At métro stop Passy, 16e arrondissement

"look at the sky..."

Strange Endorsements

Apparently, Hugh Laurie (aka, Dr. House) is the spokesmodel for the L'Oréal Men's Skincare Line in France.

He advises you to "Be yourself, but don't let yourself go!"

Go figure?

Parisian Anomaly

First time ever seeing a Parisian pick up after their dog.

Madame, I wish you good karma for all eternity, because I'm pretty sure you are the only person in this entire city who has ever done that.

Post-grad fellowship application writing fuel

Chocolat fondant and petit canelle. A sinfully rich pudding-like cake and a cheerfully sweet, sticky, sponge-y morsel.

Only set me back 2,50€ and 0,60€, respectively. And the app was finished!

After all, as the pastry wrappers in France advise...

"Eat cake more often."

MacDo

If you were wondering what the fast food in France is like, here's your answer: McDonald's (or MacDo, as it's not-so-fondly called here in France) brand-new goat cheese wrap!

These ads just went up in all the métro stations. Weirdly enough, the picture doesn't make it look that bad - but as we all know with fast food, what you see is rarely what you get...

On the other hand, I did go to a Quick - that's France's home-grown response to McDonald's. I think I heard it's now owned by the company that owns Burger King. Anyways, a few weekends ago, partway into sharing a bottle of rosé with a friend, I decided that I had not eaten enough that day. So we "quickly" (ha ha...so witty) found a Quick, and I picked up a vanilla milkshake with a shot of espresso in it for 1€. Yep, you read that right: one euro. Now, if it's just a once-in-a-while kind of thing, that's a fast food deal I can certainly live with!

Coffee Connoisseurs Continue their Quest at Café Coutume

I ran into P. at CUPA the other day (we were both there straightening out some class logistics), and we decided to grab lunch together - and coffee. P. is a barista in Portland, so he knows his java - he's one of the friends who put his seal of approval on La Caféothèque a few weeks ago. So I knew I was in for a treat when he suggested a nearby café in the 7eme arrondissement.

When you walk into Café Coutume, you feel like you've stepped out of Paris and into some trendy little place in Brooklyn or LA. The décor is done in a soothing color palette; minimalist, but with some charming quirks. Plants grow out of stainless steel sinks, and there are rolling office chairs at a little side bar. There's a diagram of the human tongue on the wall.

Once seated, we were brought the menus (attached to clipboards) and a carafe d'eau. But this wasn't just any carafe d'eau - it was a test tube!

P. ordered a regular black coffee, while I opted for a café crème. FYI, that's what you have to order if you want coffee with cream in France - and it always costs extra. No free little containers of non-dairy creamer here! But no matter, I was quite hungry and didn't feel like subjecting my empty stomach to the burn of black coffee (albeit black coffee made from single-origin beans roasted on the premises). Usually when you order a café crème, you get a shot of espresso with the milk already mixed in, or on the side. But at Café Coutume, I got a lovely surprise:

Remember, I ordered a café crème, not a cappuccino! And it was as delicious as it was pretty!

Then came lunch. I ordered their Lebanese offering, which came impeccably presented on one of those trendy square plates:

An elegant presentation of tabouleh, flanked by succuluent roasted eggplant, a blob of creamy goat cheese, and some baby greens drizzled with lemon oil. Everything lightly sprinkled with sesame seeds. You could tell just by looking (and by tasting!) that these were high-quality ingredients. So high quality, in fact, that I think the 8,50€ price tag was well-justified.

I also noted as we were leaving that Café Coutume sells small bundles of vanilla beans from Madagascar. There were perhaps 7-10 bean pods in each bundle, which went for about 7,50€ each - though nothing compared to the deals I got in Madagascar, it's still the best price I've seen since leaving the island.

We then strolled up to Invalides...

...then across the Seine into the 8eme arrondissement - the part that's filled with high-end couture shopping (aka, nowhere near my appartment!) - where we gawked into the windows purportedly selling "stylish" clothes. Is it just me, or do "designer" stores often sell a lot of ugly things, too?

