A Brief Repose in Paris

I had a nice night in Paris before I headed back to the States for Christmas via CDG. I stayed at St. Christopher’s Hostel in the 19^th arrondissement located on the Bassin de la Villette. The hostel is recently renovated and therefore it was very easy to have a pleasant experience at 29 euros for an 8-person dorm.
 

After I checked in, I ended up walking along the Rue de Crimée in search of some dinner. There’s a lot of non-French cuisine along that street heading East: kebab shops, Asian restaurants and even what appeared to be Mediterranean pizza and sandwich place which is trendy in Chicago. I bought my favorite sweet, crème caramel, at a small grocery store then backtracked to a boulangerie to buy a 2 euro slice of pizza and a tiny bûche de noël (translation: Christmas log, a traditional Christmas cake in the shape of a log decorated with plastic holiday figurines squished into the icing). Who says Paris can’t be affordable? 

I had a nice chat with the owners of the boulangerie. They joked around with me and asked me where I was from. I always really like having this type of nice small talk with strangers when I travel. We are social creatures, us human beings. 

I took the pizza and bûchette back to the hostel and after I finished eating, pondered what to do next. I could spend my time at the hostel internet café or at the hostel’s bar, Belushi’s, and mingle with fellow Anglophones. The hostel was packed to my surprise. I didn’t think many young people would choose to go to Paris in December. It’s not dreadfully cold in the city in December, but daylight is limited which can be unfortunate.  

It was really weird being around so many Anglophones who by far didn’t speak a lick of French. I kind of got snobby and pretended not to be a native English speaker. In the 8 person dorm I was staying in I said, “Bon soir!’ to one girl who just looked at me and looked down. A look I know all to well as I do it myself often when I don’t understand what a French person has just said to me. At one point I had to go back to the room and retrieve my card-key and when one of the girls opened the door for me I explained in French that I had forgotten my room key. Snarky, yes. Do I regret it, non. It was nice to remember and revel in the fact that, hey I do know French, even if I’m still learning and trying to become fluent.

I decided to meander the streets and possibly go to a café rather than mingle with Anglophones at the hostel. I was in Paris! I wanted to soak it in even if it was dark, even if I was alone, even if I was in lesser known quartier. There really is not much in the 19^th… it’s calm and by far residential. I started out by walking the arched bridge over the canal which gave a spectacular view of the surrounding neighborhood a few times and then wandering towards an old church to admire the architecture and Latin words etched on the façade. 

Next, I walked the whole of the Quai de la Seine, a walkway along one side of the Bassin de la Villette and it was just great. The sky was filled with stars, a few puffy clouds floated by in the wind and the water reflected all the different lights of the city. I felt at peace.

Not wanting to go back to the hostel after I had walked along one full side of the Bassin de la Villette, I went on the other side, the Quai de la Loire, and walked on that side, wanting to breathe in Paris as much as I could.

The French Gastronomical Tradition from an American Perspective

I had an amazing 6 course French dinner last month that made me so happy. It lasted quite a long time as you can imagine, which I felt was a nice way to spend a Friday evening. I adored the attention to detail put into every course. The French are very proud of their gastronomic tradition, so proud in fact that it sort of gets unnerving when they often diss American food outright and believe McDonald's to be the epitome of American cuisine. BUT even though they have prejudices against American cooking, they reserve a special distaste and mocking commentary specifically for British food. You gotta admit, the fact that Fish and Chips are arguably the most well-known dish in British cuisine, is pretty sad.

Anyway, I digress. A typical French meal starts out with an apértif. An apértif is an alcoholic beverage that is served with something small like nuts before dinner in order to stimulate the appetite. Often it is a cocktail like kir (blackcurrant liqueur + white wine). For this dinner, sangria and some little crusty pastry things that looked like nuts were served as the apértif. The first course was beet sorbet. Yes, beet sorbet. It was so cool. Imagine beets like a sorbet. Yes, it's real! It was served with a flavorful toast that made scooping it easier. 

The next course was charcuterie. Charcuterie is one of the most important things in the French culinary repetoire. It consists of various porc (whoops, see spelled it the French way, I'm forgetting English!!!) PORK products. This charcuterie spread consisted of jambon cru (raw ham), lettuce, and French pickles arranged on a plate side by side. Raw ham is interesting... I actually saw the students prepare it earlier in the day. They literally took a huge pig thigh and just scraped the top of the meat off. It's preserved in salt to keep it from spoiling, but the idea of scraping meat off a pig leg then eating it, was very shocking for me, a little American used to her meat being cooked/processed/sterilized the hell out of. Charucterie is often served with French pickles which are about the size of one's pinkie finger.

