Sorry for my extended absence, folks; got into some serious final examming. But now I'm back, and I thought this would be a timely topic for a lot of us:
I took this picture during my class at the Sorbonne on Wednesday afternoon. The girl next to me is actually knitting during class, sitting quite visibly in the second row--with very few people sitting in the first. Which leads me to today's question:
These artfully carved squash products were in the produce section at a Monoprix on Boulevard de l'Hôpital in the 13th. I have to say that I was a little taken aback to find something so pretty and decorative just sitting there, with no fanfare, in a local outpost of a major supermarket (and everythingmarket) chain. Just wanted to put that out there and ask, in the immortal words of Dr. Gordon, my AP Calculus teacher:
Please forgive my lengthy absence; I spent much of the last week face-first in an Art History paper on Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, one of whose paintings (Grand Canal (Venise)) is pictured above. Finally handed it in on Thursday, and I guess that since then, I've just been recovering. But, in honor of all the time I spent with these two artists, my question is:
Close-up on our huge bowl of leftover cranberry sauce...So today is Black Friday, or, as we anglophones in Paris call it, Friday. Today is Americans' signal to turn their focus to the next big holiday at hand, which is, as far as commercialism is concerned, Christmas. Obviously not everyone in the country celebrates it, but Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Solstice and their other winter friends don't provide much competition from an advertising and consumerist standpoint. What I'm wondering is:
I didn't say the scary deer was keeping me away from Orangina--just that she threatened to keep me awake nights. I try to have a big bottle of Orangina Light in our fridge at all times, because it's such a good deal: all that yummy taste for only 12 calories a glass. Particularly on a day like today, when I'm heading to Angelina for crazy hot chocolate with visiting friends later, I need to economize where I can. They've had this for years here, and what I want to know is:
I find this Orangina ad campaign terrifying. Seriously? A seductive, bikini/undergarment-clad kangaroo smoking a cigarette? I'll have what she's having. So maybe you can help me out:
I just wanted to give Starbucks Paris a shout-out for having a keypad on their bathroom, the code for which is printed on your receipt when you buy something. This would certainly be useful in New York, where, as it's the known go-to spot for free toilet use, you never know what you're going to find in a Starbucks bathroom. Question for today:
This is the line I waited in yesterday afternoon to buy a movie ticket. Unfortunately, the part of the line that was in front of me looked just like this for a while, because there was nobody in the booth selling tickets. The guy who worked for Studio Galande--seemingly the only person answering to this description--was in the theatre itself, I don't know, cleaning up?, and didn't come out to sell tickets until after the movie's posted start time. In fact, on the ticket booth, there was even this little gem:
...which is a buzzer that reads SONNEZ ET PATIENTEZ S.V.P., or "Please ring and be patient." Ring a bell if you want to buy a movie ticket?? This all leads me to ask a question I've been wondering about for quite some time, but finally have photographic evidence to back it up:
This is a picture of the water that rushes out of the holes in the curb every day or two in order to clean our street. In case you're trying to read what it says on the metal plate, it says not to drink the water. You got it, fellas--promise. While NYC-style car-moving for street cleaning is a total pain for people with cars, I have to wonder:
30 questions already?! Time do fly. This above is one of the holiday windows at the Galeries Lafayette. Each of them proffers a cute or funny, but often slightly suggestive, buffet of animatronic entertainment. This gingerbread fella was davening (second definition) on the bouffanty mannequin's knee--zoom in for a better look--and a goofy little part of me wondered:
Vindicated! I couldn't help myself; I had to take this picture, and I did my best to crop it down to minimum size for recognition of the important bits without trying to exploit the individual pictured, who is lovely. This, dear readers, is a real French person--one of my Alto-section choirmates--eating, standing up, before the start of rehearsal! I was so excited! You can kind of make out the end of the pain au chocolat in her right hand. It's just so nice to know that I'm not alone, that there are other snackers--even French ones!--lurking here in Paris.