Then it was off to the metro to catch line 14 for class at INALCO!

Post-Alasace Detox in the Park : Lundi au Jardin du Luxembourg

After returning from Alsace, S. and I both agreed : we felt gross. Those multi-course meals of white flour, heavy cream, butter had taken their toll, and it wasn't just the psychological impact of knowing how many calories we had consumed. We felt lethargic and blah...

So we swore upon our return to Paris to treat our bodies right. How did we do it? With some good old fashioned hippie food and an afternoon in the park.

First we stopped by the Naturalia closest to the CUPA office and picked up some picnic supplies. Then we walked to the Jardin du Luxembourg (also just down the street from CUPA) and found ourselves a lovely patch of grass, partial sun, and spread out our feast:

Behold (clockwise from left): quinoa salad, an assortment of sprouts and grated carrots, fresh tomatoes, a yellow bell pepper (in the plastic bag), and caviar d'aubergine (eggplant caviar - aka super-delicious savory spread).

We finished this feast just in time for the park police to chase us off the grass! Apparently, like so many things in France, it's interdit...

But, bodies nourished, we decided to absorb the last of summer's golden rays and nourish our minds en même temps. We found a pair of unoccupied chairs, and like good little Parisians, whipped out our paperbacks (La Création des Identités Nationales in my case; Dr. Faustus in S.'s case).

Nothing takes away guilt like a little "light" reading!

Un Week-end en Alsace: Haut-Kœnigsbourg and Obernai

The morning after our Academie des Bières excursion, we awoke painfully early, packed up our things in our surprisingly nice hotel rooms (have I mentioned CUPA spoils us? Because they do), scarfed down one of those typical hotel continental breakfasts, and loaded up into the bus. Where were we off to? Well, at that point we weren't entirely sure, but a quick consultation of our itineraries informed us that we were headed to the château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg and to the town of Obernai.

The Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg - "Bien plus qu'un monument," as its brochure promised - was built in the 12th century, restored under the direction of Emperor Wilhelm II at the beginning of the 20th (obviously before France got Alsace back), and was everything a medieval castle should be!

Here are a few glimpses why, taken as I wandered up and down curving stone steps, long hallways, and peered over turret ledges...

If I had been in the mood, I might have tried to capture these steps in a way that paid homage to Frederick Evans' well-known photograph "A Sea of Steps"...

Medieval Starbucks? Granddad, I thought of you...

Ceiling of the great hall...

Exactly the kind of chandelier you would expect Teutonic knights to eat under...

I named this area off the great hall "the breakfast nook"...

Why, of course I have a large stuffed dragon hanging over my breakfast nook - don't you?

The classic and obligatory wild boar's head:

Trophy wall! It was actually much more extensive than I could even capture with my camera...

View from the top:

Pious, and the perfect shape for shooting arrow without getting hit by incoming ones...

Then it was back to the buses for the last stop on our journey: the town of Obernai, where we would have our dégustation and initiation aux vins d'Alsace (wine tasting and introduction to the wines of Alsace).

Obernai was a quaint French-German mix, like a tiny Strasbourg, but otherwise unremarkable. My stomach growled as we passed countless bakeries tempting me with authentic bretzels, and I hoped I would be able to survive wine tasting on an empty stomach...

Our sommelier for the afternoon was quite the character: well-dressed, fastidious, well-versed in both history and geology, passionate about protecting the authenticity of wines (he's the kind of person you never mention a California champagne to!), and profoundly poetic in his descriptions of the white wines we had the pleasure of encountering that day.

Okay, time to reveal one of my goals for my time here in France: become a wine snob. Since I'm 21 now, I can return to the US and put this newfound knowledge to good use, and forever eschew classless American college-style drinking.

So though I felt rather ridiculous holding my glass by the foot (not the stem), tipping the glass to watch how the legs (larmes, or "tears" in French) dripped, sniffing, swirling, and sucking the wine into my mouth with a strange sound (this is meant to further aerate the wine and bring out more flavors)...I did all those things. And though it may have been totally psychological, I really do think I could taste and differentiate the lemon, grapefruit, passionfruit, pineapple, black tea, jasmine, and sea salt that the sommelier identified in each of the three wines we sampled.

