Links!

I know a few of of the people who read this are planning trips over here, so I thought I'd add links to a few websites that might be helpful. A couple of them are in French, but I've seen people set up Google to automatically translate websites for them. This results in the sort of stilted, translator-speak you'd expect, but it's still comprehensible.

Yesterday we had a break in the weather - the sun actually came out and the rain stopped for a while - so we had a nice day of wandering around. The goal was to go buy sweaters, but our destination store, an oasis of decent basics called Uniqlo, turned out to be closed. There was an angry mob of confused shoppers outside the door and a nervous employee trying to look nonchalant as he blocked the way. Electrical problems, apparently.

Across the street we saw the window displays at the Galleries LaFayette, and they are truly frightening, featuring dancing robot teddy bears in scenes from Mamma Mia! and Hairspray. In one scene they appeared to be frenetically destroying a Chrismas tree, Godzilla-style. It did not seem right.

Today it is Armistice Day, a national holiday; just now I heard a ton of church bells ringing and realized it was 11:00. The rain is coming down again and we won't be doing much walking if we don't have to. Plans involve baking things and braising other things, plus a lot of reading.

Fall colors

Last weekend we went for a long walk in the Bois de Boulogne, a large park at the western edge of Paris.

On November 1st we visited Père Lachaise cemetary. It was a gorgeous fall day with a breeze and the trees at peak color. This is the one photo I got before the camera lost power. Oh well. It was very beautiful, trust me. Or take a look at these photos, taken by someone else on the same day.

Avignon

Here are some pictures from our short trip to Avignon during fall break. This is the city in Provence where the popes were based for a few hundred years when things in Rome got a little too hot for them. While in residence, the popes fortified the city and built themselves a pretty impressive palace, and everything is fairly well-preserved as far as I can tell. If you imagine a cross between a stereotypical medieval city and Southdale mall, you will have a pretty good idea of what Avignon is like today.

Our original plan involved renting bikes and riding them to the Pont du Gard, the very famous Roman bridge and aqueduct about 25 kilometers away. When we arrived, however, the famous Mistral wind rendered that not such a great idea. So we wandered around the city, got a bunch of stuff at the market, and had a picnic at the Rocher des Doms park right above the Palais des Papes. By luck, we got together with a friend from the University of Minnesota who is working in Montpellier this year. And we went for a good long walk outside Villeneuve-lès-Avignon on the other side of the Rhone river. Here are some pictures of these exciting events.

 

 I should say Avignon is well preserved with the exception of the famous bridge, which people got tired of rebuilding in the seventeenth century or so. I guess there is a well-known nursery rhyme about dancing on the bridge of Avignon, though neither Jeff nor I had heard of it. 

Lunch! terrine, cheese, olives, tart, baguette, wine.

 Flattering shot of me with Provençal tart.

 The olives were definitely good. Jeff thought they were fabulous. 

I ate two and almost liked them, which is high praise considering how I generally feel about olives.

You get a great view of the countryside from the Rocher des Doms. You can get an idea of that and of what the wind was like from these little videos Jeff took. I later read that due to the Mistral, most trees in this area grow leaning towards the south.

 That second video shows part of the Palais des Papes. This is the biggest gothic castle still standing. Here are some more photos of it.

This is the Fort Saint André near Villeneuve, seen from our walk near the river. 

It was built by king Philippe le Bel towards the end of the 13th century to help keep the popes in line.

Walking around the countryside near Villeneuve. It was nice to get outside of an urban setting for a while, and even the big parks in Paris are full of people most of the time.

So that's the news for the moment; today we are reading books in the apartment and listening to the rain on the roof.

Happy Halloween!

Just a brief post to say Happy Halloween! We have carved a potimarron in honor of the occasion. Here is me carving, and here is the result.

From this angle he looks scornful and sarcastic...

...but from this one, he looks like he's giving you the once-over and offering to make you breakfast.

 Très parisien, non?

Everyday life

It has been a quiet week here on rue Oberkampf. Elsewhere, as you may have read and seen in various news outlets, things have not been quiet; a few hundred teenagers decided to change the face of what had been, up to that point, a very peaceful series of massive protests. Of course, it's the kids breaking windows who get attention from the media, so you might have thought all of France was in shambles, but for us, it's been normal. Our apartment is about a fifteen minute walk to my work, so I don't have to deal with subways and trains that might have been crowded or delayed, and I don't have a car in need of gas (problems for some of my coworkers, though). Some of my students took the day off to attend protests. But that's all the disturbance we've experienced.


Weekdays when I work are fairly routine: I get up and go off to teach, Jeff does whatever he does when I'm gone (I think he plays guitar, works on learning French, plots world takeover, etc.), and then meets me at school. Sometimes we get a coffee, sometimes we go for a walk, sometimes we go window-shopping. Eventually we get hungry and decide we need to find food, and depending on how ambitious Jeff's plans are, we either go to Lémo (humorously pronounced lame-o) the organic grocery store, or we run the gamut of butcher shop, fruits and vegetables, bakery, etc. The fruit and vegetable guy recognizes us and realizes that he can talk me into "un petit peu" (a little bit) of pretty much anything, and usually throws something extra in the bag,  so he is particularly fun.

