairs, and, looking around, the room was... not that bad. No bones to be seen, just a tiny, dank, dungeon-like brick room with a ceiling so low I could barely stand up straight and a plaque reading, in archaic French, "DEATH IS A GAIN." We followed the tunnel in front of us, winding around and around, me leading, the girl behind occasionally grabbing my arm for comfort, me nearly shrieking every time she touched me without warning. No one in front of us, no one behind, several hundred feet below ground, and the only light coming from single electric bulbs every 50 feet or so. This is the difference in my thought processes and the rest of the world’s, though: I am walking along with visions of my life in comparison to Belle, my favorite French princess, when the girl in the back of the line whispers in a gravelly voice "My PRECIOUSSSSSS," causing the other two of us to jump. I have never seen any Lord Of The Rings movies, but I’ve seen enough of the previews to recognize the Gollum quote... and then the other one says, "I think we have entered Middle Earth and any minute the Orcs are going to appear..." I am thinking princesses and enchanted castles, and they are behind me with (more realistic) theories of underground monsters. We had gone a few hundred feet when one of the two behind me said, "this is just like being in a cave..." and the first thing that came into my head was "what caves have YOU been hanging out in?" because in MY cave (so called because, well, I think I was one of two people to ever work on The Mountain who actually LIKED the stupid cave) there are large clearish-orange cave crickets that look like spiders, endangered bats that fly at your head if you aren’t careful, and water that comes mid-calf after a hard rain. This was more like a Willy Wonka chamber, shrinking gradually till I realized we were walking single file out of necessity, and that if I stood on tiptoe I would graze the ceiling. Soon we reached the doorway to the ossuary itself. I hit the doorway first, and, as though it wasn’t even real, I put my foot out to take a step, caught a glimpse of what was inside, and whirled smoothly back around, colliding with the two following me. We looked at each other terrified, then the one behind me grabbed my shirttail and we took our first step in.

Imagine, if you will, Edgar Allan Poe’s dream come true. Remember The Cask of Amontillado? (spelling?) Where the guy gets walled up in the bricks of the wine cellar, never to be heard from again? Yeah. Think about him, and then multiply it by SEVERAL THOUSAND and take away the bricks. The walls of the ossuary were made completely of dead people. And this wasn’t like one room– most of the Catacombs were just chamber after chamber of ossuary. Remember what I said about the French appreciation for art? Yeah, so the bones are lined up, skulls at ground level and then forming a kind of macabre crown moulding, in between row upon row of row upon row of femurs, with the occasional skull thrown in– sometimes in a design: a cross, a heart. Rotted to what appeared to be a dark brown color (though I couldn’t really tell since it was so dim), they were mostly in remarkably good shape, except for here and there were there was a hole in someone’s cranium. During WWII, the French Resistance used the Catacombs to hide out in. I think I can not think of anything worse. It was, quite honestly, like stepping into an Indiana Jones movie, and though I love Indy and have a predisposition to fall in love with archaeology professors, the fact that this was not a movie set and not a Planet Hollywood display but ACTUAL REAL PEOPLE who had been dead for 700 years was really unbelievably... bizarre. To the credit of the French, the part with actual bodies in it does command respect, and they don’t treat it as a tourist trap. It’s not like the Haunted Mansion at Disney– it’s real people, who had the misfortune to be buried in mass graves twice. Every room has a label– this room came from the Cimetiere des Innocents, this one from Cimetiere des Halles, etc. The Innocents is so sad, in a historic kind of way– the children’s cemetery, mostly used by orphanages to bury children dead from plague, starvation, etc. At one point, while I was trying to read a Bible verse posted on an ancient plaque in French, something dripped on my head and I almost lost it. I jumped pretty much out of my skin and almost shrieked, squelching it at the last minute. I have no idea what it was– some kind of underground dampness, but it could have been the hand of death for all it mattered at that moment. Eventually we made it out, and I realized the girl was right– once we were breathing Fresh Air it occurred to me that it did totally smell of death down below.

