France-tastic

This weekend certainly got off to a chilly start, when I woke up to find it snowing outside on Saturday morning!

So of course I wrapped up like a michelin man and braved the elements to capture the first Paris snow of the winter:

I think this particular café had high hopes this morning...

Rooftops from my window, showing about the extent of the snow - I know, I know, not that impressive, but that white is actually snow! By afternoon it was melted again!

On Saturday night I hosted my first french dinner party! And it went of in fitting french style.

• Entrée: Soupe á l'Oignon
  
• Plat: Lapin á la Cocotte
  
• Salade Verte
  
• Fromage: Camembert et Roquefort
  
• Dessert: Tarte aux Fraises

I was a bit worried about such an ambitious menu in my kitchen, which has two stove plates and a microwave, but it was fabulous! (If I don't say it, I don't know who will- and I completely forgot to take any photos as proof!) And now I have a tasty french menu to impress visitors who come from faraway lands to visit me!

The day started very successfully when I was able to speak to all the appropriate people at the market to get all the necessary bits and pieces. Living in a new country (with a new language!) is what I think it must be like to be a baby. Everything is difficult, even the most routine day-to-day things like buying bread, and when you manage to do something that other people do without thinking about, it gives you a little warm glow of achievment, and you feel the need to tell people about it ("I bought cheese! Two types! And they understood me without my having to repeat it!! And I got exactly the piece that I wanted!") So, I got the cheese I wanted, as well as rabbit and vegies and a strawberry tart and bread and wine and lots of good things!

Less successful was an attempt to borrow a saucepan from Ruxandra. Somehow saucepan became pot became bowl, and she turned up with two salad bowls in hand. Hard to make a rabbit stew in! But my little kitchen managed to cope extremely well with the demands of the day, and the salad bowls had to watch from the sidelines.

And soon the cold, cold Paris night lurking outside was forgotten as Ruxandra, Cecelia and Dominic settled around my little table, and tucked into the steaming hot onion soup (minus the little melted cheese toasties, beyond microwave technology). By the time the rabbit stew made its appearance, everyone was warm enough for me to have stopped worrying about another riot if the rabbit was inpenetratable by knife, but luckily it was delicious! It had been cooking for around 3 hours in red wine, garlic and rosemary, and the meat was beautifully tender, falling off the bones, and the stew rich and warm and filling- Perfect for a winter night! All this richness was countered by a rocket salad before being added to by a gorgeous couple of cheeses and a strawberry tart (I make no apologies about buying dessert- french patisseries are always bought, unless you happen to be a patissier).

All in all, excepting for the broken table leg which sent only one wine glass and no plates flying, it was a highly successful night. Especially for me since I didn't have to brave the cold at the end of it, but only to give a little push to turn the sofa I had been warming for several hours into a lovely bed!

Some of you may know that I have an unfortunate tendancy towards book hogging. And now that I have neither television nor two nuggets to distract me, never mind the close-to-zero temperatures outside inspiring inside, sofa-sitting activities, the need to feed my addiction has only been growing stronger.

I thought I was going to get a good fix at the American Library in Paris, apparently the largest english book collection on continental Europe (or rather all of Europe minus an island or two across the channel). However I was sadly disappointed to find that this very americo-centric institution is, how can I put this delicately... a bloody rip-off. Just to look at their collection, as one might want to do before joining, given the €100 joining fee, commands an €11 "day member with no borrowing priveleges" fee. I will point out that this is one little euro short of DOUBLE the "day member with no borrowing privileges" fee to look at a rather more famous Paris collection, namely the Louvre.

Not for borrowing.

Luckily for me, I have just learned some very important french. Having seen lots of shops selling livres d'occasion (livre being book) I thought it strange that there was such a market for "occasion" books here. Must be for special occasions, maybe for presents, or books about Christmas, or even books that were only occasionally books. A good example of a faux ami indeed, because in this context occasion means second-hand!

