“I’m Over It”

Now that you’ve picked yourself up off the floor from reeling from the shock of seeing a new blog post, let me apologize for the extended absence. Sure, a week or even two might be tolerable, but months?! That’s sort of pushing it, even for we busy professional types. I’d like to say that I’d been kidnapped by angry Argentinian activists, held in a cave where I was tortured for information, only to have clawed my way out, and through some novel worthy death defying adventure (I know that should be hyphenated, but I’ll explain why you won’t be seeing hyphens in a few paragraphs) to have made my way back to Paris, exhausted but posting to my blog. Hell, I’d even take a story about being hit by a car in the dangerous Parisian crosswalks, only to wake up thinking I was Queen Victoria and teaching all the Frenchies proper English etiquette until my memory came back, but that’s not what happened either. No, the truth is, I’ve just been busy. Outrageously so. Maybe I should see if I can contact those angry Argentinians because, if they’d let me bring my laptop and my reading, that quiet cave in the mountains might be ideal for getting through this mountain of academic drudgery. Between the roughly ten (yes, ten, like 1, 0) novels I need to read (not thin ones, mind you) and analyze, the three exposés I need to prepare (those are French oral presentations with very specific and somewhat ridid structures), the papers, and the thesis project all of which need to be done by mid May (damn this lack of hypen!!), I can basically count on locking myself in my apartment and spending so much time hunched over books in the dark, that I’ll return to the US some sort of photophobic mole person. Fantastic.

Anyway, you’re probably not here to listen to me (or read me) moaning (although, if you’re not, you’d think you would have learned by now…), and if you’re like Allie and “over” my blog, I’m probably not going to get you interested again talking about the two main ingredients of any master’s in literature (reading and writing). Instead, let’s take a whirlwind tour of my life since the end of January, shall we?

One of the main social events that dragged me out of my academic isolation last month was Whitney’s “Sabor Latino” party; a shindig of about twenty or so people that included copious amounts of sangria and a smorgasbord of tapas (little latin finger foods if you’re not familiar) which took place at her place in Malakoff. Can we talk about the kind of party you have to promise to get people to take the train all the way out there? I’m not sure exactly what she told everyone but I think I heard rumors of topless belly dancers riding Indian elephants.

It was a tricky night for her as she had to babysit until an hour and a half before her party, which anyone who has ever hosted a party knows leaves no where near enough prep time beforehand. Being my mother’s son and having helped through more than a few parties of this sort, I thought I’d offer to help out. As luck would have it, Whitney and I ended up on the same train to Malakoff and therefore ended up getting to her place at the same time. Both all too aware of the gravity of the situation, we sprung into action. Knives clacking frantically as garlic met its untimely end, tears streaming as onions were quickly reduced to a pile of translucent caustic bits, we were T minus one hour to the party and we needed patatas bravas made, baguettes sliced, and every other type of hors d’œuvre heated, unplastic wrapped (hopefully not in that order), and placed on a serving platter in less time than some of these things were supposed to take to cook. Clayton and Mario came and the unsuspecting duo was immediately put to work. Basically, after using pretty much every dish in the apartment, fighting Whitney for her iPhone which had suddenly taken on near holy importance as it had become both a recipe book and and a doorbell for her guests, and after stirring with one hand, peeling with another, and asking the microwave for all it could give, we all managed to make the food at the party happen. Kat and others were a big help in the whole endeavor too, but there was such a blur of hands and faces in the kitchen, I can’t remember who did what. It was a good time had by all (at least I hope it was), and I think people will definitely be going to Whitney’s next party, should she decide to have one.