A note on relativity: The bottom of the staircase that was to lead us out had a note posted on it warning us to take the staircase slowly, as there were 83 steps and it is very steep. I laughed in the face of the sign...well, not really, because I was afraid to offend the million potential ghosts behind me, but my best friend in Paris, whose apartment I am at several times a week, has a 87-step climb to get to her garret room. 83? Pssh, that’s a breeze. When we got to the top, a man sat at a podium to check our bags to make sure we had not stolen any bones. No kidding. There are signs everywhere warning that stealers of bones will be prosecuted, but WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND COULD ACTUALLY TOUCH THEM?

Bombs Away,
B

P.S. Steve Vai is coming to Paris to do a concert. I wonder if he’ll play on the double-necked guitar that looks like a heart with two legs coming out of it?

In France, and I suppose most of Europe, there is really no subject that is taboo, particularly when you are from another country, and are thus regarded as something of a specimen. I think this is especially true here because most Europeans regard the US as this country where everything is kind of... perfect. Even the ones that don’t like the US are courteous enough to see that, if one is American, there is not that much reason to leave the country, because, I mean, what is missing? So as an American who has decided to live in another country (France, at that!) they are curious as to what motivates that decision. It’s not that they have no value for their own country, they just want to see the appeal through a foreigner’s eyes.
Because of that, I am often asked very forthright questions. I have been told in French culture classes and study abroad orientation groups and whatever that you never never ask a French person what they do for a living– it’s a complete faux pas, and, for some reason, is considered a very personal question. So I have these rules of thumb like that, and then my own American set of standards (don’t ask about politics or religion), and these combine to take away all the useful words and small talk questions I have. I’ve gotten better now, but on my arrival here, whenever I met new adults, I was completely at a loss– what do you say to them?
But among the first questions I have been asked by almost everyone I meet is "What do your parents do?" and more often, "What does your father do?" because to them, if you have any class at all, your mother probably does not work, but is at home with the maid, hanging out and... doing whatever it is French women do with the maid all day. Luckily, since my dad is a doctor, and my mom works at a bank, I get an easy answer. My friend’s dad has one of those job titles that doesn’t, like, mean anything and she is always having to just say, "he works with money."
One night at dinner, Madame asked me, out of nowhere, after I had been living here for a couple months, "And Blair, what religion do you follow?" I nearly choked on my quiche, less because I thought it was awkward and more because in the US, one would never ask that, even to someone my age. "Moi? Je suis protestante." "Ahh, une vraie americaine, n’est-ce pas?"
"I’m protestant."
"Oh, you are a true American, aren’t you?"
These kinds of conversations are awesome, because despite the fact that I am only 21, I am still regarded as somewhat of a child, due to my language skills that make me sound as such and the fact that the French don’t really grow up at the same rate that Americans do. But because I am regarded that way, I can get away with bouncing the questions back and learn more about these people. "So what about you, then, what do you do?" and "What religion do you follow?"
(The religion question got sticky this week when Madame asked the new girl in the apartment. Her mom is Catholic, her dad is atheist, and she is something along the lines of agnostic... but how in the world can you tell that to a good Catholic French woman in your second language without all kinds of misunderstandings? Because here there is no good reason why you would not want to follow a religion.) I, however, have no problem with questions like these– in general, it is hard to offend the French when you have done the trouble of learning their language and moving here. So even when I say something ridiculous, they just kind of nod their head, probably thinking something along the lines of "those crazy Americans... how have they ever become a world superpower with children like this?" That said, it’s not just ex-pats they are open with... though they don’t generally ask each other such personal questions, they will discuss just about any political issue, quite rationally, and you must go no further than the wall outside my university (or any street lamp in the Quartier Latin) to find fliers protesting just about anything the government has decided to do. And the government does a lot here. So from religion and voting to the war in Iraq and the suburban riots last year and the spread of AIDS, nothing is really taboo with them the way it is for Americans.

