I apologize in advance for the length of this entry!
Six days, wow…umm oops? Ok so do you want the long version or the short version?
The Short version:
The guys returned on Tuesday night for another dinner out at a French hole in the wall restaurant and a handsome young man’s life story. Wednesday night out with a group of muckety mucks from S’s work at a famous downtown restaurant that is underground in the rediscovered wine cellar of a monastery built in 1345. Thursday was a bad day. Friday was better and busy. Saturday we were going to go to Barcelona but spent the day running errands, e-mailing people about change of plans (stupid M Co.), extending the car rental, getting new Air France Tickets (not) and buying stuff we still need for the house. Sunday, rainy and S worked on finance stuff and work stuff and I wandered around aimlessly flitting from project to project.
And how about those stinking Cubs, of course they’d get this far when I’m not able to be there to see it. Dorks. They don’t show baseball on TV here. Looking for internet options. Any ideas let me know. And what’s up with the Huskies? Un-stinkin-defeated?
The Long Version: (Go get a cup of coffee and get comfortable)
Tuesday night when the guys got back from Turkey/Hungary we let Barry lead us around town again to find a place to eat. The group dynamic is great. We go from restaurant to restaurant looking. Barry looks at the menu to check out the prices, he’s looking for cheap but edible. S’s criteria are a bit more refined, he looks for real cloth tablecloths and napkins. He figures that kind of attention to detail might also translate into good cooking. Me, I look for where the crowd is gathered. I figure if lots of people are eating there it must be good. On Tuesday night Barry found a place that had reasonable prices and S saw good table linens but I saw lots of empty tables, just one being used by three women in the back. So I, being in the minority, had no choice but to follow them into the empty place and to a table.
A spider tried to attack me first thing and I knew I was not only going to hate the place but I was definitely going to get sick.
A young woman greeted us and asked first thing, “Are you English?”
Not certain how to answer that, was she inquiring as to the language we spoke or our nationality or did she...”yes”.
She disappears, we assumed to get someone English speaking. Then a very handsome young man comes to our table with the menu (The menu in places like these is usually the day’s offerings written on a small chalk board) He proceeds in good English to tell us what’s available. Since we were the only other people there and he felt an affinity of sorts with us Americans, he hung out and told us his life story.
As it turns out this boy of 26 was our chef for the evening. He told us the story of how at the age of 22 he had spent a few years cooking in the US where “French chef is God, a real French French Chef can earn lots of money. But I don’t let it go to my head” he tells us with a smile that tells you that he most certainly did. Hmm, handsome 22 year old French man with that accent and he cooks, are you getting a good picture of how none of this would go to his head?
He worked for a man that had ‘many enterprises’ in Hawaii and in California. This young chef was set up as the star attraction at a big hotel in Oahu. (But he didn’t let it go to his head.) He was not ‘papered’ so every three months he had to leave the country and re-enter as a tourist after a week or two back in France. As his employer was paying him ‘under the table’ and was aware of his immigration status (or lack there off) he covered the expenses for this boys trips back and forth. After about a year and a half he was moved to the San Francisco area to run a restaurant there. He followed the same pattern there, except that after making the France trip several times he got tired of making that flight. He decided that he didn’t have to go all the way back to France. He just needed to leave and re-enter the country so he chose to go to Canada instead. This proved to be his undoing. Apparently the Canadian/American authorities in Canada were more vigilant and they sent him packing back to France and listed him as persona-non-grata in the US. He’s never returned. So he tells us sadly that he returned here to France from being ‘god’ to a country where a French Chef is every 4th person, and opened this restaurant.
The food was of course fabulous. Just as a dining out side note, we wondered how long this would continue to be the case. Not how long the food would continue to be good but how long we would continue to think it was. The food is new and all tastes great but eventually will we begin to discriminate between restaurants and cooking and flavors we like better. I’m afraid that this may be the case but we plan on enjoying the process thoroughly.
Dessert made me think of Scott. I ordered the chocolate cake. It arrived, just a small round cake, no frosting, just chocolate cake sitting in the middle of a large square plate surrounded by whole cream, drizzled with chocolate sauce and sprinkled with cinnamon. The cake was hot, fresh out of the oven, baked just for me. As I cut into it with the spoon, chocolate came pouring out of it. Hot chocolate syrup, gushing out onto the plate, mixing with the cream… It was heavenly.
(It’s 7hr on Monday morning here now. I started this Blog entry yesterday and if I continue to write this slowly I’ll be weeks behind before I publish it.)
(Just IM’d my sister in California where it’s 22hr on Sunday night. Told her goodnight while I enjoy my breakfast of coffee and brioche. This also begging the question, “What in the hell am I doing awake at this hour of the morning?”)
Wednesday night we went out with a group from S’s work. A Spaniard, a French woman named Sandrine (I love her name) Barry of course etc. Reservations had been made at a restaurant near the ‘capitole’ called ‘la Cave’, yes ladies and gentleman, The Cave. Anyone getting a picture of me at this restaurant? Ok, let’s move on. We met and walked a short walk down what appears to be an alley that led to another alley that led to a large gate/door.