The next course was the main course or plat. It consisted of an artfully arranged half dome of rice stuffed full of seafood like mussels (and other seafood that to this day I'm not sure what it was ) and vegetables, with sides of jumbo shrimp and pork bone. I've been eating so much meat in France that I never eat in the United States - mussels, duck, goose, liver, and lamb. In the cafeteria the other day they were serving lapin (rabbit) something which I feel is usually something that only hunters eat in America. I have no idea why Americans don't eat game except like deer. There are a few animals  I will NOT try - frog legs and snails (les escargots) for example. I would consider trying horse meat though. My host mom last year in France told me she grew up eating horse meat in Lyon (a city in the Southeast of France) in the 1940s because her family was poor and the meat was cheap. Then she said it became sort of a delicacy and therefore the price shot up. The meat is not commonly eaten anymore because a lot of families horseback ride and consider horses like pets now. 

Next came a cheese course which consisted of two long rectangle pieces of cheese (don't remember which kind...), dark berry jam and lettuce. Cheese and jam is such an awesome combo. Now that I think about it, in America we eat cream cheese and jelly bagels so I guess we have the same concept just more fattening. I'm sure there's an art to pairing the right cheese with the right jam but I have no clue how. I'm getting used to French cheese more in general. Frankly I like good ol' American cheese better. French cheese tends to have too strong of a taste and it's often overwhelming when consumed in more than tiny quantities.
My favorite French cheese is Camembert. Camembert is from Normandy in the north of France and it comes in a circular box. You cut it into wedges usually and eat it with bread. The head English teacher here told me that Camembert+baguette+saucissons (salami basically) is probably the favorite meal of French men. Camembert consists of flexible rind or la croûte and a gooey delicious center. I don't really like the rind, I think it makes the cheese taste bad. Another famous French cheese is Roquefort. To be certified as a Roquefort cheese it has to come from a specific place in France, so Roquefort is produced in a comparatively tiny  area given the context of the country. Roquefort is too gross to eat on its own in my opinion, but obviously a lot of people disagree with me. It's whitish with blue-green spots throughout. The blue-green spots are mold. I think Roquefort is good when it's on a sandwich. I had a sandwich in Nantes which consisted of jambon cru, little Roquefort chunks, and other creamy cheeses. It was good because no taste overpowered the other. 

On to the dessert! The dessert for this meal was a cylindrical puff pastry about a half a foot tall drizzled with a colorful glaze and filled with a similar colorful amazing cream. The flavors you could choose from were raspberry, piña-colada, and peach. I chose peach. It was paired with a sweet white dessert wine that complimented the pastry so perfectly that the taste was lingering on my palate for weeks. Why don't we do the dessert+wine thing in the States?! It's amazing! Well I guess French desserts are amazing in general. All throughout France in every city and town there are pâtisseries that sell French desserts. It's always a treat to walk by a pâtisserie and see all the pretty desserts on display. A couple weeks ago I bought a millefeuille from the local pâtisserie/boulangerie. A millefeuille is a rectangular layered pastry that is awesome. Here's a picture of it -> MILLEFEUILLE PIC! 

After dessert, the server usually asks you if you would like a coffee to round off the meal. Coffee in France is served in really little cups which you can't get it iced. It is also pretty expensive if you compare it to the price of a medium iced coffee in the States. That's one thing I miss about America is the variety of coffee+tea. I usually get a tiny coffee like a noisette when I go to a café since I don't like coffee very much anyway.

I forget to mention that this meal was served with three different types of wine each corresponding to the different flavors present in each dish. It was very cool to see the wine glasses add up in front of your plate, like I said it's the attention to detail!  I don't remember what wines they were but when dining out the sommelier does an impressive job of presenting them. Often when a bottle of wine is opened the sommelier or server if it's a not-so-fancy place will open the bottle for you and ask you to try out the wine to see if it's acceptable. Like I said, the French are very proud of their gastronomy. In Bordeaux I had great regional wine - St. Émilion and Médoc for example. Red wines are mostly produced in Bordeaux and it's really cool too in France that you can go to the supermarket and buy wine for like 2 euros.