Incidentally, France has one of the highest AIDS rates in Western Europe, which doesn't imply that much since it is also the largest country on the European continent, except for Russia, which obviously doesn't count. I think it might have been the highest, at one point, but now falls behind Portugal, Italy, and Germany, as well as SIGNIFICANTLY behind Luxembourg and Belgium. However, the government has taken a huge step in public awareness in the last few months, and I've been stopped over and over by young people in red SIDA jackets (the French acronym for AIDS-- syndrome d'immunodeficiency auto...something). They are always young, always friendly and not pushy the way a lot of people are in France when trying to stop you for something. The first time I told them I was in a hurry and couldn't stop (which was true). The second time I told them I didn't speak French (with respect to this subject, relatively true-- my technical vocabulary is hugely lacking with regard to health things). The third time I figured out who they were and stopped and talked to a guy for a little bit, and they just give information and chat with you a little bit-- they also only stop young people, which I guess makes sense based on the demographic most likely to be affected (something like 95% of European cases are detected in people under 30). But I think it's amazing that the French are so open about things like this that we as Americans keep so tightly under wraps-- since I've spent the last two years living on a college campus in the US, it is kind of second nature to me now; there are constantly panels, discussions, free handouts, vigils, and events to fight AIDS and the prejudices that go along with it, but in the American society as a whole, no one ever speaks about it. Mention of the AIDS epidemic and virus are, in France, as common as mention of the breast cancer walk in the US. It's just culturally different, I guess, but I think it's impressive that the French are not intimidated by the concept and thus can do so much more to fight it than we can, since we seem to always be caught in a politically correct contest to see who can be more polite about it.

Speaking of cultural differences... Cindy Sheehan is here this week. Brought to you by "Americans In Paris Against The War," which seems an unbelievably redundant group title as well as a completely gratuitous statement of belief. Because for one thing, if you are American and living full-time in France, I can pretty much guarantee you aren’t a republican, and thus that it is a pretty sure bet you are against the war. And furthermore, everyone who lives in France is against the war (though it’s beginning to seem everyone everywhere is... but that could just be my skewed I’ve-been-in-Europe-too-long-to-remember-real-life mentality talking), so why bother starting a group if you are already in the majority, and not just the majority, but the only? It’s like starting an "Americans who live in America" group... or "People In Favor Of Breathing" or "People Who Wish They Lived In Paris." You can’t start a group like that, because then everyone in the world falls into the category. You have to have some qualifications, man... like, I don’t know, frilly toothpicks or something, to weed out at least 50% of the people-- if a club is over half the population of any given populace, it's not a club, it's a majority, and then you don't have to have a club because you are the ones making all the rules anyway.
Good heavens, I've turned into Steven Colbert.
Next thing you know, I'll be making a dead-to-me list...
And Nate is gonna be number one. :)
~B