Shortly after Whitney’s party, the 14th of February, the day all single women seem to dread, rolled around. Kate, Donna, and I all got together for a little Valentine’s dinner which included champagne rosé which I found at this neat little place down the street from Jess and Nick’s, a fantastic heart shaped cake filled with chestnut confit (which I assure you is amazing), a side of Terre à Delice salted caramel ice cream (which made me sick, but hurt so good), a nice red wine from Spain, an overflowing plate of fresh strawberries, and a case of these delicious little confections called “Millionaire’s Flapjacks” by Gü (thing “ooey gooey”) which were amazing if not assured to give you Type 2 Diabetes overnight. Anthony ended up stopping by later on, which was nice, and all in all, I think we all had an enjoyable holiday. As a side note, I might be the only one and maybe I’m broken or have a heart of stone, but being single on Valentine’s has never bothered me. I’ll have to explore that more later.

What fantastic day comes just a week after Valentine’s Day? Which day am I petitioning the French and American governments to recognize as the special, day off worthy occassion that it is? Why, it’s Lise’s and my birthday, of course! She and I had planned to do some big combined extravaganza but as we both took so long to plan the thing and it fell on a Tuesday night just before a week of vacation, we ended up having a thoroughly enjoyable smaller group out for dinner and dessert in the 13th. I have to admit, I was a little skeptical about the choice of venue when I first showed up, bedraggled after teaching on my feet for 5 hours straight and seeing this little empty restaurant named “Gladine’s” on the corner. It looked pretty, well, délabré (run down) and there was no one inside. Still, I trusted Lise, and hoped for the best. Yahaira showed up shortly after I did and we had a nice chat until Lise, Eric, and Whitney joined us, we did the Paris shuffle to get a table, moved to a bigger table so Kat could join us, and added an oddly folding chair when Jess arrived a bit later. Despite the exterior, it was an excellent choice for a restaurant with extremely generous helpings of Basque cuisine which, after it opened, had lines out the front door and around the corner waiting to be seated. Dinner was nice, and though I wasn’t as adventurous as Eric was ordering tripe, I had a good time.

As the restaurant was pressed for space, we decided to have dessert up the street at Place d’Italie at a small place called O’Jules (presumably named after the French bastard son of an Irishman). We all had ice cream, or in my case, vodka soaked lemon sorbet, coffee, and enjoyed ourselves despite the irritating know it all (really missing those hyphens) waiter that informed Eric that people don’t say “en fait” (actually/in fact) unless they have a speech impediment (totally untrue, EN FAIT) and who was generally rude. It’s amazing how many French servers become assholes when you have the audacity to openly speak English around them.

I also had my first visitors since I got here! My friends Hayden and her boyfriend Nick who I know from my Burlington and UVM days came to visit in February after a month working for an agricultural exchange program in southern France and eating altogether too much poireaux soup and crappy bread, butter, and cheese sandwiches. Nick had never been to Paris before and Hayden had only been long enough to do the touristy whirlwind sightseeing tour. I did my best to show them around while managing to get my work done and allowing them a little time to themselves (it is the city for lovers, after all). I really enjoyed having them here, and not only because they brought me fantastic mint tea from their recent trip to Morocco, but as I saw them getting on the train to Charles de Gaulle (the big Parisian airport) on their way back to Vermont, I was hit by my first major twinge of homesickness. There’s nothing like friends from home that are part of an existence totally seperate from Middlebury to provoke “le mal de pays”. Ah well, such is life.

That pretty much wraps up the exciting goings on in my life. Aside from that and shortcircuiting my keyboard during a rather unfortunate cleaning accident (thus the lack of hyphens and my ‘p’ key also acting as mute) which brings my tally of laptops killed or severely maimed since I started college up to five or six, it’s all reading. Not that I can complain too much; most of my reading is fairly interesting as it’s about prostitutes or other equally exciting populations of the francophone world. Still, this lack of posting is inexcusable, and so I’m going to try to resolve to write at least a paragraph a day. Well, as soon as I replace this damned keyboard because this muting my music every time I type a word with ‘p’ in it is getting all kinds of old. If you don’t hear from me, don’t worry too much; my brain probably just exploded all over the walls of my apartment after it exceeded it’s maximum capacity.

