Part III

So, carrying on. Each day, I scan an excel spreadsheet of clients who have utilised Bedouk's services in the past. They are organized by time zone. First thing after I begin work, I call the UAE, cause they've been up for a while. I catch South Africa and the Scandinavian countries by mid morning, wait to call England before lunch, and am talking to New York and Rio De Janeiro by the afternoon. Each country has their own flavour, I'm learning. The Germans have investigative secretaries, Morocco and Tunisia give me empty promises, and the Argentinians stumble poorly and bravely through their English. If the French, Belgium, and Luxembourg clients are nice, I switch to French (If not, them flounder). My favorite are the Dutch,m who seem tickled when I ask them about their day and wish them a nice weekend. I've already arrived at that all too familiar level of recognition known to secretaries, so Rachel of Sweden and Ahmed of Egypt know my voice.

And then there are the French that sit around me. Marie to the front, Cyril to my left, Valere behind me and a floor to ceiling window to my right where I watch old metro cars rush to and from Paris and tiny cars circle the grandiose fountain in unassuming Antony. Cyril stands up and tests the limits of his phone cord, pacing as much as one can pace in a two feet tethered radius around his desk as he makes his sales calls. Marie uses me as a walking translation programas she mirrors the French website with its International (see: English) counterpart. Valere is the snarky web master who has me writing articles for the weekly newsletter. We make paper airplanes, we share gum, we make talk about the weird guy I just got off the phone with.

Cause if I had waited any longer, my family would've disowned me.



My big ugly mug at the Musee D'Orsay. Photos forbidden. I was chased around by old
volunteers wagging their fingers all day long. Their POINTER fingers.



Wannabe baobab in the Jardin des Plantes.

I loved this. Its the backside of the Natural History Museum, which is on my list. Apparently there are hundreds of taxidermed (Real word? Not certain.) animals, all stuffed "in motion", and there all look like there in a big rush to head out the front door. Some famous dude being haloed by what I'm assuming are sawfish bones.

The Mosque in Paris. I guess there's only one. Super photogenic building. Don't worry, there's more.

See.

Ooh, look, another one!

I decided to make a Arab/Muslim day out of it, and after a mini photo shoot at the Mosque and the Arab World Institut (See above), I headed home and had some mint tea. All I was missing were the tiny cups. Well, I guess an Arab or a Muslim might have sufficed.

Pretending I'm deep and artsy.

For Dad. Me. In a park. Cold.

Kinda fuzzy, but I think you all might know what that thing is.

I'd like to think I look SLIGHTLY more french than this at some point during this sejour.

Alicia, an old exchange student, and I in front of the American cemetary near Metz, near the border with Germany. They were kinda happy to have us around that time.

Attention! First crepe.

Did I warn the vegetarians about this photo? Hmmm....

View from my bedroom window. Snowy day in Antony.

My room. If it looks like a cozy dorm, then it must be a cozy dorm, right?

Pecos. Me. Nuff said.

My clementine cake. Juicy. Really. It was.

The french love their carousels.

Wild Mushroom Tarte.

Part II

I have a badge. That's right. It gets me onto my floor, plus there's a rent-a-cop on the 1st floor, some soft spoken teenage girl I could break over my knee if I was so inclined If the building is taken over by terrorists, we're all screwed. Its like having a fish as a guard dog. I charged some money onto my badge, so I can get cheap espresso and semi-disastrous cafeteria food at lunch. My manager had me go and fetch her a cappuccino today. I think that means I have been officially initiated into the intern hall of shame. That and I spend lunch giggling and bitching over our food trays in the cafeteria with the other interns like school girls. I was quickly aligned with Casey, Eszter the Hungarian, Julia the Austrian, and Lisa the German. Not much juicy drama yet, but we get to commiserate about being the bottom rung. None of us take the general disregard for our presence very seriously, and we all work quite well together. Bedouk is broken into two geographic areas, the French team and the International team (funny, sorta like France vs. The World). Since Bedouk is French, most of their clients and business are done in French. I'm (obviously) on the international team, and the language used is English. It was a bit daunting seeing numbers to be called in Morocco, Russia and Saudi Arabia, but being someone who is learning another language, I know how to slightly alter my vernacular and speed to talk to these people in English, and I just bust through their Gutentags and Shaloms and we get along just fine. More on this later.

Bedouk

Ok, theres a lot to relay concerning this subject and since some of you readers have proved to get a teensy weensy bit snippy when I'm not producing regularly, I'll make tiny installments. I must also preface this by saying its going to get a little stream of consciousy here. There's a lot to tell and I'm no pro writer, so I hope you'll take what you can get. I prepped for my first day at the internship by allowing ample time and leaving early. I left at 9:25. I begin work at 9:30. Now I know how long it REALLY takes, I'm not forced to be so absurdly cautious and I leave at 9:28. Have I mentioned that I don't have to cross the road to get to work, cause I don't. Bedouk has been bought out by InfoPro, who does, lots of things, I guess. Luckily, working as an intern means I'm not expected to know anything or do anything correctly. It's like being a baby. Or a dog. My manager is from L.A. She married a frenchman, which is how she has managed to infiltrate the Fort Knox that is the European employment systems. On my first day, I was placed under the kind and gentle supervision of Casey, an intern from Illinois who has been at Bedouk since November. She was at IFE, so she knows all the pertinent info I need regarding the paperwork, relationship, and expectations between Bedouk and IFE. It seems that Bedouk couldn't function without interns. I am one of four. I guess I should back up. Bedouk plays the role of a business travel agent. Companies use Bedouk's free venue finding service to locate convention halls, meeting spaces and event centers all over the world. Bedouk connects large companies with these venues and hotels, who then pay for their finders fee. Its a valuable tool for companies with enough money in this economy to continue holding international conferences and no time to do the venue hunting themselves. Assuming, however, they let me finish my pitch and not just hang up on me like the "proper" English tossers that they sometimes have a tendency to reduce themselves to, at least when I get fustrated and start calling them names (see above). My job is to call these clients, meeting planners and enterprises that hold international events and offer to help, free of charge and without taking anything off their commission if they receive one. If this sounds difficult, its because it is. I floundered a bit the first few days, but by Friday I actually caught myself leaning back and swivelling in my desk chair, one foot on the windowsill, one hand twirling a pen in the air while schmoozing with John Doe of Boring Industries in Rainy, England. K, that's all I got in me today, more on the myriad of co-workers later. Hi ho, hi ho......