We then proceeded into the restaurant, where a lovely menu awaited us:

Once again, the decision was pretty much made for me (other than dessert), but no complaints here! Still, I snapped a picture of S.'s foie gras with mango chutney for you (since my mesclun salad, though delicious, was less photogenic):

The vegetarian main course at this restaurant was much more normal: a delicate arrangement of vegetables, mushrooms, and potato purée:

(the green vegetable in the middle was like a cross between broccoli and cauliflower - yum!)

Oh, and did I mention that the sommelier personally came around to each table and poured each of us a different wine for each of the three courses? Here's one of them:

When it came to dessert, we were all expecting the kougelhofpf glacé to be a glazed kougelhopf, or a kougelhopf filled with ice cream. What were not expecting was ice cream shaped like a kougelhopf, and filled with rum!

I love ice cream, I love rum, and I love raspberry sauce, but this was not my cup of tea!

Luckily, I had switched orders with someone so that I could get the assiette tout chocolat, which I was expecting to be an assortment of truffles. Once again, we were surprized:

Chocolate cake, chocolate mousse, and chocolate ice cream - now that, I can live with!

We finished off the meal with coffee and a dish of smaller, humbler sweets - including marshmallows and fruit pâté (the gelly, sugar-encrusted squared in the middle).

Then it was back to the bus and back to Strasbourg to catch the train back to Paris. Au revoir, Alsace!

ONE MONTH MARK

I realized this weekend that a milestone had passed without my even noticing : having arrived on August 23rd, I have been in France for over a month now!

And it shows:

- I'm at the point now where all my thoughts are in Frenglish (a delightfully incorrect mix of French and English). I'm forgetting basic English words and speaking English using French grammar and sentence structure. Sometimes I get frustrated when I'm speaking English to someone and I can't use a French expression that just feels better in the given situation!

- Although I'm eating vegan and wheat-free in my apartment (and whatever I want whenever I eat out), the other night as I was walking home I just knew that after my vegetable sautée I would have a craving for something sweet. So like a typical French person, I stopped into the nearest épicerie and bought a two-pack of little chocolate mousses. French people LOVE their little pre-packaged plastic desserts: yogurts, pôts de crême, mousses, etc. In fact, they are almost incapable of eating a meal (especially lunch) without one. You should see the amount of refrigerator space in any given French supermarket that's devoted to little creamy desserts in little plastic containers!

- I spent this past weekend in Strasbourg (more on that later), and I felt completely disoriented in what looked like a small (by comparison) town with heavy German influence. Walking up to a castle in the mountains through dense forests - even more disorienting! Not being able to hop on the métro? Quel horreur! So much for my suburban-girl apprehensions about living in a big city - Paris feels like home!

Score!

This is what we aim for - first orientation class paper!

What does a girl have to do to get a decent cup of coffee in Paris?

For those of you who associate the term "French" and "Parisian" with all things sophisticated, refined, and delicious, you're in for a shock: the coffee in Paris is terrible.

Don't let those little cups of espresso that you order in quaint corner cafés fool you - close your eyes, forget you're in the City of Light and romance, take a sip, and admit it. It tastes bad.

And it's not just me and my friends who think so: the New York Times magazine wrote on article on that very subject. Luckily, this article also provides suggestions for where one can in fact find a good cup of coffee (so the title of this blog post isn't as provocative as it might have seemed at first glance). Our main man David Lebovitz also weighed in on the issue, so we decided to check out La Caféothèque (metro stop: Pont Marie).

Upon entering La Caféothèque, our nostrils were met with a scent that we hadn't smelled since we left the states: freshly roasted coffee beans. We wandered to the back of the place, and sat near the coffee bar, and took in the scene. Eclectic chairs and stools. Patrons sitting in groups of two and three, chatting in a variety of languages. Names of the beans' countries of origin on the walls. A shelf well-stocked with books. A piano waiting to be played. Frank Sinatra playing in the background.

