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Apr. 10th, 2002 12:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quislibetI just went upstairs to sign up for an advising meeting and briefly experienced again what it is like to hang out with fellow graduate students. Not that I know who most of them are at this point, but one old colleague who is still around was showing off the website for the class she is teaching on Augustan literature -- on her page for Ovid's "Metamorphoses" she has links for "home" and "exile," with the exile link taking you to the official homepage of the city in present-day Romania where the poet lived out his last days by decree of the emperor whom he'd pissed off.
Heh.
Anyway, here's some more on the France trip.
Thurs. March 28, mid-afternoon
After leaving the Catacombes, J. and I walked for about 20 minutes to the Rue Mouffetard, passing numerous schoolchildren bearing after-school treats. And so it was pastry time for us again, as we stopped at the patisserie which seemed to be the or at least a source of those treats, to judge from the line of kids and their parents, teachers, or court-appointed pastry-buyers. We split an eclair, assuming that there would no doubt be still more pastry in our future.
Before we explored the food shops that line Mouffetard, we went to Les Délices de Daubenton. M. Reynaud's store is stocked with all sorts of tasty things, and so we did what any sensible traveler would do - we bought 7 heavy jars of confits and "caviars" and so forth. I myself picked out an artichoke pesto and some milk jam with coffee. M. Reynaud recognized me from last year, to my surprise. ("I may be a madman," he says, "but I have a memory for faces.") He is a friendly and talkative man who will happily describe in heavily accented English the contents and uses thereof of each jar and bottle in his store if you only happen to glance in its direction. (In a lesser mortal, such behavior might be tiresome. I know it pisses me off when the guy at one of the Salem hobby shops goes on like that. Maybe it's because he doesn't suggest recipes.)
This time his mother was there too, with her own recommendations (in French, via J.). M. Reynaud recommends the citron butter, his mother the lemon, almost coming to an argument. We decide to get both.
M. Reynaud likes Americans -- "C'est vrai, cest vrai," his mother says to J., rolling her eyes -- "Sometimes I like Americans even than the French," he says. "The French, they are all madmen. They are lazy with this 30-hour work week..." (J. and I dream of the French 30-hour work week and, what is it, 6 weeks of vacation a year? But if we told him that I suppose he'd think we were lazy, too.) Eventually we left happily, a half hour and about 60 euros well spent. And the more breakable things you can pack in your luggage, the better -- that's our motto.
On Mouffetard, slices from two different types of plum tarts; J.'s prejudice against chain stores, which this patisserie turned out to be, was strengthened by the not-so-tastiness of the tarts, but that only came later, when we ate one slice without joy and let the other one return to the earth uneaten. We revived ourselves with coffee and wished again that there was a point to buying fresh produce, which is hard to come by in Salem. But we can't prepare it in our hotel.
We decided to walk over to the Jussieu area, not far away, to check out Dysphorie, a "dark music" CD store whose website at dysphorie.com is apparently down or else I'd link you. On the way we passed an upscale toy store we remembered from last year and stopped in "briefly." Since we both have nieces and nephews that give us an excuse to buy cool toys (when we feel we need one), we both did some Christmas shopping a bit early.
We continued on to Dysphorie with our wooden toys and puppets and small army of plastic knights (not to mention the jars from earlier and two as-yet uneaten plum tart wedges). The rue Guy de la Brosse is too small to appear on our freebie maps, and we sort of walk around hoping we'll remember a landmark until, just as we are about to give up, we see it. I don't want to spend too much time in there, especially as we have already done a fair amount of CD shopping today, and so I don't take advantage of one of the store's cooler features, which is that you can listen to every CD they have for sale before you buy it, whether new or used. Seeing nothing that screams "you must buy this because you won't find it at home," I nevertheless pick up an Apoptygma Berzerk album, and from the used bin cheap copies of CDs by Kraftwerk and Gitane Demone -- this last to J.'s horror, because she had her momentarily confused with Eva O.
