À Dejeuner

I've been trying to take part in the French thing of big lunches, small dinners. A habit that makes sense, really -- even though I love a nice big dinner. But so far this ladies-who-lunch thing has been successful.
On Tuesday I met a friend at Le Loir Dans La Théière in the Marais, which is a cozy place with wooden tables and a kind of coffeehouse feel to it. I ordered a creamy/zesty linguini dish that was yummy and my friend got a zucchini tart that was FULL of zucchini. The best though was dessert -- a lemon meringue which consisted of 10% really tart lemon and 90% huge, really dense and sweet and yummy meringue. I never liked meringue pies, the kind offered at my church cafeteria -- the meringue was airy and tasteless, I thought. But this stuff was so good and I am thus converted.
Today we went to a local place called Le Reveil du Xème which is a modest little bistro around the corner. The people there are super nice and the food is no nonsense. Most of the dishes were incomprehensible to me and I was too scared to order something called "Tête persilée" (parsleyed head?), which made me believe that this must be "real" french cuisine. I ordered the saucisse dish which came on a mound of dense mashed potatoes with not a green veggie in sight. It was really good. My one friend ordered the duck confit with sauteéd potatoes -- really moist and yummy. And the other ordered the salad with chevre chaud that came with two huge mounds of chevre. We also ordered escargot to start and what I suppose was a modestly priced pôt of beaujolais (since our "addition" wasn't that overwhelming, about 20e/person). And we got an eggy (kinda quich-ey) peach dessert (i forgot what the kind of tart is called). I liked it.

Foundation Cartier

This museum is free on Wednesday afternoons. They were exhibiting pieces by César, a sculptor who seemed to have enjoyed some popular and populist fame in the late sixties.

Toby

I wonder what is sold under this name . . .

Musée Nissim de Camondo

Today I visited a "hotel particulier" in the 8th arrondissement, a bourgeois neighborhood in which blond children walk around literally looking like Ralph Lauren ads. Very weird. This is the former home of Moises de Camondo, dedicated to his son Nissim (a friend of Proust's I think) who died in WWI. The place was built in the early 20th century, but decorated completely in 18th c. fashion. The de Camondo family, originally from Istanbul, earned its money in banking and spent it on art collecting. The last of the family died in Auschwitz.

Louis XVI style sitting room (I wish I knew what an early 20th c. Parisian sitting room looked like, to have some sort of basis for comparison. Next museum visit.)

Where the head chef decided his menus for the week.

Defense de Boire

As I already began to suspect during my last few months in Santa Cruz, not being able to drink really cramps my social life. It kept me mostly at home evenings, which I didn't mind so much then because SC night-life was beginning to grate. But now, it would be so much easier if I could, during one of my aimless walks, duck into a bar/restaurant/cafe and order a beer, read my book, be out and about, with the people, the people I tell you.

Order something else? I can't drink coke either. Sometimes I do stop in for a coffee. But really, alcohol is key. It's one of those things you can order more than one of, and it just means sociability. Perhaps what I'll do is go out a mere once a week for a mere "demi pression," a teeny, tiny draft beer. We'll see what the doc has to say about that.

Rues of Paris

The Single Life

As you would imagine, it's an odd feeling moving from married life in the States to single life in a foreign country. As a "GSI" (Graduate Student Instructor), we aren't provided with the kind social security blanket that the undergrads get. We're supposed to be adults with a purely academic purpose here. So far, it hasn't been bad. I've been mostly preoccupied with checking out the neighborhood and peeking my nose shyly into this brasserie or that bookstore.
But yesterday was a miserable rainy day and, even though I went out for a very nice social lunch, I was faced with the rest of the unplanned day. Not only do I feel pathetic simply because I am friendless in a big city, I also get a glug of anxiety whenever the thought crosses my mind to venture out to populated areas where someone might try to talk to me. You know, in French.
So my goal for the time being is to have one substantial activity per day that I successfully accomplish. Today I had to do another excursion to Sacre Coeur with a different group of students. Check. And then I wanted to check out a museum up there on Montmartre, The Halle St. Pierre, which was having a show of contemporary artists under the theme of "Interiority." I'm not sure how these pieces were an expression of interiority -- some of them were paintings of american subways, some were self-portraits, some were fabulously detailed patterns -- but they were mostly all creepy, in a good way.