Trotters

I do not like the term trotters. I guess it all stems from "having the trots," an Australian expression for diarrhea. But when you are trying to convince the general public to eat something, ok, lets all be real here, gross, you have to give it a fancy name. Take Squab. Rocky Mountain Oysters. Vegemite. Whoops, got away from myself there for a while. Trotters are pigs feet. They should, in my opinion, be any animals feet, but I wasn't the one to discover that they could be eaten, so I will secede. It does mean, however, that I should be able to give a name to french fries dipped in a vanille milkshake. So, here is my maiden voyage with les pieds de cochon.

Purchase-
I woke up on Sunday, and it just felt like a day to cook something strange. I walked through the Sunday market on Avenue d'Italie with the devout and the hungover, and found him. My man. Mr. French Butcher. His hands looked like swollen pink chops of meat. He was wearing a hat with a GD pheasant feather in it. He actually burped in the middle of a transaction. I had seen ears and tails and cow tongues and the like, and was almost tempted to buy some pig cheeks, which are supposed to be delicious, but I was on a mission. He grabbed two front feet, beat the shit out of them with a butchers knife to split them, since all the good stuff is inside, and, upon hearing I was both a pigs feet virgin AND an American, he practically threw an arm around my shoulders and offered me a drink. He walked me through the steps of cooking un bon pied de cochon, which subsequently led me to mentally throw out the other recipes I was considering for this food anomaly. Screw lentils with pigs feet, pigs feet stew and braised pigs feet. I was going to make some potatoes stewed with pigs feet, because he told me to. I immediately bought a small bag of filthy potatoes, and hurried home.

Prep-
They don't feel good. Like, think human skin. I threw them into a big pot with a few liters of water, a quartered onion, the fresh bay leaves that he snuck into my bag without me looking, and a mish mash of herbs I found in the pantry left over by other tenants- sage, pink peppercorn, rock salt, garlic, and a few yummy smelling mystery leaves. About an hour into the stewing, the toes began spreading slightly, and I am not stoked to see a SERIOUS lack of meat. This is going to be one weird stew....

Eating-
An appropriate amount of stewing time later, I chucked in some potatoes, pumpkin, broccoli and a few mushrooms. I fished out the pigs feet and bay leaves, and, without much bravado, ate it. Verdict, you say? Broth flavor- CRAZY good. There is enough fat in the feet to give a heap of water the most lovely taste. The soup- meh. Butcher-man got the broth idea down pat, but I'm needing some meat in this mother.

Overall impression-
Making a stew? Buy pigs feet, but buy some other kind of meat to throw in there.

Ok, what should I make next? Cow brains? Frogs legs? Escargot?

FLNJ- an organisation all of you should be savvy of.

Years ago, I travelled to the tiny town of Montargis. An unassuming town just south of Paris, Montargis is surrounded by the woods. The modest, hardworking people of the town had recently been victims of rampant theft, targeted for their tastes. Their horrible, horrible tastes. A group calling themselves the Front de Libération de Nains de Jardin decended upon the tiny village of Montargis, among other towns within France, with one purpose in mind- to free the gnomes. That's right. Founded in 1996 in Alençon, the aim of the FLNJ was to save garden gnomes via nightly invasions (see "illegal") from the very own neighbors gardens, and return them to their natural environment. Some 7000 gnomes were liberated from suppresive gardens and front yards and released into the forest, glades, and woods. Police interaction, obviously, was required, and many FLNJ members were apprehended with literature and tiny shovels and ridiculous wheelbarrows (forms of slavery), the gnomes already released into the wild. Many a startled hiker came across the gnomes deep in the forest, sometimes solitary, sometimes entire communities, reunited with their own kind, each one equipped with food rations, mainly pasta, and "night vision goggles" (painted glasses). Although things have quieted down significantly in the past years, the FLNJ do pop up ostentatiously from time to time, to remind the people of France of the real home for these misunderstood "garden art". Lest we forget.

Proof

Look! Its me. I'm in Paris. I swear. If you squint real hard, you can see the eiffel Tower just about my right ear. Fine, you'll just have to take my word for it.

Enjoy this view while you can people. In a week, Ill have a different view from my balcony in Antony, namely, the building I'll be interning at. Boom.

Keep on Truckin.

