"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