food

best […] ever

January 28, 2009 by krisis

[British Belgian restaurant]
We found an amazing Belgian restaurant where I had truly phenomenal mussels. The couple beside us told us they come from outside the city just to have dinner there, and then go home.

[American bragging rights]
Every conversation we’ve had so far in London includes, “What do you think about Obama?” to which we reply in chorus, “We love him!” We have a pretty set script we’re working from at this point. In France it was more polite questioning, but here people have been probing a bit more.

[away-from-home mattress streak]
The wedding hotel mattresses were absolutely heavenly. Like, even the night before with all the nervous energy and whatnot I slept like a rock. I would have tied one to the roof of our car if I could have. Then in Paris we had the sort of ultra-firm Ikea futon mattress that we have at home. And now we’re on a comfortably soft, well-appointed deluxe queen. Seriously, this is highly improbable success.

[water served below room temperature]
Finally, water with ice. I mean, Paris was definitely the best place ever, but I can only drink so much room temperature water in any given week.

[honeymoon timing]
France’s public transit workers and teachers went on strike about an hour ago. We were about four Metro stops from anything of interest; we would have been stranded if we had stayed an extra day.

[drunken plans to write a musical of a movie we watched on our first date seven years ago]
We got sortof drunk over dinner on Beglian beer and, much to the delight of our neighboring couple, debated at length how we would go about writing and staging a musical of The Princess Bride. We got as far as breaking out the songs and their titles and arguing over appropriate voice parts. We’re very into the idea at the moment, but let’s see what happens when we sober up in the morning.

Anything you’d like to add?

abandoned thoughts

January 23, 2009 by krisis

We have yet to see a single obese French person in Paris. Even the roundest, jolliest French-speakers we’ve seen look healthy.

We still have yet to be served anything with ice. Elise cannot figure out what lattes are called here. My club sandwich at Louvre was not club in the American sense, and came on the whitest white bread ever.

There is a distinct lack of disposable stuff, in general. Paper towels are petite compared to their American compatriots – like a single liter of soda next to a 2-liter. The toilet paper is thin and perfunctory.

Our flat has no apparent heat; it’s warmed by a radiator and an installed wall plate at either side of its length. Is this typical of French buildings?

Every single restaurant/bar has the same facade, no matter what they serve.

French cable has a channel for every possible iteration of nationality. We watched Romanian and Armenian television earlier. Does US digital cable get a lot of Romanian channels?

I always thought it was amusing that different languages have different words for the noises animals make, because animals don’t obey language. Children, though, that’s interesting. All of their little wheezes and whoas are completely different. And, I have yet to see an awful mess of a child, the sort you constantly find yourself sitting next to on SEPTA.

We haven’t yet had an opportunity to order escargot. At the Franprix they have a frozen dinner of them, but that’s not how I imagined my introduction to them.

my wife, the spy

January 21, 2009 by krisis

This post has had about two dozen ledes in the past twelve hours.

As I expertly predicted, the exchange rate was greatly improved just hours after inauguration. Unfortunately, we had to change our money while the speech hadn’t yet started so we’d have cash for the flat. We lost out on about a meal’s worth of Euros in the process.

Our flat is situated in a small complex of condo-like apartments – a long hall off the street and through a small concrete courtyard with potted trees and recycling bins. It’s almost as deep as the first floor of our house, and half as wide.

Actual French people live on every side of us, through walls about as thick as crepe paper. Par example, last night I was awoken not by jet lag, but by the snoring of a neighbor.

True story. Luckily, the packing list was very effective when followed, which means I do have two pairs of earplugs with me.

Post-plugs, the jet lag took over – we arose brightly and without an alarm at 7 a.m. Philadelphia time, or 1 p.m. local. Pity, as from the forecast it looks like this will be the only dry day of our time in Paris. We nipped out for a walk around our environs in the daylight, snapping the daylight version of our view over Parc de Belleville from last night.