I have a cell now. It was the cheapest one they had, I would describe the sound that the buttons make "a noisy racket", but its a quadri-band, and its mine. Its our first outing today, I'm expected matching yellow hats and a guide carrying a tiny yellow flag, but I'm a bit pessimistic when it comes to these types of things. I mean, I guess 28 loud young Americans can't generate TOO much attention on their own, now can they? I had dinner last night with some family friends, and since I am currently living alone, speaking only french in the classes, and reading french newspapers ( I made myself promise), I am kinda knee deep over here. English is limited to these blogs, some social networking contact, reading and music, the french is coming along rapidly. I find that french words come to me more naturally than before, and the english is lagging. I had a hell of a time writing an email to an old friend from high school who is living in Paris, and the letter was in english. In hindsight, I'm pretty sure I was supposed to capitalize "french" and "english", but they don't in french, so the hell with it. Agnes and Nicolas and their girls spend some time at Nico's parents farm in Normany every year, and I have been invited. They threatened me with too much wine, too much food, and too much outdoors. Sounds horrible. My task for the day is to sign up for a Monoprix (supermarket) card, just to make me feel slightly more french. All of these obscure outings have forced me into situations which require me to describe things, offer elaborate hand gestures, and, my personal favorite, draw pictures. I keep forgetting to look up pertinent vocabulary before I wander into buy a cell phone, start a library card and the like, but no one seems to mind. They smile and bear with me, entertaining my "adorable" accent and my "cute euphemisms. Thank God I've got experience acting as the dumb tourist.

Classes with the girls... and three men.

Just as I suspected, I am the oldest one. Everyone else seems to have gotten a bit of a head start on me, being the ripe old age of 27. There's 28 of us, 25 being women, completely unsurprisingly. There is one other girl however who has also graduated, speaks comparable french to me, and also spent a year in France back in college. There's the usual smattering of college students, though a strange collection of Vassar and Goucher girls. I'm hearing about people interning at schools, museums, theatres, veterinary hospitals, Slow Food movement NGO's, and one guy is lucky enough to have landed a job DJ-ing a radio station here in the city. The one thing that I am happy (for the time being) to hear is that we are not allowed to speak English in the building, that is the IFE (Internships in Francophone Europe) building. It makes our conversations a bit staid, depending on the person speaking. While the more advanced can tell jokes and recount stories that "would have", "could have" and "had" been, others are forced into the tiny pen of what is happening right now. "I am from Illinois." "I do not like France." "Where is the wine?", or whatever it is 20 year olds talk about. I "wouldn't" know. Our first class was with a history professor, who walked us through the French Revolution. I'd like to pretend I was bored, but I wasn't. Although I've learned a hundred times about Napoleon and Marie Antoinette and that whole crazy bunch, I never seem to quite have the details filled in, and this guy was good, painted the whole picture Hollywood-like. After a long ass lunch (the french do like to eat), a young guy came in to talk about culture shock, albeit a boring subject, but he ramped it up by basically asking us what were were astounded by in France, what pissed us off, and moments of extreme embarrassment. It made for what amounted to a great story time, filled with les bises gone awry, bidet uncertainty and revulsion upon realizing what boudin noir is made of. For those of you wondering, I am still visiting the weird meat section whenever I poke my head into Monoprix, and those pig feet are still there. Waiting. Patiently.

Apartment hunting.

So, yes, remember that first time you went looking for an apartment? Something cute, good location, big kitchen, but nothing too expensive? Remember how exciting it all was? And then maddening? And when you learned something called an ageency fee, and Rupesh broke it to you that the cute apartment had a 1000 euro fee ON TOP of the already steep fee he was asking for? And when you saw undercover cops busting drug dealers right in front of the building you were just about to walk into to check on a flat? And when the one place that you might actually afford has NOT been designed for tall people, and you can see yourself bashing your forehead against the mezzanine bed in the middle of the night, and then stumbling blindly down the hall to the SHARED toilet? And that one apartment who smelled like the previous tenant hadn't bathed in weeks, where you had to provide your own lights and chairs? And that one guy you inquired about the room won't stop emailing you, asking if youre single and to send personal photos? And remember that other guy who wants you to western union him the money, since, you know, hes in India and all? Yeah. I sure do.

My date with a dead man.