More fooood.

I have been introduced to the Smitten Kitchen food blog. Have you been there? Do you know about it? Cheddar Beer and Mustard Pull Apart Bread?! She can't be stopped. I fell back into the kitchen when Pecos left, realizing that I need some favorite standbys. All my cooking life, I keep taking on completely new recipe, trying something completely different with curious ingredients each time, which ends in either something that needs to be tweaked, something f%#@*&$ amazing that I have some difficulty recreating with the same delicious fervor, or something scary. I need dishes that people associate with me. And then I found this website, and it all went out the window. Clementine Cake, made with WHOLE clementines? Aww HELL yeah! So, you boil four or five small clementines or forty five minutes, until they stop resembling clementines and begin resembling children's interpretations of puppy chew toys in the shape of clementines. You seed 'em, mash em up, skin, pith and all, and mix in a bunch a eggs, a shit ton of almond powder, some levure chimique (I'm sorry, I really don't remember whether this is baking soda or baking powder. It required multiple trips to the store, asking my roommate, looking online, and taking notes on packaging. And after all that sleuthing, I don't even remember. Nice.), and a cup of sugar to balance out the skins and pith. Bake. Done. Eat. It was lovely, and super duper moist.

But why stop there? Pre-made dough is a staple. I see one out of five people around me in the grocery store carrying this shit around, so I picked one up. If the french use it, then it must be good. This theory is extended to all foodstuffs, and when Pecos and I went to the market in Antony, he witnessed me being conned by two audacious mushroom pushers. The french are mushroom aficionados, which I learned in Aix-en-Provence when I saw multiple mushroom sellers at the markets being swamped with business. There are too many mushrooms to count in this country, so I go somewhere between boring button and super expensive cepe, a kind of truffle spin off that goes for about 25 euro for 100 grams. Yikes. One kind looked nice, and the woman was already shoving handfuls of it into a grocery bag, and before I knew it, I was buying a kilo of them. ITS LIKE THEY SAW ME COMING. "They'll melt down" they kept insisting while i hummed and hawed over the need for a bulging bag. The insisting was kind of half assed, the man flapping his wrists at me lazily, knowing I was his puppet. We both saw the woman smile knowingly at my gullibility. Aww fuggit. These things would cost fifteen bucks a pound in the states. I paid under five. I ate mushroom with ever meal, until my conscience told me to finish them off, that even though they ARE fungus, I was pushing their expiration date. This is where the dough comes into play. I made Wild Mushroom and Creme Fraiche Tarte. I will upload photos after work today. They will make you run out and spend too much on shitty American mushrooms. HA! Take that.

Pecos

Pecos came to visit me. ALLL the way from Felton. Not even from Santa Cruz.We got to talk about Monty's and JB's. Floating in the river in Henry Cowell. Smoking pot in the redwoods. Felton stuff. He came in from Dallas like a bat outta hell, and hit the ground running like a trooper. I scooped his ass up from CDG and hurried him back to Antony, expecting to pour his tired ass into bed. He had a number of bleary eyed smiles before he crashed, one when an accordion player struck up a bellow-y tune that folded around his receptive ears on the metro, and anoter when we stepped into the first (of many) bakeries to buy his first Parisian baguette. He was on his own for the three remaining days of the week when I had class, spent it sleeping, going to the Louvre, and going to the Louvre, in that order, and each event taking up all the time the sun was in the sky. The first day, he put his French to the test, braving the Parisians on their own turf- a cafe. Ordering a latte, he was served a tea (for you non french speakers, "le the"-"the tea"- sounds eerily close to latte). He (regretfully, I think) was convinced into spending ample hours in the Louvre, but really perked up on our visit to the modern art museum, le Centre Pompidou, a museum that I liken to the way I feel about Chuck E Cheese or the Yellow Submarine, I like it, I find it to be incredibly curious, and sometimes it makes me feel a little strange. We sat on cushions in a re-created 1950's style tv room and watched video installations of people dressed like pyramids ski down mountain sides. We both adored it. We hit up the Dali museum too, since Picasso was closed for unexplained reasons and the Musee D'Orsay seemed to me to be too similar to the Louvre. A photo now exists of us inside the nail of a thumb sculpted by the mustached fiend himself. We sat on the banks of the Seine and got drunk off good champagne. We walked though marketplaces, parks, hip neighborhoods and cobblestone streets. We ate cheese that smelled like feet. We saw Rodrigo y Gabriela at l'Olympia. We dodged schoolchildren at the aquarium. We stood before the Eiffel Tower and listened to music in the Virgin Megastore on the Champs Elysee. He taught a bartender how to make a snake bite and I ordered us tarte aux pommes. We had an ok time, I guess. Oh, and Happy Birthday, Pecos.