THE PARIS LETTER: The Sad Truth about Martinis in Paris

Well, while I'm on my food and drink kick this week - it must be some residual Thanksgiving-ness percolating through me - I'll go forth and discuss something you CAN'T get here, or I should say something I definitely haven't found here, and that is a good martini.

Oh Martini, where have you gone?

Oh, Martini, why are you so delicious, yet so challenging?

Really, what is weird to French people I think is that you'd want that much cold alcohol all at once. I do have some French film business friends who are constantly drinking vodka on ice at Cannes and staying up all night, but they're sort of considered wild and crazy.

Whereas this used to be my Friday night after work drink in New York City.

Here are a few things that might happen when you order a martini in Paris - all true stories by the way!

1. You ask for a martini with olives and are brought a glass of sweet vermouth with olives in it.
What? Isn't that what you asked for? It says "Martini" right on the bottle. Right next to 'Rossi". What's the problem?

2. Having learned from this experience, you ask the next bartender if he knows how to make a martini, and he says, "Sure, I've got lots of Martinis. Red martini, white martini, what would you like?" You quickly realize he means vermouth - again. Oh dear. You try to explain how to make a Martini New York-ais: Very cold gin, just a little vermouth, some olives. Oh, like James Bond! he says. Yes. like James Bond, if James Bond's bartender had to go to another part of the hotel for glassware and liquor and came back twenty minutes later with your drink. That was about 50% vermouth but to it's credit definitely had some gin in it. And the glass was big.

If you like Martini Coladas...

3. Go to LE GLASS, a  hip cocktail bar in your neighborhood that was recently written up on a cocktail blog. Find out that it serves draft beer and cocktails that come from those alcoholic-slushie machines you find in New Orleans. 

Get worried when you see that the only Martini-like drink on the menu is something called the Martinez, which includes gin, vermouth, MARASCHINO and ORANGE BITTERS, and seems to come a PRESSION which means on tap which means - a martini from one of these alcoholic slushie machines??? What is this world coming to?

But then you explain you just want a simple martini to the bartender and she seems to get it, and gives you a reasonable version, in the correct glass with olives.

But still with way too much vermouth.

Stay tuned, I'm still on the hunt. I'm headed to someplace called THE EXPERIMENTAL COCKTAIL CLUB next.

THE PARIS LETTER: The Problem with Dr.Seuss

One thing that happens a lot when you're an American learning to speak French is that you unwittingly make some kind of sexual joke without realizing it, and French people laugh at you. This is because just about every word in the French language is a double entendre, no surprise there. Some of my favorite examples:

The word for "line" is "queue" but intead of pronoucing this like the letter Q, as you would in England, you pronounce it "keuh" (I guess - its still hard for me). The word that sounds like the letter Q is "Cul" which is slang for "ass". So often I'd be asking some people outside the boulangerie Is this the ass? instead of Is this the line? Super awesome.

The word for "lower" is baisser, but the slang word for "to fuck" is baiser. Got that? Bahsay - lower; Bayzay - fuck. Yes, I've messed that one up so much that I try never to ask anyone to lower anything for me ever.

This brings me, interestingly enough, to Dr.Seuss, that children's classic author that basically does not exist in France. In large part, this is because its nearly impossible to translate his awesome rhymes into French - Usually, you end up with a literal translation:

Yes, that's Green Eggs and Ham in its literal French translation. They make a good effort to translate the book into rhyming French, but its just hard - for lots of reason, but mostly because these need to be easy readers,  so you can't really reach far for a synonym.

BUT, another, perhaps lesser known reason why Dr.Seuss isn't read much in France - The name Seuss sounds the same as "Suce" which means "suck" which .... yes you guessed it....is slang for blowjob.

So one American friend of mine was telling her French husband about getting some Dr.Seuss books for their daughter, and her husband turned to her, horrified.

"Our daughter is not reading anything by someone named 'Seuss'!" he said.

Interestingly enough, there's a company here in Paris that specializes in digging holes in streets - for electrical work, etc - that call their trucks "Les Suceuses de Ouest". Yes, that means "the suckers of the West" but also....well, you get the idea. And the trucks are all PINK and have women's names. I believe one of them is even called Monica if you can believe that.

Yes! That's their ad! Its a winking elephant and the caption says "Janine, Monica, Linda and the others are ready to help you out whenever you want." Oy. 

Here's a pic of one of them on my street recently. The French, still not super up to date on the whole women's rights thing...
 