Joy El, can you please work on either a) extending the day to 36 hours so I can get everything done or b) creating a few adult clones of me that have a copy of my brain (I don’t have time to raise and teach them)? I could really use the help and I’m not really sure why you’re dragging your feet. We paid off those ethics people, right?

PS, if you need to send a greeting card, check out Hallmark’s new SmileBox service. It’s kind of cool and (mostly) free!). Take a look below at the card I sent my sister to see what I mean.

Make your own digital greeting

Tags: 13th, Anthony, birthday, Burlington, Clayton, Donna, Epitechp, Eric, Gladine's, Hallmark, Hayden, Jess, Kat, Kate, latino, Lise, Malakoff, Mario, Middlebury, Nick, Paris, parties, research, Sailor, SmileBox, UVM, Valentine's, Vermont, Whitney, Yahaira

Oh Frabjuous Day!

First, let me apologize for the conspicuous lack of posts during the last ten days; I’ve been sick and busy so though I have many half finished posts, none of them ever saw the light of day. Other than a lingering twinge of a sore throat, I am feeling much better and therefore thought it past time to write to my legions of adoring fans (*coughALLIEcough*).

The little village of Ecouen

Yesterday was the big trip out of Paris to the wee village of Ecouen to the north to visit Le musée national de la Renaissance (The National Renaissance Museum) for my Le Prince class. Since I’m lame and slept in for Versailles and never actually signed up for the Normandy trip, this was my first trip out of Paris this semester, and boy was it refreshing. Just 22 minutes north of Gare du Nord, the dirty city streets, graffiti, and honking cars are all left behind, and replaced by quaint little stone houses, rolling hills (yes, changes in elevation!!), and little restaurants and cafés. I rode the train with Donna from Paris, and I think we confused the two middle-aged French women sitting across from us. They were looking at us as if thinking “you don’t seem to be French, so why are you speaking to each other in our language?” while trying to place us like a pin on a map of the globe. To give them a little hint, we spoke English just a bit, though the puzzled look didn’t fade away so I’m thinking we left them cycling through Australia, North America, and the British Isles in the same way Latin American Spanish speakers keep me guessing (unless they say things like “vos” and then I’ve got them!). Disembarking the train, we met up with Yahaira and Clarice and walked with them through the drizzly streets toward the “city center.”

711/Cumberland Farms à la française??

Turning at the convenience center above, which was sort of a Cumberland Farms or 711 à la française the illusion of being in a quaint French village of a different time was sort of broken. Not that the good people of Ecouen should be without a convenient one-stop shop place to seem like a little town from another era, but it’s things like this that sort of pull the needle across the vinyl abruptly while I’ve got some pre-War French classic playing in my head. After about fifteen minutes à pied (on foot), we made it to the city center, though, after Paris, we were all sorely tempted to keep looking for it as, aside from the château, it consisted of a post-office, a 24/7 video rental place (out here, really?), the city hall, and a little restaurant. My town center in Vermont has more than that! After walking up to the castle, taking a few breathtaking photos of the side of Europe I’m sure will most please my parents when presented with my various photos, we decided to see about lunch.

Unlike Paris where you can throw a stone in any direction and hit three cafés, probably serving three different types of cuisine, there was just the one place to eat unless we wanted to walk all the way back to the train station to the Japanese restaurant (again, really? Out here?!). So, we went in to what seemed like a closed restaurant, but was in fact just a small country place, complete with the pastry cooler twirling homemade pies. Clarice, the planner of the group, had prepared herself a sandwich, so she decided to go eat in the gardens of the palace while we had our lunch. I felt awful because, as nice as lunch in the royal gardens sounds, it was a rather dismal gray day, but with all the grace of the bien élevée, she assured us it would be fine and wished us bon appetit before departing. As we sat down, we had no idea what we were getting into, and I have to admit as fantastically appetizing as the twirling tarts in the case looked, I was pretty sure we weren’t in Kansas anymore (or so to speak).