And down the road from uni there is a fine livres d'occasion outlet with english novels for around €2! Much better! One trip yielded me five books in three languages (the third actually being an italian cookbook in norweigan!) for the grand total of €9.90! I have also found a GREAT bookstore selling only english second hand books. I think this might be the second largest collection of english books on the continent and HEAPS of great stuff. Unfortunately a little pricier than the first, with books around the €5 mark, but a fantastic collection.

Forget anything I have previously said about favourite stores, now I have a real one, in which I will probably never be able to afford a hanky, but that actaully made me feel sick with desire. The beautiful, beautiful clothes made me wish I was a model, not to be beautiful, but just to get the chance to wear those beautiful things. The store is Le Bon Marché, a department store quite near my house, and very upmarket. At least at Galeries Lafayette, they sell the designer gear, but also affordable stuff, like Grace Bros (sorry, Myer) or DJ's, but at Le Bon Marché (which ironically means the "good buy" or the "bargain") I didn't see I single tag I didn't recognise, and I'm not talking about K-Mart here. Christian Lacroix, Chanel, Pucci, Cacharel, Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten, Chloé, Alaia, the list goes on. Absolutely amazing. I know you can buy designer stuff in lots of places, but here, you (meaning me!) can walk around and touch the clothes and pick them up, and the store is beautiful and calm, and it was just a dream! The feel of the fabrics, the colours, the textures, the shapes, just amazing. I really need to start saving my money so that I can own one of those pieces.

Anyway, back to reality...

The real Bon Marché that I got was a couple of tickets to snowy Sweden! It will hopefully be snowy by departure time at least! Thanks to the genius of Ryan Air, two return tickets from Paris to Stockholm, a mere €160! That is about what a train to the other side of France would cost per person!! So, very happy about that. On the way there, the tickets were only €2.79! But that was without the €20 or so in taxes that they tack on, but still!

So lots of bon marché action! Yay!

Some fun with googlemaps, to show you where I live...

Most of Paris, with important landmarks marked. It is a bit small, but the largest I could upload. Chez moi is about a 10 minute walk from the Champs-Elysées and the horrendously ugly (I will have to take a photo of it to show you, because this place has certainly not made it onto any postcards) university is on the banks of the Seine, a short stroll from the Ile de Cité with the Notre Dame and less hunchbacks than some would have you believe.

A bit of a close up of my quartier, showing my building (google maps is so cool!) and the Seine and the Invalides lawns.

I've been a bit slack posting this week, and today am actually nursing a mild hangover, including a not-so-mild headache, so am not about to be rectifying that situation by in-depth analyses of anything at all. So you will have to wait until next week for a more comprehensive insight into french adventures (I say next week because we have yet another long weekend starting tomorrow! Yay France!).

Again with my loyal companion Ruxandra in tow, on Saturday night it was time to check out some of the less salubrious quartiers of Paris. Encouraged by my Lonely Planet, we set off for a spot of shopping in the Goutte d'Or, located by the Chateau Rouge metro station, allegedly the home of "creative young designers." In actual fact, it is the home of homeless people, alcoholic bums and prostitutes. This was the first time in Paris that I have felt the need to take an extra tight hold on my handbag. We were glad it was daylight still! It was however a good opportunity to speak french, because we felt we looked out of place enough, with shoes and no bottle in hand, that we didn't need to attract further attention by speaking english. After wandering down several deserted backstreets, mentioned by name in LP, full of boarded up shopfronts and broken windows, we did find three or four tiny boutiques, indeed selling stuff made by "young creative designers." Sometimes creative is different from good, but in defence of my LP, it didn't actually say that any of these young creative designers were good. Chateau Rouge is much less pleasant that Chateau Fontainebleau.

So we briskly trotted away from those designers, jumped back on the metro and emerged just a few stops later, in Pigalle. Think of the strip joint section of the Cross, and multiply it by about ten. Another very pleasant stroll, but this time the underworld got highbrow, too. Nestled between the sex shops, the stripclubs and the XXX cinemas, there was a Museum of Erotica. Interesting I'm sure, but we gave it a miss.