We’re in the 19ème arondissment, just a hop over from 20ème. It seems like every street in our neighborhood curves around to intersect with another street in an unusual way. After some gawking at Google street-view it’s starting to make sense. It reminds me of the one block in New York that Rabi and I always walk past where you can sit in the courtyard of one Starbucks peering into another one.

We located a grocery store on rue de belleville – le marche Franprix. To our obese American eyes it looked to be the size of a convenience store. What we did not take into account is that nothing in France is packaged at the massive size of its American counterpart, so what to us looked like a super-sized Wawa in fact contained just about everything we’d expect from an Acme.

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If I passed last night’s first verbal exam by the skin of of my teeth, today’s written was much smoother – between the two of us Elise and I are pretty good at food vocab in French (and like lots of French food). We also had the benefit of illustrative packaging, though the print professional in me was fascinated by the subtle differences in photos and headlines.

For every lack of ridiculous flavor iterations (the cereals were only about six feet wide) there was half an aisle of things we consider to be prohibitively gourmet. My sans pulp orange juice was next to a litre of guava-pineapple juice. The condiments aisle had an entire block of hand-jarred preserves, only half of which were fruits I knew the translation for.

Being the fat Americans, of course we had three times as many groceries as everyone else in line. Between the petite bags of groceries everyone was toting, the multiple fruit stands (in the winter!), and our teeny fridge (smaller than the ones at the wedding hotel!) we’re figuring most people in this neighborhood buy for just a day or two at a time. But, hello, if you had seen the cheese aisle you would understand.

Finally, we had our second near-arrest (the first being last night when the cabbie thought Elise was making a run for it). Once again, my international super-spy wife pulled an Alias getaway and left me holding the bag. Literally, in this instance.

The market has this giant wooden paddle at the end of the conveyor, and when you’re done buying they swoop all your stuff to the side and start checking the next person. Elise did not necessarily grasp this idiosyncrasy, and continued to bag from the right rather than from the left, and then took off like Roadrunner with her half of the bags while I was still performing my ritual pocket-check.

Suddenly I am being jabbed by an older French woman and regarded curiously by the checkout woman. This is not an instance where you want to be trying to recall decades-old French class. Apparently, Elise bagged the woman’s preserves in one of my bags. Thankfully, my expressive eyebrows transcend the barriers of language, and I got out with a muttered desolé.

(For the record, Elise is familiar with the wooden paddle concept, and… I don’t understand what comes after the and. And just felt like trying to get me arrested to see if the police would really call Gina’s number to have her meet me after my deportation? I’m not sure.)

Now safe, sound, and fed, we are going to take advantage of our one totally dry evening to venture down to the Eiffel. Also, just now we started planning a day trip to Brussels with Jem & Jan, which is going to be AWESOME.

(I didn’t get a chance to install Photoshop before we left, so these are all sans color retouch, for the moment.)

le premier nuit

January 20, 2009 by krisis

Google informs me that the titular phrase with “soir,” as I originally phrased it, frequently refers to the question of having sex on the first date.

Funny how they don’t teach you these things in high school.

Here’s gare du nord, where we disembarked.

I took special delight in the fact that Dexter is being advertised as heavily here as it was in the states last fall, but I’m not sure what season they’re on.

I insisted we snap a photo to commemorate the end of our 18 hours of traveling before we went out for dinner.

We turned the wrong way up our street at first and discovered that it terminates in an absolutely breathtaking overview of the entire city, with the Eiffel directly in the center. We were at a loss for words.

(That is, until I remarked that the roving light from the top of the tower is not unlike the eye of Sauron. Because we are huge, married nerds.)

Photo forthcoming; at the time dinner was a higher priority.

Elise made me speak French to our waiter three times. He was extremely patient, and seemed to take delight in the fact that we were struggling not to use English or ask him how to say things.

When we left he said “Thank you, byebye!”