Most of you will recognize this as Winnie, our littler little dog. She's pictured above chewing on one of the Nylabones my parents brought for the pups. She's been spending a whole lotta time chewing, which is quite unlike her. Graham's always been a heavy hitter, dentally speaking, but we had a hard time convincing Winnie to follow suit. This meant that, despite her sweet face, she had some gnarly breath. But since we've been in Paris, she has been a whole other pup. Sure, she's still generally entropy on four paws, but some things have changed. Where she was once sometimes picky, she now chows down with gusto. She runs alongside Graham to chase bones thrown across the apartment. She's a bouncier, pluckier girl (and also a little more willful, but perhaps this comes with the territory). So the question is:
This is the dessert section of the lunch menu at l'Ami Louis, a famed old-school rotisserie on our block. Those prices are in euros, sadly, not francs. We did not order dessert. When we (Nick, my parents, and I) got there for lunch this afternoon, I was absolutely blown away by the ridiculously over-inflated prices. Could it possibly cost still more for dinner, or is it the same menu all day? I realized after we left that I had, in fact, known that this was a pricey establishment, but had totally forgotten beforehand, including when I made the reservation. Which, by the way, required calling the restaurant three times--to say nothing of the times the line was busy or they weren't answering. They didn't have a single table for dinner all week, and made me call back to confirm my reservation the day-of. I have a million questions, including: "Will my parents forgive me for thusly lightening their wallets, once they read this and realize I had once been aware of what we were getting into?" But I'm going to go with one that I believe has more universal appeal:
This is from a store window in Barcelona. The bride and groom look pretty happy together, sure, but my question is:
Like my chest x-ray? A little gift from the French government following my medical visit today, which is required in order to receive the titre de séjour, which allows me to be here legally for the year. So now that I have this lovely artifact, I'm wondering:
Pictured above is the waistband of a pair of pants I bought here in Paris, which provides a fine illustration of today's question:
This is my dinner from this evening, a little while before I finished it. On Mondays, I have class from 5-7 at Paris 3 and then choir rehearsal from 7:30-9:45. I grab dinner between the two and eat it once I get to my seat at Eglise Saint-Marcel, where we rehearse. I know that, to the average French person, this sort of on-the-run eating is incomprehensible and precisely the reason that Americans are obese and carry guns. Nonetheless, I persist, because if I have to wait until after 10pm to eat dinner, I'm kind of a mess. Spanish I ain't. At any rate, while I'm eating my dinner on any given Monday, a few of my French choirmates will catch my eye and, while looking at me as though I have two heads, wish me bon appétit. My question is:
This fine kir on the left came from a tasty lunch Nick and I had at a restaurant called Le Pommier in Bayeux, on the Middlebury weekend trip to Normandy. Once again, the Guide Michelin did us tasty.
es--plus an additional pre-release screening I got into for free by virtue of having the card. I feel as though I'm doing my duty. Although, to be fair, I counted tickets' full prices, and I could get them for less with my student i.d. Still, four-plus per week is more than adequate, although not likely a level of cinematic gluttony I'll be able to keep up all year. We shall see. But I did want to share with you some spoiler-free tidbits on the 20 I've seen so far, along with, when available, their Rotten Tomatoes (RT) ratings, where 60% and up is considered to be "fresh," rather than "rotten." If the movie has a foreign-language and an English title, I'll give you both. So, without further ado, here are the first ten (not necessarily in the order in which I saw them)...
This, for authenticity's sake, is a photo of the event to which I will be referring below, but given the sensitivity of some readers (myself among them), perhaps it's better that my phone's camera di
dn't pick up enough light for a clear picture. I took a couple afterwards of the main characters that will help to illustrate. In this corner, weighing in at...hold on, I'm going to go weigh him...18.4 lbs (it was actually 16 when I weighed him, but Nick got worried that the pup had been crash-dieting and double-checked, and got 18.4 three times in a row), we have Graham, our little boy puppy. Wow, he's lost weight. Hey, Dr. Neuman, if you're reading, it worked! And in this [other] corner, weighing in at...sho
ot, I don't know, let's just say a couple of pounds, and definitely fewer than 18.4, we have a probably injured bird. The photo sort of tells the whole story in itself, but I'll fill in the details. When Nick and I had gone out for dinner earlier, there was a seriously chubbed-out pigeon-type character sitting in our courtyard. He was, in fact, so plump that I thought upon first glance that he had no head, when, really, he just had no neck. He was behaving in a rather unbirdlike fashion, which is to say that he didn't appear to have a 3-trillion-beats-per-minute heartrate and wasn't moving, and thus seemed as though he might be sick or injured.