I would never, never buy an Eva O. album, dear readers. So fear not.
We walked back to the Jussieu metro, and it was during that walk we realized the Awful Truth of the Plum Tarts. Sad, sad.
Back at the hotel: we pick through our things to sort them into categories of "necessary" and "not so," around the criterion of "what we will need for a couple of days in Brittany." I have also brought some art supplies from Utrecht for my old roommate Becca, who is living in Paris as an art student and finds art supply costs there unreasonable; it is my desire not to carry 10 pounds of paint with me all weekend if I can help it. When everything is ready, we go to dinner at A Sousceyrac on rue Faidherbe, about 5-10 minutes' walk from our hotel. We pass the Creperie Bretonne Fleurie on the rue Charonne, where we had eaten the year before (and J. two years before that), an excellent creperie that J. credits with, to some extent, awakening her interest in Brittany because of its decoration and soundtrack. We figure we will be eating crepes enough in the region itself over the next two days, and pass by with only minor regrets. We imagine the man who is apparently both the owner and the entire kitchen staff would understand.
A Sousceyrac takes us to the cuisine of Gascony, however. J. has duck, lots of it: a duck liver terrine and a main course of duck and mushrooms with buttery fried potatoes. I have a tasty salad of greens and breaded langoustines and then beef with morels and green asparagus. Good stuff.
It seems a long walk from the hotel to the Bastille metro with our heavy bags, and then (I would swear) as long again to get to the right platform once we're in the station. We eventually make it to Becca's tiny apartment near the Musée Cluny at practically midnight, and stay for tea and chatting (I hadn't seen Becca for six years, and J. had never met her). We leave our heavy bags and plan to see her again Sunday night when we return from Brittany and dash for the Metro when Becca looks at a clock and tells us that it stops running around 1 AM. And indeed, it stops running as we are sitting on a platform a few stops away, waiting to change trains.
And so, unhappily at first (especially me), we walk back to the Bastille, but the moon is large and bright and we're walking along the Seine in Paris after midnight and it's really not that bad a walk. We get back to the hotel at about 1:45. We look at our schedules and rule out trying to make the 7 AM train to Auray in Brittany, settling on the one at 10.
And then, sleep.
Next: transportation trickiness and standing stones.
Heh.
Anyway, here's some more on the France trip.
Thurs. March 28, mid-afternoon
After leaving the Catacombes, J. and I walked for about 20 minutes to the Rue Mouffetard, passing numerous schoolchildren bearing after-school treats. And so it was pastry time for us again, as we stopped at the patisserie which seemed to be the or at least a source of those treats, to judge from the line of kids and their parents, teachers, or court-appointed pastry-buyers. We split an eclair, assuming that there would no doubt be still more pastry in our future.
Before we explored the food shops that line Mouffetard, we went to Les Délices de Daubenton. M. Reynaud's store is stocked with all sorts of tasty things, and so we did what any sensible traveler would do - we bought 7 heavy jars of confits and "caviars" and so forth. I myself picked out an artichoke pesto and some milk jam with coffee. M. Reynaud recognized me from last year, to my surprise. ("I may be a madman," he says, "but I have a memory for faces.") He is a friendly and talkative man who will happily describe in heavily accented English the contents and uses thereof of each jar and bottle in his store if you only happen to glance in its direction. (In a lesser mortal, such behavior might be tiresome. I know it pisses me off when the guy at one of the Salem hobby shops goes on like that. Maybe it's because he doesn't suggest recipes.)
This time his mother was there too, with her own recommendations (in French, via J.). M. Reynaud recommends the citron butter, his mother the lemon, almost coming to an argument. We decide to get both.
M. Reynaud likes Americans -- "C'est vrai, cest vrai," his mother says to J., rolling her eyes -- "Sometimes I like Americans even than the French," he says. "The French, they are all madmen. They are lazy with this 30-hour work week..." (J. and I dream of the French 30-hour work week and, what is it, 6 weeks of vacation a year? But if we told him that I suppose he'd think we were lazy, too.) Eventually we left happily, a half hour and about 60 euros well spent. And the more breakable things you can pack in your luggage, the better -- that's our motto.