"What’s my age again?"
~Blink 182

I forgot how much I love middle-schoolers. Every time I say that, there are one of two reactions that immediately follow: 1) you’re lying, or b) then why in the world aren’t you going to be a teacher?
And the answers are as follows: No, I am not lying– I love them. And why am I not a teacher? Because think about it– I don’t care who you are, when you were in middle school, were you nice to your teachers? I mean, honestly, like nice to them. Because I was a major hardcore good girl back then, and I was never rude to mine– but I kind of just tolerated them at best, because it’s way too important to be cool when you are 13, and the number one way to be not cool is to hang out too much with your teacher. So if you actually like middle-schoolers, teaching is not it for you. What IS it, however, is working at camp. Or tutoring in another language. Or babysitting extensively.
Fabrice, the kid I help with his English, is awesome. I think maybe it’s just that all French kids are extremely well-behaved, but I don’t want to detract from his coolness by crediting it to the culture, so I will still say that the kid is amazing. His parents make him sit through an hour and a half a week being tutored in English by a 21-year-old American who acts like a 13-year-old and talks like a 7-year-old, and he takes it like a champ. I know it must drive him crazy to have to do all that extra grammar work, but he never complains or acts bored... though when I was his age, if I had had a 21-year-old Spanish guy show up at my house once a week to teach me Spanish– the language I was learning at the time– you can bet I’d have paid attention. But I have no idea how to make this stuff interesting– if I were explaining it in English, I could, but I’ve got to explain it all in French, so there go all my little games and tricks and mnemonic (I just almost spelled that pneumonic. Which wouldn’t be weird unless you know what a freak I am when it comes to spelling things) devices. I came unbelievably close to teaching him the being verbs song today as a reminder of how to conjugate the verb "to be" in all kinds of tenses. But then I started thinking about it, and I hated that stupid song when I learned it at the age of 9, so what’s to make me think this kid, at the age of 11, and in another language, is going to be helped by it. I think part of the problem is that he doesn’t LOOK 11– he looks all of 9, which probably has something to do with diet and exercise and amount of sleep versus length of lunch break and hormones in beef and the fact that he walks to school, but I thus can’t get it through my head that this kid would be in the middle of being a Great Escape camper, or a Junior Conference kid; he just seems so much... I don’t know, more educated, which is odd, because he can barely formulate a sentence in my language.
Today I was writing his mom a note and I had to ask him how to spell "Bonne Vacances" (Have a good vacation), and the kid explained it and when I thanked him and told him he teaches me better than I teach him, he said, "Oh, it’s ok, it’s actually an exception to the rule, see, because since vacances is plural, "bonne" ought to be too, but it’s not, so you just have to memorize it." All in French, of course, but still...
When we do the exercises in his grammar book, I have to stop him all the time and make sure he understands the words in the sentences– "Tu comprends ruler?" "You understand what a ruler is?"
"Yes, like a paper towel," he responds, in French.
"No, wait..." and then it’s my turn to explain what a ruler is, but I don’t know the word in French, so what does poor Fabrice get? "Ruler c’est la chose qu’on utilise pour mesurer quelque chose...?"
"A ruler is the thing you use to measure something..."
"A meter?"
"No... the... stick thing?"
"Ahhhh, a regle!" But the thing is that we never actually know if he understands properly, because since I don’t know the word I am trying to explain, and he doesn’t know the word either, we just kind of rely on each other... It’s rather efficient...
Today we read a sentence about a tie, and I asked him if he knew the word, and he said no, so I said, "You know, it’s the thing men wear around their neck..." and he said "A briefcase?" in French.
He was reading a story to me about a cat, and he pronounced it "kate." And I have babysat 5 year olds learning to read, so I know the drill, and I said, without thinking about it, "Wait, what is that word?" And he repeated "Kate" slightly louder in case I hadn’t heard the first time. So I said, in a fit of Americanness fit to kill, "No, sound it out, babe."
Sound it out.
As though sounding it out is going to help this kid. As though he even knows what "sound" as a verb means. (Which, by the way, is a completely weird use for the word.) It’s not like he’s learning what sound the letter "a" makes for the first time in his life. You can’t sound out words in another language, because you revert to the pronunciation of YOUR language, and it is just useless. (Except in the case of Spanish, which I miss sometimes for precisely that reason.)
I always thought I could never be a grammar teacher because it is so dry, but this kid makes it amazing.
Monday night I went to my friend Laura’s apartment to hang out... we lounged around at her place in Chinatown for awhile and then decided we ought to go get dinner– Sushi! We both like fake sushi– the kind with fake crab instead of actual raw fish– and since she lives in Chinatown, we decided it must be good, right? So we walk into this fancy sushi bar and order a plate of california maki to share...
And the lady says, "Saumon? Ok!" "Salmon? Alright!"
So I stop her and say, "No, not salmon– ONLY California maki."