I know this isn't the greatest picture (and I hope the gentleman in it doesn't mind getting totally famous from appearing on my blog), but it was taken on the sly from across a métro car. I was looking at the crutches. This question has actually lain unanswered for over 15 years--a friend and I discussed it the year I spent in Brittany--and so I present it to you. It seems that French people use for a broken ankle, for instance, the sort of crutches that people use in the U.S. for a longer-term crutched tenure--the kind that fit loosely around the arm, and have a handle in the middle. But for these shorter-term injuries, Americans generally use the loosely triangular kind, with one pad under the armpit and one to grab below. So the question is:
A couple of my favorite people are pregnant, and at least one of them is having a boy. I've always been very into naming things--I owned three baby name books as a child--and I've been doing a little online browsing. Today's question:
Pretty berries, right? No, that's not today's question. We bought these lookers this afternoon on our first visit to the Bastille market on Boulevard Richard Lenoir in the 11th. And they are absolutely ordinary. I was going to ask today where the seller got off selling unremarkable produce at an open-air market, but I think that, more to the point, I should be asking:
This here on the left is what I have dubbed a "guilt kir." I poured the framboise into my glass, then reached into the fridge, opened a bottle of wine, and didn't realize until after I'd poured, and noticed how dark my kir was, that the wine was red. Dumb mistake. Ordinarily I would have poured it out, but this turned out to have been the only bottle Nick had brought back from Beaujolais from the domaine where he worked the harvest back in September. I had made my kir; now it was time to sleep in it. Or something. And so I did. Not awful, but not generally what I would choose. Bonnie tells me, though, that what I thought was a made-up non-apéritif actually has a name--a "cardinal"--and is the intentional choice of some cocktailians. Ya learn something new.
y thinking she is the lucky beneficiary of a big mistake, at the end of which a woman's voice whispers "bien plus qu'un marchand de meubles" ("much more than a furniture store"). Loud whispering is super-irritating.
girl following a decked-out Nicole Kidman around, goo-goo-eyed, before NK catches some dude's gaze and absconds behind closed doors, unzipping the back of her dress, to drink some Schweppes citrus soda and say to us naughty-minded viewers (in English, with a French subtitle): "Hey, what did you expect?"
On
e of my pet peeves is being able to clearly hear what other people are listening to on their headphones. But I noticed, when looking at this random stranger's standard-issue Apple earbuds (seen closer-up at right), that there are holes on the non-listener side--that is, facing me--that look like little speaker holes. So my question is:
Why not a kir in a paper cup? Why not a paper cup with balloons on it? Why not a paper cup with balloons on it that was uncommonly expensive, because, unbeknownst to us when we walked into the place, we bought it and seven of its brethren at a store that imports goodies from the U.S. and charges homesick expats or wannabe Frenchies top-euro to buy them. Ah, well. We were having a picnic on the Champ de Mars, facing the Eiffel Tower (see photo to the 
right), and needed cups for our wine.
Pictured above are Nick's and my toothbrushes. Mine's the one on the right, sitting in the little white charger. We have two of them, but Nick suggested that we keep just one [charger] in the bathroom and share it, so that we could use our second step-down (or maybe it's step-up) transformer for other American appliances. I had a hard time with this, because I like to have my toothbrush charging at all times when it's not in my mouth. Similarly, I am most at ease when my laptop is plugged-in, and get anxious when Nick wants to use my adapter because his computer is about to switch over to reserve battery power. I think these are two distinct personality types: fearful of scarcity vs. trusting that the plenty will be there when needed and, if I'm being honest, this comes up all the time, not just in the realm of home electronics. So what about you?