I stood him up yesterday. I said bye to mom, came back to the condo to clean, laundry, listen to music, apartment hunt, etc. Somehow the time got away from me, and the thought of traipsing back up north for "my date with a dead man" was too taxing, so I decided to go out for my first night on the town. Alone. This is always an interesting experience, no matter how many times I do it in a new city. This particular trip, out to rue Oberkampf, was suggested to me by Lonely Planet. Now why the hell I listened to LP and didn't use it as kindling is beyond me, but it led me astray. Its lofty promises were reduced to drunk youths (I mean, like youths), a few drunk bums, and drunk tourists. And sober Paige. A bad combination. Apparently french men have adopted a new curious habit. I don't remember this happening to me when I lived south, but three men veered into my path to intentionally run into me. If the purpose of this social experiment is to pick up women, it doesn't work. Even if I HAD been interested, they are walking the other direction. Bizarre. It soon began to rain, and after a beer at a packed bar, I called it a night.
Today was my day though. I took the metro way the hell up and gone north of the city to the Marches aux puces de st-ouen, a massive antiques flea market. (This metro trip's soundtrack has been brought to me by- Paul Simon, Arcade Fire, Fela Kuti.) I didn't bring my camera. These kind of world famous flea markets are plastered with "Pas de Photos, SVP", so I'll walk you through what I saw. Old bearded men sharing their lunches with old bearded dogs. The distinctive pop of a wine bottle draws my attention to a family of (at least) five generations having an extravagant lunch. Theres nothing quite like a store filled with classic 50 year old Dior and Yves Saint Laurent to cause me to tug self-consciously at my 50 cent yard sale finds. One dress had more fabric than all the clothes I was wearing at the time- and remember, Paris in winter. I saw a store selling only spectacular ballroom type chandeliers, one six feet in diameter, the ground of the floor completely bare. I bought a small paper cone of chesnuts, charred slightly over a fire housed in an old metal trashcan. A lot of the stalls on the outskirts of the flea market were run by men playing french rap, which I cannot for the life of me take seriously (thats not really fair though, I don't take most rap seriously, but seeing two men trying their best to look tough give each other kisses kinda deflates the image a bit). I saw a lot of crap we sell at the auction house, whose technical names and descriptions I fear have been engraved permanently into my brain. I fell across a wicked maze of life and larger than life sized metal garden statues of various animals. I took notes in my little black notebook as I walked, and one woman, lubricated by her daily ration of french wine, asked me if I was a reporter. Before I could answer, she began to tell me about what she thought of the market, offering me her name, you know, so I could print if for my paper. I played along, scribbling squiggles in my book. She seemed very pleased with herself. I saw old women chatting, their cigarettes bouncing along with their lips.
At two, I made it to la Chope de Puces, where, on the weekends, play live gypsy jazz. The place is a Django Reinhardt mecca, and arriving late, I held up the bar with my rouge with the rest of the grizzly head-nodding, foot-tapping men. It felt like I had returned to the age of the beatniks, but no one was snapping. Its Django's birthday on Monday, so I enjoyed his memory while watching a weathered musician bend over his guitar. Pretty nice way to spend my day before classes start tommorow.

Dinner with some old friends

We went out last night with  Stephane Toullieux and his beautiful family, Magali, Raphaella and Hugo.  Stephane is a Parisian who stayed at our house as a foreign exchange student when I was three. The Toullieux family, including his parents, sister, wife and two children, have been exchanging christmas cards with us since then, and every time we swing through Paris, we have dinner. The Eiffel Tower that Stephane sees is quite a bit larger than the one we see, and his house is covered with cool stuff he has collected from his years of travel to countries that make me jealous; Madagascar, Morocco and Mongolia are three that come to mind. He can make cultural references to the US that astound me. Last night at dinner he made a Reggie Bush/Jeb Bush joke, mentioned a Vanity Fair article quoting Biden's opinion of Mitt Romney, and uses a startling variety of American slang and expressions. When we came by his flat, he was watching a college football game, and had a book on his coffee table about James Dean. We walked past an address that was the new political headquarters for a candidate I don't know, and then we went to a restaurant where a famous French actor I didn't know was eating. Those Americans...embarrassing.

Susan here......at my 60th BD party last month I was telling people that one of the greatest gifts I can name is the miracle of having doubled my group of really wonderful friends within the last 5 years. At a time (not to be maudlin) that you start to lose friends, to have so many new friends in my life is an unexpected pleasure. Still, when I sit across from Stephane and his family, and I remember how long we've known each other, it reminds me that old friends are important too. Very important- and worth the effort it takes to keep in touch. I hope to see them sometime soon in either Felton or Mexico. Mexico- definitely.

So on to day to day details- today the famous soldes started and we were ready. We had our list of shopping/souvenirs items  we simply had to have, and so we used our navigo (metro pass) autre fois and headed out. Nothing. So we are back at our flat, having lunch and a rest, then back out to Place D'Italie, a nearby shopping area that might yield a treasure. We are confident! And determined. Wish us luck.

Entry one, since a title doesn't really apply to this post.

When I held the torn piece of warm croissant between my tongue and the roof of my mouth, it turned to butter. Brilliant. There is a book called le Guide de Vin in our appartment in the 13th, so I've been brushing up on my knowledge of the world of french wines. Its daunting. The book is thick enough that I wouldn't be able to break if an old woman with a baby stroller darted unannounced in front of my car, assuming the book was wedged maliciously under the pedal. You can see through the pages, as if you were reading the bible secretly by candlelight. Actually, the bible comes to mind, complete with red mottled cover and the string page holder. My head is now full of romantic sounding wines, like Pouilly-Fuisse and Cotes du Roussillon Villages. Sorta makes me want to drink a lot of it. Mom and I are avoiding the crowds and lines of the Eiffel Tour, the Musee D'Orsay, Champs Elysee and the like, for stranger, more bizarre neighborhoods. We did find ourselves on the Pont Neuf between the impossibly micro-managing Alliance Francaise and the curly Louvre protecting its pointy pyramid, and I gotta tell you, those areas are touristy for a reason. Thousands of locks were clamped down on the chicken fence under the railings preventing curious dogs from fatal curiosity. Each lock had names of young lovers separated by the ever-promising heart, and the key, I assume, launched into the Seine. To hit the point home, there were lots, LOTS, of couples sucking face on the benches, sometimes so many crammed on to one point I kept expecting one young woman to caress the back of another mans neck. Here's mom.

Wow, how can I follow that? On a more pragmatic, motherly note, I'll report on the mundane fact that this morning we were UP and OUT of the apartment BEFORE 11 AM.........this is remarkable because yesterday morning we got up (well, Paige got up, finally) at 10:25. Yep. On vacation, or something. Of course, jet lag, 3 flights in one day and colds for both of us- all contributing factors. We have been covering neighborhoods previously unexplored by either of us and are enjoying the lack of crowds and the variety. Today we spent 90 minutes going through Chinatown (we are on the edge of it), returned for lunch, then out again to the right bank for a scripted tour of les passages. Our good friend Stephane ( who we will be dining with tomorrow night) introduced us to the this wonderful side of Paris about 11 years ago and we have been eager to return to them ever since. Quaint and picturesque- I don't know how the shops stay open as the prices are high, the items obscure and the serious buyers few. Still, we loved it.

And if Paige hasn't covered it as yet, we are staying in an apartment in the 13th...on the 18th floor of a complex that has a pool on the roof. Our place is fine: usable kitchen, bath with a SHOWER CURTAIN, balcony, washer (but no dryer.....???) and that ever popular, can-we-plug-this-into-the-search-engine item, a piano. A piano. Now mind you- the bedroom does not have a closet. None.  And the best part of the piano that takes up more than it's fair share of the living area? You can't play it. Because as it so succinctly says in the handy renters book left for us to read and use--------if you play the piano, the police will come. Evidently our neighbors are NOT music lovers.

P- The large French woman who lives inside me head took over the diminutive Spanish gentleman ALMOST IMMEDIATELY. I couldn't even say Torres Del Paine without sounding like a Spanish one French student. Everyone seems to get me, everyone thinks I'm English (cause, you know, Americans don't speak another language), and since there is a new onslaught of foreigners in Paris, the odd accent here or there doesn't seem to throw even the Parisians, nowadays. I guess since the last time I spent any time in France was when I was living in the south in 2005, I was a bit sheltered to the facts of living in the big city, i.e. a smattering of skin tones, languages, greeting techniques, volume of voices, heights, overt friendliness/immediate disdain that I have grown to see as my people in the years I have been travelling. Trust me, I am NOT complaining. I don't remember the last time I saw some of these weird Asian dishes I loved and have since forgotten about. And the couscous. Oh my. I have decided that my little adventure for this time spent in Paris will be semi- dedicated to weird foods, specifically, weird meats. Oh, and the internship, I suppose. Unidentifiable body parts never did scare me, and I am now curious about those meats I see whose names don't even bother including the animal it originated from. In the deepest parts of the meat counter, you can't find a "beef" or "pork". We've jumped straight on over into "tripe", "head", "brains". I will keep you posted, vein by bloody vein. (Got a little Marquis on you, sorry.)

I just couldn't help myself...

What are filles jolies supposed to DO with all this artistic inspiration? I've just got artistic inspiration coming out of, you know.

P&S