Then up to Montmartre, which is always more crowded than Chatelet at 8.30 am on a Monday morning (NB. Chatelet is always crowded at 8.30 am on a Monday morning). So we battled our way up the hill, past fanny pack toting yanks, ice cream clutching british brats, and japanese tourgroups, and managed to find some really lovely little back streets, away from the crowds and the cameras, with lots of great little resaurants and bars. We found a little place serving cous-cous, which is quite famous here, since Paris has such a high population of Northern African immigrants. So I ordered cous-cous marguez. Qu'est-ce que c'est, merguez, I asked, and the waiter ran off and brought me a raw sausage on a plate. Bring it on, I said.

I got a little worried when a serving platter of cous-cous arrived, followed by a salad-bowl sized pot of vegetable stew and a plate of (cooked) sausages. Perhaps the cous-cous is supposed to be for two, I though, oops! But then I spied a table of two with bowls twice as large as mine happily tucking in, so I got down to work. It was also served with a big bowl of chilli paste, and the whole thing was delicious, so tasty and flavoursome and rich. I didn't manage to get right to the bottom of those bowls, but I did pretty well. Ruxandra had an also tasty rabbit stew, yum!

After washing down this feast with a carafe of wine, we dragged our swollen bellies up the giant staircase to the Sacre-Coeur. In my well-formed opinion, the view is prettier from up there at night than during the day. The city looks so charming and friendly, and so, so different from modern impersonal skyscraper cities.

Our less than promising start in the north, ended very well.

An unrelated night-time photograph.

A four-day weekend, which also brought the end of daylight savings, the end of seven o'clock sunsets, the end of getting dressed in the dark, and a ten hour time difference between me and most of you (which would have woken me up earlier than planned on Sunday if I wasn't already walking down the Champs-Elysées at 8 am on Sunday morning, when Alex called me- hello darling!), seems to have marked the end of the lingering summer weather, and brought the rain and cold to us Parisiennes (NB. some of us may be Parisiennes-in-the-making). My mind is starting to turn to thoughts of the softest leather gloves in stock at the Galeries Lafayette... Actually I doubt I could afford their very softest gloves, judging by some of the price tags I saw on a little turn through their gilded gates on Monday. A €9600 furcoat would keep the winter chills out!

But what is this talk of bridges, you may ask, if you had bothered to look up the word "pont"? Well, in France, they have come up with many génial ideas regarding maximising their long weekends, and if a public holiday happens to fall on a Tuesday or a Thursday, then the Monday or the Friday is called a bridge day, and almost everybody font le pont, and takes a four day weekend! Genius I tell you! The trade-off is, if a public holiday falls on a Saturday or Sunday, you don't get to take the Monday off.

So I took advantage of my sejour of freedom, and did what all real Parisians do on a long weekend- I got out of Paris, in the company of Ruxandra, the Romanian girl in the lab. And headed 65 km south-east to a lovely Chateau called Fontainebleau. After a rocky start, including a spilt coffee, a wrong platform, and a missing ticker validator, we safely made it to the pretty little town named after the former home of Louis (XIII, XIV, and XV; I think XVI preferred Versailles), Napoleon (I and III at least, not sure about the second, but I guess he must have), and their various women.

Corridors of gilded ballrooms, opulent bed chambers, sumptuous dining rooms, lavish sitting rooms were ours to waltz through (staying just this side of the velvet rope of course), and outside the fountains trickled in the sun, the flowers bloomed and the air was sweet!

Oh, to live in a 1900-room castle, with more servants than you could count, the Mona Lisa on your bedroom wall (now elsewhere of course), and a stable full of horses with which to tour your majestic grounds, too grand to walk around! And a throne room, especially a throne room!

The weekend brought lots of other charms as well, but I might leave those until tomorrow!