Seasons and Mushrooms

If you've been bowing at the altar of the internet gods for us, we thank you - we do now have real internet in the apartment! Everyone will be shocked to hear that the long wait was the result of an administrative mix-up, and our internet had been activated without any notification being sent. Ah well, bygones.

I'd mention all the very lovely food we've been eating, but Jeff is going to tell you more about that later. I will restrict myself to mentioning that the pig's ear salad at l'AOC. It is amazing: rich and caramely and sticky with a little balsamic vinegar, and not chewy at all. Truly wonderful, and that's coming from someone who is not that adventurous in her choice of meats.

The weather here has been gorgeous - cool, dry, and brilliantly sunny - so we've been trying to soak up as much light and flower power as possible before winter sets in. As you may have noticed, we are great fans of the city parks for our picnics and walks: any average day can be brightened up by an interlude in the Place des Vosges, lying on the lawn with a thousand other people.

Last weekend we went to the Bois de Vincennes, a very large park on the eastern edge of the city. This was originally a royal hunting preserve conveniently located outside the Château de Vincennes, later turned into a military training ground. Louis-Napoleon turned it back into a public park and added trees and lakes, and now it's a lovely place to spend a nice Sunday afternoon.

At the Parc Floral in the Bois de Vincennes, we also visited an exhibit on mushrooms. You may not be aware that this is the Semaine Nationale du Champignon, but it is, and even if you are not French, American mushrooms surely deserve some celebration, and maybe even a hug.

They're pretty high on my favorite food list, anyway, so off we went. We saw a few hundred different kinds of mushrooms in little trays: some tasty, some hallucinogenic, some that could shut down your kidneys or induce heart failure. Disturbingly, most of them looked very much alike. I left the exhibit convinced that mushroom-hunting is best left to professional mycologists.

There were also some mushrooms that smelled convincingly of something else: kerosene, ink, etc. Here I am, checking the garlic-scented mushrooms.

Okay, that was slightly exaggerated for effect, but they really did smell very strongly of garlic.

The Parc Floral has a lot of nice gardens, as you'd guess, and some interesting plants, including a giant rhubarb.

They also had a corner full of pine trees that smelled for a second like the North Woods. We were already feeling a little wistful after seeing the Santeri Tuori video installation at the Institut Finlandais, a very large-scale time-lapse projection of a forest going through the seasons. So we are currently planning a trip up to Bretagne (alias Brittany), which we think will be a lot like the North Shore but with oysters and medieval things. That will be the week after next, assuming the trains are running.