On Mouffetard, slices from two different types of plum tarts; J.'s prejudice against chain stores, which this patisserie turned out to be, was strengthened by the not-so-tastiness of the tarts, but that only came later, when we ate one slice without joy and let the other one return to the earth uneaten. We revived ourselves with coffee and wished again that there was a point to buying fresh produce, which is hard to come by in Salem. But we can't prepare it in our hotel.
We decided to walk over to the Jussieu area, not far away, to check out Dysphorie, a "dark music" CD store whose website at dysphorie.com is apparently down or else I'd link you. On the way we passed an upscale toy store we remembered from last year and stopped in "briefly." Since we both have nieces and nephews that give us an excuse to buy cool toys (when we feel we need one), we both did some Christmas shopping a bit early.
We continued on to Dysphorie with our wooden toys and puppets and small army of plastic knights (not to mention the jars from earlier and two as-yet uneaten plum tart wedges). The rue Guy de la Brosse is too small to appear on our freebie maps, and we sort of walk around hoping we'll remember a landmark until, just as we are about to give up, we see it. I don't want to spend too much time in there, especially as we have already done a fair amount of CD shopping today, and so I don't take advantage of one of the store's cooler features, which is that you can listen to every CD they have for sale before you buy it, whether new or used. Seeing nothing that screams "you must buy this because you won't find it at home," I nevertheless pick up an Apoptygma Berzerk album, and from the used bin cheap copies of CDs by Kraftwerk and Gitane Demone -- this last to J.'s horror, because she had her momentarily confused with Eva O.
I would never, never buy an Eva O. album, dear readers. So fear not.
We walked back to the Jussieu metro, and it was during that walk we realized the Awful Truth of the Plum Tarts. Sad, sad.
Back at the hotel: we pick through our things to sort them into categories of "necessary" and "not so," around the criterion of "what we will need for a couple of days in Brittany." I have also brought some art supplies from Utrecht for my old roommate Becca, who is living in Paris as an art student and finds art supply costs there unreasonable; it is my desire not to carry 10 pounds of paint with me all weekend if I can help it. When everything is ready, we go to dinner at A Sousceyrac on rue Faidherbe, about 5-10 minutes' walk from our hotel. We pass the Creperie Bretonne Fleurie on the rue Charonne, where we had eaten the year before (and J. two years before that), an excellent creperie that J. credits with, to some extent, awakening her interest in Brittany because of its decoration and soundtrack. We figure we will be eating crepes enough in the region itself over the next two days, and pass by with only minor regrets. We imagine the man who is apparently both the owner and the entire kitchen staff would understand.
A Sousceyrac takes us to the cuisine of Gascony, however. J. has duck, lots of it: a duck liver terrine and a main course of duck and mushrooms with buttery fried potatoes. I have a tasty salad of greens and breaded langoustines and then beef with morels and green asparagus. Good stuff.
It seems a long walk from the hotel to the Bastille metro with our heavy bags, and then (I would swear) as long again to get to the right platform once we're in the station. We eventually make it to Becca's tiny apartment near the Musée Cluny at practically midnight, and stay for tea and chatting (I hadn't seen Becca for six years, and J. had never met her). We leave our heavy bags and plan to see her again Sunday night when we return from Brittany and dash for the Metro when Becca looks at a clock and tells us that it stops running around 1 AM. And indeed, it stops running as we are sitting on a platform a few stops away, waiting to change trains.
And so, unhappily at first (especially me), we walk back to the Bastille, but the moon is large and bright and we're walking along the Seine in Paris after midnight and it's really not that bad a walk. We get back to the hotel at about 1:45. We look at our schedules and rule out trying to make the 7 AM train to Auray in Brittany, settling on the one at 10.
And then, sleep.
Next: transportation trickiness and standing stones.