Then Jeff works his cooking magic while I catch up on the news of the world, but I like to let Jeff talk about that since it's his thing. I've cooked maybe three times since I've been here (other than toast and such).

Non-workdays are more fun and vary more; since I last wrote, we have been to the museum in the Petit Palais, we have gone actual clothes-shopping, gone out for drinks with some of my fellow lecteurs, we have been investigating French pizza, and today we are planning to head over to the Musée de la Chasse (hunting) et Nature, which we have read is surprisingly great, full of taxidermy and weapons and paintings, all commemorating the great aristocratic pastime of shooting things.

However, our big plans right now are a long weekend in Avignon. It's Fall break for all schools in France, ending with the Toussaint (All Saint's Day, an official holiday here), so I have ten full days off. In the middle of them, though, is a band that we want to see. So we're just planning a quick jaunt down south for some sunshine and Roman ruins.

I just realized I haven't put any pictures in this post, which I usually would add for interest - maybe we'll get some up later. In any case, that's what's going on - the streets are not burning, things are quite ordinary, but some excitement of the positive variety is in the forecast.

Tous ensemble! Tous ensemble! Grève générale!

Boulevard Voltaire today. That's the door to our building.

There are just as many people two blocks away on Boulevard Beaumarchais.
The groups will meet at Place de la Bastille and then head to Place de la Nation as one giant mass.


Around the corner from our place:
"General Strike"


Earlier today we tried to visit the new Basquiat exhibit at the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art. The line was down the block so we detoured to Musée des Beaux-Arts at Le Petit Palais. We checked out the 19th century paintings. The building is super cool. Here's the central courtyard:


On our way to find lunch we were passed on Avenue Champs Élysées by a very old, very dirty car that had a "Peking to Paris" sign on it. Twenty minutes later as we walked through Place Vendome, we found where it was headed. We had stumbled on the finish line of the 4th Peking to Paris Motor Challenge. It has been run in 1907, 1997, 2007 and 2010.

After lunch we bought expensive cookies from Pierre Hermé. Next time we'll hit Ladurée so we can weigh in on the eternal Pierre Hermé vs Ladurée Macarons Debate.
We got six flavors: rose, peach & saffron, salted caramel, green tea, creme brulée and hazelnut.

A bunch of unrelated items about food.

Of visiting Americans with little knowledge of the French language, the one advantage I have is that I know a lot of words for animal parts and vegetables. When I don't know what something is, I buy it and we eat it. It's how I show my mastery over nature. Last week, while looking at duck bits, we found manchons de canard. Luckily, I had Lia to inform me that manchon means sleeve. So these are duck wings. They are good, but not great when stewed in red wine. I found them at the store the next day preserved in jars of fat as confit. Probably better that way. Probably even better on the menu of the chicken wing franchise Jeff D. and I would like to open here.

A much more rousing success was the dish below. Shoulder of lamb, braised with lemon, garlic, tomato and Banyuls- a fortified, sweet dessert wine from Catalan, kind of like ruby port. Best thing we've made since arriving in Paris.

Last weekend we visited La Grande Epicerie de Paris. It's a gigantic grocery store, with fresh and packaged goods from everywhere. I especially enjoyed the TexMex/Spain/Germany section. This is a great place to go if you want ketchup, peanut butter, fish sauce, maple syrup, English canned beans, horrible salsa, wild rice, rare artisanal Spanish ham, marshmallow fluff and you want it all at one beautiful store. Of course, you pay more. €3 for a shot glass-sized bottle of fish sauce is crazy when there are Asian markets selling liters of it for that price. Anyway, it's fun to see all the hard-to-find and luxury items in one place. If it were open all night you would find drunken tourists and ex-pats from all over the world satisfying their midnight food cravings together.

I have what I think of as a Midwesterner's relationship with seafood. I'm kind of ignorant and a little unsure what to do with most of it. It makes me anxious- I wash my hands more than usual when preparing it. How do I cook this? When is it done? Which part do I eat? How do I get to that part? Which part is poison? I just don't like being that neurotic at the dinner table. I figure France is a great place to get over this problem.

To start, we decided to hit the open-air market, buy a bunch of seafood and make a stew. It sounded so simple and then ended up being one of the most time consuming things I've ever cooked. Luckily, it was delicious and fun. We bought langoustines(little lobstery things from the North Sea), mussels and rouget(red mullet).

Langoustines and Mussels

Rouget fillets and their former home.

shells, fish racks, leeks and carrots

Lia particularly enjoyed the little langoustine claws.
Here she is eating them while impersonating a Vermeer painting.


The table.