And she nods knowingly and says, "Right! Salmon ONLY!" and turns to walk away so quickly I don’t get a chance to stop her again. But two minutes later she walks by and I stop her, at Laura’s insistence (since not only do neither of us actually LIKE raw salmon, but it’s also not really the kind of place I want to be eating raw fish from anyway...), and say "Wait, we want–" and she interrupts with "Salmon! You want salmon!" And I say "No no, no salmon– we want CALIFORNIA maki– with... with..." and here I forgot the word for crab (I actually know the word for fake crab meat in french, file that under questions that may someday win me a million dollars on Final Jeopardy.). BUT I forgot the word for crab, so I look to Laura, hoping she can fill in the blank, but she has no idea what I am trying to say, so she says "Soy sauce?"
And the lady goes, "Ok, ok, shared maki with soy sauce!" And Laura, more optimistic than I, says, "Wow, that was complicated..." as I am trying to decide what we are actually going to get.
And, sure enough, the lady brings us a giant plate of, like, a million salmon makis, and TWO bottles of soy sauce, since we clearly wanted it so bad. Excellent. We picked the salmon out, one at a time, of each and every maki and ate them plain... but it’s the kind of place that they may have just saved our heap of salmon for the next customer.
AND both of the soy sauces they brought for us were soia sucrée. I don’t know how to explain this... I eat sushi a lot in the US and have never seen this stuff, but everyone here loves it. It LOOKS like soy sauce, but it’s thicker, like if you mixed maple syrup with regular soy sauce, and it’s... SWEET. How weird is that? But it’s good. And at sushi places here (real upscale ones, not places where they don’t know the difference between fake crab and real salmon), you always eat the sweet soy sauce with sushi– the salty kind is only for chicken and rice and other kinds of meat. Maybe it’s a European invention, the way a lot of things at Taco Bell are American inventions... or maybe it’s some kind of legit Asian dietary staple that I was just never aware of... but either way, I’m glad I discovered it.
Last night I went to see Molière’s Malade Imaginaire at the Comedie Française with my program. The Comedie is this place where they put on– you guessed it– comedies. It was built in 1690, across the street from the Louvre back in the day when the king lived at the Louvre, so that it was handy for him. The building is beautiful; I got there early on purpose, and although my seat kind of sucked (it required a handheld O2 tank to get there), it ended up being ok because it just put me closer to the ceiling, which was gorgeous. Remember my passion for Beauty and the Beast? Think ballroom scene in Beast’s palace. Cherubs and angels frolicking in the clouds, and in the movie they actually frolic in time with the music, while looking down placidly at Belle and Beast. The chandelier too was straight out of the movie, and although the ceiling painting was dated 1913, it was still gorgeous.
The play itself was... good. (The title, translated, means "The Imaginary Disease.") A lot of the humor in it was puns, and the gag of the whole thing was how the main character was dying but still talked at top speed all the time... so it was pretty hard to understand, but it was still funny.
But it had this weird personification of death through the whole thing, as a crowd of masked people in those really terrifying tall Art Nouveau hats... you know the ones? Anyway, I have this HUGE inexplicable fear of people in those kind of outfits, and, completely separately, an even bigger fear of people in masks pointing at me. Actually, neither of these are inexplicable... I know exactly where each one came from, but that doesn’t make them any less legit. And death in the play was a crowd of people in those masks that came out chanting to eerie music, and then pointed at the main character.
I almost peed my pants. I mentioned this fear to someone afterward and they looked at me like I was crazy. Which made me start thinking of things that really freak me out, and I suppose they are kind of weird...
Parking garages. Burkas. People in masks pointing at me. Masquerade masks with fake noses. Those tall hats. Roaches. Cave crickets. The Lady in White (a monster that no one really understands who is reputed to live in the cabin I spent all summer in and was seen there by more than one staffer in years past– AND I totally saw her one night last August). Whippoorwill John, but only before dawn.
That’s kind of an exhaustive list, which is why it seems so long. But nevertheless, the point is that I came home and, quite literally, dreamed about people in masks in my room chanting around my bed and woke up in a cold sweat. So much for the comedic effect, I guess.
In other news, I went and talked to the people in charge of my program about getting out of this architectural design class– I have no experience in this, and not only that, but it’s also not even an intro level class– it’s a third year class. It’s really not my fault; the course description mentioned nothing about designing things. Anyway, I went to the office to talk to them about my difficulties, and this is what they said to me: "You know, the Pantheon is just around the corner from here– you could draw that! There are always students sitting outside of it with their easels and pencils!"
Are you kidding me? I got told three times last week that my plan of the plain classroom we were sitting in was wrong, and all they can tell me is to go draw the freaking Pantheon? I don’t have a picture of the Pantheon to put here, but suffice it to say this: Pantheon means, like, "all the gods" or something, and this building encompasses all the architectural elements known to man. When I mentioned that perhaps the Pantheon is a bit out of my league right now, they responded with "Well, Paris is the perfect city to take a design class in! There are monuments and fancy buildings everywhere!" I think they missed the point.
The next Le Corbusier,
B