We ordered: filter coffees for my friends, a cappucino for me. The fact that each was accompanied by a square of dark chocolate didn't hurt...

Note: When I say "we" I mean two fellow CUPA students who go to Reed College in Portland Oregon - a city with quite the taste for java. So you don't just have to take my word for it - these two coffee conoisseurs (one of them a barista) put their seal of approval (along with mine, for what it's worth!) on La Caféothèque!

As delicious as it was beautiful!

One of my friends had brought along some of her own whole coffee beans from the states, which La Caféothèque was kind enough to grind for her (I told you these friends were quite the coffee connoisseurs!). Plus we learned a new verb: moudre = to grind.

I savored my cup down to the last rich, frothy drop...with classes starting soon and the weather getting colder, you can be sure we'll be back!

No measuring cups or spoons here!

Admittedly, my posts are getting a little out of order. But these recent New York Times article was just too apropos not to share!

First order of business: How to Measure while Cooking in France.

You can imagine my hippie-foodie-healthnut-Californian delight when my first trip to Monoprix yielded this:

Organic, resonably-priced quinoa? Quel surprise!

But then, most of you American readers can imagine my confusion when I went to prepare it and saw this:

Cooking instructions

Serving for 1 person: 60g of quinoa

60 GRAMS of quinoa? How on earth was I going to measure that?

I looked up the conversion from grams to cups (obviously, this was doomed from the start, as grams are mass and cups refer to volume) so that I could then convert from cups to tablespoons - I was thinking I might approximate a tablespoon using the apartment's regular dining cutlery. All right, I gave up.

I asked the professor for his advice last night, and lo and behold, he produced a kitchen scale, on which I was able to weigh a perfect portion of 60 grams of quinoa. The funny part is, the New York times just ran an article on the superiority of cooking with such a scale, in lieu of American measuring cups and spoons. It's a convincing argument, making sense both in terms of the science of cooking and baking, as well as in terms of post-cooking mess clean-up. Mom, you may want to invest in one...

~

Second order of business: "A French Feast from a Political Pot" by Elaine Sciolino

Another apropos article appeared in the trusty Times yesterday, reporting on how one French deputy has compiled a cookbook of recipes from all the members of the French National Assembly. Among my favorite quotes, "It is our national responsibility to cook and eat well," says the deputy. What a breath of fresh air! Would an American congressman or -woman ever compile such a work or make such a statement? (Nah, that would be counter to the interests of the food lobby AND the pharmaceutical companies that make big money on treating health problems, instead of preventing them!)

Furthermore, if the US were to make such a Congressional cookbook, would it even be any good?

One Day, Three Museums!

On Saturday I met up with two of my grandparents' friends who are on vacation in Paris for about a week. We decided to go to the Musée Rodin, as none of us had ever been there. It was my first time using the card that CUPA gave me - free entrance to all the art museums in Paris! It was a hot day (85 degrees!), but we had a lovely time strolling around the gardens before it got too hot.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Rodin by name, you've probably seen his most famous sculpture, "The Thinker."

Then we went across the street to figure out what this beautiful golden-roofed building was:

It turned out to be L'Hôtel national des Invalides, which includes a retirement home for veterans, monuments, and a museum of military history. We bought tickets so that we could see Napoleon's tomb, which turned out to be one of the most extravagant buildings I've ever seen!

The ceiling:

A giant tomb for one very small man:

Opposite the entrance:

In the crypt:

I also happened upon the tomb of a former French colonial administrator who served in Madagascar (stay tuned - he'll appear in my thesis!)

We then went back outside and explored the beautiful gardens...

My CUPA friends texted me to say that they were going to the Musée d'Orsay, so I checked the map, saw that it was just a few métro stops away, and headed over! It was a bit of a whirlwind tour, as we had just an hour and a half before the museum closed, but here's a picture of the four of us sitting outside afterwards: