Hello everyone -
It's a beautiful spring day here in Paris, almost impossible not to be outside - unless you're like me, with my terrible spring allergies...which apparently are even worse this year as I get used to the new European pollens. However, I did just hit the pharmacie and loaded up on medicines, so hopefully I'll be out there drinking at an outdoor cafe soon enough -
This week was a pretty quiet one, but Friday marked the beginning of French spring break, another 2 week school holiday that runs through Easter weekend - I'm off from the Sorbonne for those two weeks, and we have some good upcoming travel - I'll be in London this week at the London Book Fair, and happily catching up with some New York and London friends, and then Easter weekend Matt and I will be in Helsinki, Finland, and I'm sure we'll have lots to report from there -
BAGELS
Strangely, here in the land of the croissant, I've been craving a good bagel and cream cheese lately, and wow are they actually hard to find. I may have mentioned before that there's a bagel craze that's been sweeping Paris - I guess its been around for a few years at this point - and there are a few restaurants here that claim to be "New York style" bagel bars - But, there are very few places where you can find bagels to buy and eat at home. I made a pilgrimage the other day, walking all around the Marais looking for bagel shops (I had heard a rumor that there was a place in the Marais where you could buy frozen H&H bagels from New York, but it has since CLOSED, boo)
I ended up at Sacha Finkelsztajn (La Gastronomie Yiddish depuis 1946), which I think must be Paris's equivalent of Katz's Deli or Russ & Daughters - you can get chopped liver, knishes, babka, and pastrami sandwiches there, in addition to poppyseed bagels and something they call a Pletzl that basically looks like an onion bialy. I was ecstatic - until I paid for my two bagels and two pletzls and it came to 7Euro80. That's basically 10 bucks for four bagels. I'm sure all my New York friends are laughing at me now - That would buy about four times as many bagels in the US.
The thing, though, with these French-Jewish bagels, is that they don't quite TASTE like New York bagels - they don't have the denseness or the chewiness I'm used to. They're much lighter, like french baked goods - OR, as Matt said of the onion Pletzl, like a really good hamburger bun. But with some cream cheese and smoked salmon, they satisfied my craving at least.
Here's a link to Sacha Finkelsztajn, in case you guys want to see what a Jewish deli looks like in Paris.
http://laboutiquejaune.fr/
REGRET
I also learned this week that the French have an entire verb tense for expressing regret - something that seemed so funny and so appropriate to me. This verb tense, the Conditionnel Passe, is something we essentially have an equivalent of in English - it's used when you say something like "If I'd known the store was closed, I wouldn't have gone out today" or "If you'd told me her husband died, I wouldn't have asked about him", etc - times when you wish something had happened in the past that didn't happen and now you regret it - in English, this would be the would/could/should group of words, but in French they have a whole declined verbal way of saying it.
This basically fits in with another observation that I have about France in general, which will sound totally weird to any WASPs on this list (like myself) - there's no real value of keeping a stiff upper lip in France. Its not that they can't hold it together, its just that stoicism isn't really VALUED in the same way as it is in the US. There's no shame here in complaining about things - in fact, it's kind of culturally encouraged.
This has been really hard for Matt and I to get a handle on, because we are so used to American/yankee rules of sort of bearing up with a smile, asking for something politely and not asking a second time, etc - However, here, its apparently really just cultural to both complain about how things are going and to ask and ask repeatedly for what you want. It feels really weird, but thethe more I'm here the more I feel like there's really much less of a stigma in French mind to doing these things - its more about my own US mental block to behaving in a way I would see as annoying by US standards, but is more thethe way things are done here.
And now I've got a whole verb tense to prove it.
THE STATE DEPT
Finally, we had a really fun dinner on Friday with a young foreign service officer and her husband, a chef, who are here on their 2nd foreign posting. We met them at the scientific award ceremony at UNESCO that I wrote about last month, and it was really fun to get to talk to people here working on the government and policy side - AND they were really happy to spend time with us, since I think it's very easy for these guys to get into a diplomat-bubble. They are living in Boulogne, a suburb to the west of Paris, on a government complex that includes the Marines who guard the embassy here. When they came to our neighborhood for dinner, they were like "Wow, its so vibrant here! There are people on the streets at 10PM! Things are still open!" - I was surprised because honestly, we live in one of the more average parts of the city, not as happening as the 10th or Belleville or the Marais; but, I think they must be living in the equivalent of Maplewood, New Jersey - So we have at least a few things to offer them by showing them some of Paristhe more fun things to do in Paris, outside of the Embassy crowd. chef and I started making immediate plans to explore Thethe many new bistros here, which I've been wanting to do but haven't quite motivated myself.
Oh, the chef is also cooking for the Marines at the Embassy, and he described something called "The pork chop debacle", where he cooked pork chops for them and found that at least 4 or 12 marines had never seen one before - thethe only way they'd eaten pork was in bacon or in barbecue. He told me he's been trying really hard to make them food they like, but that for several of them its extremely limited because they literally won't eat anything that isn't in realm of burgers, pizza, lasagna, and breaded chicken. This really surprised me, but on second thought I guess its not that strange - but definitely France is gonna be a culture shock for these guys, if they ever venture out past thethe Marine compound - Maybe I should send them my post last week about Top Chef, so they'll know what to avoid -
I'm gonna sign off now, but hopefully will have some good stories this week from London - Hope everyone has a great week!
xo CTL
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