Le grand mystère was solved when our waitress with the D&G glasses came over and handed us a menu. Portuguese?! Really?! OK, I like Spanish food and I’m assuming Portuguese cuisine is just Spanish injected with a few extra servings of fruits de mer (seafood). Not that it mattered as we all ordered fairly safe salads and omelets (I tried to keep it authentic and at least order a porto from Portugal, but that was about it). Lunch, both the food and the company, was excellent, and it reminded me of one of my absolute favorite parts of traveling: the adventure of the unexpected. Whether on road trips across the US with my friends or family or traveling through Asia or Europe, my favorite part has always been visiting that one weird little place that you would normally have never seen. It’s that sort of thing that makes you feel like there is a little magic left in the world and that l’aventure de vivre est belle (the adventure of living is a beautiful thing).

Château d'Ecouen & Musée national de la Renaissance

The visit to the museum/castle itself was OK, but held a somewhat limited interest for me until we got to the ancient books at the end. Don’t get me wrong, I very much appreciated Professor Le Person coming out on a Saturday and showing us around, but after a few hours of rooms that SERIOUSLY smelled like a goat barn (I’m from Vermont, and my sister had to have goats when she was little, so I promise that’s what they smell like), my back was hurting and my intellectual curiosity in the finer details of Renaissance architecture waning. The ancient scripts at the end, especially those that negotiated a sort of cooperation between François 1er and the Ottoman Empire against Charles V (which didn’t really go anywhere, as I recall), were fascinating, but anyone knows you can throw me in a room with dusty old tomes and I’ll be happy.

Ancient Arabian script

When the visit was over, we all practically sprinted down the many stairs and back into the rainy streets to get back to the train to Paris. Yahaira asked the only local waiting in the bus shelter with 10 Americans (a scene which can’t be common in Ecouen) if we were in the right spot to catch the bus to the station, and to make a long story short, we weren’t and we ended up walking back in the wind and rain. Luckily, Eric had the fantastic idea of stopping at the café, and though they didn’t have warm drinks like I was hoping after a moist little jaunt, I did walk away with the consolation prize of a tasty millefeuille which did not disappoint. Finally, a half hour later, we were all on the train back to Paris, Donna and Yahaira planning a date with Zola while I did the same with Michel Tremblay. It’s funny to use romantic terms in regards to the authors that are consuming all of our free time, but I suppose there does have to be some love in there as we all keep spending our nights with them cuddled up next to our chest, whispering sweet nothings to us from the letters on the page.

Riding to Saint-Michel on the 4, I had to try two Starbucks until I had a suitable place to meet with Whitney to study (read: chat over coffee and read five pages in two hours). Though I knew the studying would be a bust, we did have an excellent time taking advantage of the wonderfully warm weather and walking home (yes, all the way from Odéon to Porte Maillot in Neuilly where we split up). On the way, I actually experienced this incredibly strange moment when giving directions where I realized that French was the first language to automatically come out of my mouth when talking to anyone that wasn’t another American, even though the Italian tourists appreciated English much more. I guess I am really getting French-i-fied during my time here; fantastic! Also, besides the view of the sparkling ferris wheel at Place de la Concorde and a very pleasant stroll, Whitney and I shared some fresh sugary churros on the Champs Élysées which is fully decked out in Alpine wintery goodness.

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Alpiney Goodness on the Champs Élysées

Champs Elysées near Christmas time

All in all, I must say it was a fantastic day. Thank you, Donna, Yahaira, Clarice, Whitney, and the rest for making it so! It’s days like this that make me think I could stay in France forever.

Tags: Champs Élysées, château, Clarice, countryside, Donna, Ecouen, France, Gare du Nord, Le Prince, Odéon, Portuguese, Renaissance, restaurant, Saint André des Arts, Saint Michel, Starbucks, travel, Whitney, Yahaira