We walk in the door under an archway to a nice sized courtyard where a huge crowd is waiting outside the door of this restaurant. We have reservations so we shove our way through the crowd to the door where we are lead down a winding staircase to the dining room.
The dining room is more like three square rooms with high vaulted ceilings. The walls, the ceilings, the large archways that lead into the next room all made of brick. Maybe it’s really like one large room with three vaulted sections. Anyway it was very cave like but very open, well lit and cool. The front cover of the menu had a brief history of the restaurant. What I gleaned from the French text was that this was believed to be the wine cellar of a monastery that had been built in 1345 and had been rediscovered through a mischance of recent (recent being relative) construction. Of course it’s just a setting, a historical setting of sorts to be sure, but still just a place. What would the food be like?
Wonderful of course. Menus were decided on, wines were ordered to compliment peoples food choices and a selection of appetizers were chosen. I tried a little bit of everything. One appetizer was a puff pastry with a cucumber filling that included some kind of fruit. Another was a pudding-y looking thing that was wonderful, it reminded me of LaVerne’s thanksgiving cornmeal stuffing, but the consistency was softer and less textured. I ate almost all of that myself. There was of course the goat cheese salad and something vaguely bruchetta-like that wasn’t.
Our fellow diners included another group of American business types, a group of Chinese business types and the rest of the place was filled with a large party of people (about 150 of them) whose relationship was hard to discern. Were they family, a business group, a social club, who knows, but they occupied all the remaining tables and were quite loud, continuously toasting each other and joking across the room with each other. I’m not sure who they were, but they appeared to be just winding up as we were leaving 3 hours later. 3 hours for a meal and that was for a quiet group of only slightly tipsy people.
On Friday night we found out that of course the Visa’s aren’t ready. Well, oddly enough S’s is almost done, but there appears to be a problem with mine. No one can say exactly what the problem is, but just that there is one. I’m forced to speculate that either A) The French don’t want me. B) They’ve uncovered some disturbing things in my past that I’ve long forgotten or C) They’ve read my Blog and want me stop immediately for fear of what my adventures will do to tourism.
So instead of going to Barcelona on Saturday we went to the airport to extend the rental of the car. We re-booked our tickets to return to the US on October 29th instead of next Thursday. Then we did something really amazing. We bought a drier.
We had been saying that we should get one for when the weather cools off so our clothes won’t have to hang for two days to be dry. Well, the amazing thing isn’t that we bought one, it’s that we brought it home ourselves. We just put it into the back of the little Peugeot. Thank god for the hatchback! And then, because there was some room left back there, we bought a microwave and wedged it into the car too. The man at the appliance store helped us load the drier into the car and in his deaf person French (deaf person French is when you speak louder to people in hopes of compensating for lack of language with volume.) warned us, very seriously, against sudden stops and starts.
If you go to Peugeot France and click on the link under the picture of the car for 206, you’ll have an idea of what size care we are driving, except that ours is the four door model.
The microwave was a bit of an impulse buy, because we have no place to put it. We have about 2 feet of counter space in the kitchen. Just a little breathing space between the cook top and the sink. S had already purchased a toaster oven (that took 15 minutes to make two slices of toast) and coffee maker to occupy that little space, but we found that having to put leftovers back in a pan or in the oven to reheat was too much trouble. We kept saying we didn’t need a microwave, but it became apparent that we did. We found a microwave/broiler combo, with a toaster built into its side. The microwave and broiler can be used together so you can get cooked food that looks cooked too. It does it all! It is awesome, sort of space age looking. We put it on the counter top and managed to barely wedge the coffee maker in next to it. It’s a tight fit but it’ll work. The toaster oven is currently living on the kitchen table but looking ahead to probable early retirement to the garage.
We also visited IKEA where we bought a nice large rug for the office, a swivel office chair to save my back when I work in the office and then we bought some groceries and stopped at the bakery too. Ok, ok, from IKEA on was a separate trip, we’re crazy not stupid!
Next weekend however we are going to try to squeeze some patio furniture into the car. It seems we have a few months of 70’s left so we might as well enjoy eating outdoors. I’ll let you know how that turns out.
I am currently reading “Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris. It’s the story of his life, sort of. Some of it is a little sad and some of it is a bit gross, but the parts about his experiences in France and learning French are absolutely hilarious and leave me hoping I don’t sound like that to local shop keepers.
Precious, my laptop is beginning to look like an octopus on life support. All these wires coming in and out and she still doesn’t seem to have enough receptacles for all I need her to do. Probably a form of self protection, poor thing. I bought a USB hub that plugs into the PCMCIA slot and gives me three additional USB ports so I can plug in my camera and microphone. This enables me to hold IM streaming video/sound conversations with my sister and mother in law, who have similar setups. If anyone else would like to join in this lunacy let me know, it turns out to be quite fun and much cheaper than a phone call. Probably want to have DSL or cable modems though.
Ta for now.