THE PARIS LETTER: The First One

Hi guys -

I'm up early-ish on a rainy Sunday here in Paris, and I was thinking about all of you and though I would write a letter to give you a little update on my life here over the last 6 weeks. I've had these ambitions of starting a blog to keep in touch with people, and I sort of got one up and running - but I realized it takes actual skill to do things like embed pictures and format shit, and I haven't figured all that out yet, so in the interim I must rely on the medium I know and understand - email ;) Please don't be disappointed -

So here we are in Paris. It is surprisingly just like living in New York AND totally different at same time. We live in thethe Northwest part of the city, on the border of the 17th & 18th arrondissements. This doesn't really have an equivalent in New York, though I've been trying hard to come up with one...In a lot of ways, I guess, it's like where we lived before, Upper-upper west side, between 100th and 125th street. Because theParis is arranged in a circle, and is just generally smaller in area than New York, EVERYTHING is much closer together, so neighborhood distinctions are both sort of more precise and more meaningless than in New York -

We are sort of right where the 8th, 9th, 17th, and 18th all converge. the 8th and 9th are more part of downtown Paris, and the 17th and 18th are more residential. The 18th is Montmartre, where Sacre Coeur is (and also Le Moulin Rouge), a hilly, very beautiful but also traditional cheap/artsy/seedy area, and the 16th, on the other side of us, is the Parisian Upper East Side, so we're sort of in the middle - half yuppie, half boho, with a fair amount of Maghrebine/working class folks as well. Maghrebine is this French term which means "Arabs from French Colonies", so from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, and there are LOTS of them in Paris. There;s a much stronger Arab/Muslim presence in Paris than you do in New York - they're definitely dominant ethnic group, and in a way it gave me a little perspective on why thethe French government was freaking out about the head scarf issue, because you really see head scarves everywhere- not that I think they should have freaked out, but it's just a different vibe.

So we live on a little Cour, which is like an alley or a dead end street, right off a busy street, Avenue de Clichy. It's kind of great because we have a lot of services very close to us, but our little street is pretty secluded and quiet. We are also half a block from the Metro, which we were at first very excited about, until we discovered that our line, the 13, is the MOST CROWDED SUBWAY LINE in Paris. Several French people, upon hearing what line we were on, exclaimed "Mais le treize, c'est le pire!" (but the 13th, it's the worst!) - terrific. It's like the 6 train kind of - they built it and the area it served expanded, and now they need another line in addition but haven't built one.

Sooo - what we have been doing instead, while the weather is still decent enough, is riding our bikes everywhere - or rather, Matt has been riding his bike and I've been using the Velibs, which is the Parisian public bike system, and to me is the best expression of how socialism can work. Velib is short for "Velo Libre", or "Free Bike". Each metro station has at least one rack of bikes within 100 meters, and you can rent them for 1 Euro a day - you unlock them, ride them to another part of the city, and then relock them at another Velib station. And, there's even a Velib van that goes around the city making sure the bikes are evenly distributed in neighborhoods - since we live on a hill, I am especially appreciative of this. Some mornings its like the Velib elves came in the night and restocked the nearby rack...

Anyway, this is especially fun for me as a New Yorker because 1) you can ride almost anywhere in Paris in under an hour and 2) You do not have to carry a gigantic chain lock or worry about your bike being stolen. The main issue is that a lot of the bikes are beat to shit - they're designed to be heavy duty and unbreakable, but you've still got to be pretty on top of it when you're checking out a bike, to make sure it doesn't have a flat/broken seat/misaligned wheel, etc. But usually it all works and it's AWESOME.

Matt is loving his job at the Pasteur Institute - he started about a month ago, and his lab is very high-powered, which is ironic since he moved from New York (traditionally workaholic) to (traditionally laid back) and is now working longer hours than ever. He is learning to slice live mouse brains and also inject them with a protein that can be controlled by light. I could go into more detail, but that would be a whole nother email. He's getting along really well with Paristhe other folks in the lab, and is able to speak English with most of them. What I am enjoying about Pasteur Institute is its cafeteria, which is also just like an American cafeteria and also very French at thethe same time - Trays and steam tables and all that, but also French food - Matt can often choose between braised rabbit and sole in butter sauce for lunch, and they have a cheese plate and bowls of chopped fresh herbs at the salad bar. Sometimes I'll go and meet him for lunch just for the food...

I'm working on some projects in the US as well as taking French and starting to look for a job. Its slow going, but I'm trying to be patient with myself and with the whole experience. Our furniture just came this week, FINALLY (after 2 months!) and that is making us feel MUCH more at home, though our apartment here is smaller than in the US and so we're trying to figure out where to put all the clothes, books, and papers.

Some other things that I'm enjoying: Going to movies at 10AM - and the general wealth of movie theaters here; not being able to do any errand running on Sundays - at first I thought this would be annoying, but it's actually great because it FORCES you to take time off; super cheap fast internet; kick-ass Moroccan food; chocolate/almond croissants; the boulangerie that does a second bake in the afternoon so you can get warm bread at 5PM; being able to travel anywhere in Europe in under 2 hours; butchers who ask you how you plan to cook the meat you're buying, and give tips; crazy workers strikes (I'm actually enjoying the social activism of it, believe it or not); little kids speaking French (adorable)

Things that they don't have here: chicken broth in a can or box (only bouillon cubes, no idea why), melatonin, chipotles, cheddar cheese, incandescent bulbs over 40 watts, dinner before 8PM, ice cubes/ice cube trays, magnetic stripe credit cards, good IPAs or hoppy beer of ANY kind, shoes in my size (11 womens)- I'm making an ongoing list of things that I may have to stuff in my suitcase and bring back when we're in the US over Xmas.

I'm going to sign off here for now so this doesn't get too long, but I"d love to hear from people just to catch up, so if you've got the time, drop me an email back!

xo CTL