Paris: The City of Lights, Love, and Calorie Counting

1 Septembre 2011

She is 19, has beautiful big brown eyes, curls, and doesn’t talk much.  She sounds like the perfect girl and she is absolutely smitten with me.  As everyone knows, I’d love to marry a French girl, and I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m not working harder on this one.  Well, she happens to be the 19 MONTH old granddaughter of my host mother, and she’s damned cute (says the guy who really doesn’t even like kids).  Suzanne has been at the apartment quite a lot recently because she’s acclimatizing to her new nursery school, so only goes for short visits during the day while her parents are at work.  Before this I didn’t even realize you’re supposed to acclimatize kids before they get into their new environment, I thought you only did that when you bought a new fish for your fishtank.

In the last couple of days I’ve had the opportunity to relive my childhood a bit while entertaining a 19 month old.  She waddles around the apartment, going from room to room, and saying simple things in French.  (I’m hoping they’re not words because I can’t understand what she’s saying most of the time, and that’s pathetic.)  I’ve gotten quite good at making and playing with the wooden train set, which is almost the same as the one I had.  We’ve also watched French animal videos on youtube, which have been mutually beneficial; did you know that a hedgehog is called a hérrison?  Well now Suzanne and I do!    

I know most of you think I don’t particularly like kids.  They’re sort of smelly and loud, and go through phases of being absolutely repulsive.  I have to say though, this one is kinda cute.  And she even smells good.  Another great thing about Suzanne is that she forced me to get one nice deed for September out of the way, and it’s only September 1^st!  I hope that doesn’t mean I have to do another one.  I was about to leave to go back to SciencesPo this afternoon when I heard Suzanne crying.  Knowing that Madame was asleep in the salon (afternoon siesta time), I opened Mme’s door and pulled the crying kid out of the crib.  I opened the door and was clearly not what she was expecting, but she gave me a great big smile anyway.  I guess that’s a good thing.  By the time I got to the living room, Madame was awake and I pawned Suzanne off on her.  Salient point: I made a kid stop crying, and that’s a good deed.

One thing I meant to mention in my last entry was a very amusing event that I happened to witness at the Champs Elysées when I was there last Sunday.  I was sitting on a bench watching the people go by and really enjoying myself.  Unlike going to Wal-Mart on a Friday night, an afternoon of people watching at the Champs Elysées only makes you feel ugly and poorly dressed.  Out of the corner of my eye I noticed what I thought was a guinea pig on a leash.  Well luckily nobody had their guinea pig out for a stroll, and upon closer inspection it was a chihuahua (yeah, I had to look up that spelling).  Well, tiny dogs like that don’t interest me in the least, so I tried to pretend it didn’t exist and focused my attention elsewhere.  I happened to turn my head just in time to see the dumb little dog and its owner walk onto one of those grates over a subway air duct.  You know, the ones with the little 1”x2” rectangular holes where ladies get their heels stuck?  Yeah, one of those.  Well, since the chihuahua had legs of roughly the same dimension as the average high heel, he fell right in.  Now, I don’t mean one leg fell through.  Oh no, all four went right in and KERPLOP, there was a dog stuck in the grate.  He couldn’t move.  I sort of imagine his legs kept moving underneath like one of those electric dogs that I love to put on their side when I’m in a toy store.  Maybe I’m an ass (it’s still up for debate in some third world countries), but I got a good laugh out of the whole dog in the grate event.  

Since I last wrote I’ve had a week of methodology courses at SciencesPo, which have been a touch dry (as in super dry), but I’ve survived.  I can’t say that I’ve learned an awful lot, but I’ve met some nice people, which is a good thing.  I haven’t gone to many of the Bar a Night things this week, but I did go to the Wine and Cheese event on Monday and that was a lot of fun.  Crappy wine, and crappy cheese, both of which were gone in the first 45 minutes, but an awesome band.  Instead a handful of us went to the local Monoprix (sort of like Super Wal-Mart), bought bottles of cheap wine, and then got crêpes from a street vender.  After chowing down on the crêpes, we took the (remaining) wine and drank along the Seine.  It was sort of like the Abba song “Our Last Summer,” I can’t even lie.  

I ate at home on Tuesday night and we had some really good (and really rare) roast beef.  I think the center was still mooing, but it was incredible!  We also had some salad, and small, yummy potatoes.  Interestingly, they don’t use butter on their potatoes here- olive oil gets the job done.  As I was eating the oily-potato, I tried to figure out which I liked more: butter or olive oil.  I have to say, you actually taste the potato when you use olive oil whereas otherwise you taste the butter and saltiness.  I’m getting quite fond of this after dinner dessert cheese course, however.  The brie smells so horrible but it tastes sooo good!  I have to say, these crazy Frenchies do food up right, even though they do eat a bit late.  

When I came to France I was initially convinced I would come home and be 1200 lbs.  Well, that may still be true, but I’m starting think otherwise.  At Monoprix today, (it figures that the American gets lunch at the French Wally-World) I noticed that all the sandwiches (which are cheap and decent) have the calories on the side of the box.  The chicken wrap I got today had 367 calories and that’s all I ate for lunch.  Because I go to Trinity, where I’m surrounded by calorie counting biddies (I had to stop the alliteration before it got vulgar), I know that a Chartwells wrap alone, the wrap before they put all that stuff in it, is 300 calories.  Well, after they fill it up with about 7 small pigeons, breaded and deep fried for full caloric potential, pepperjack (because it’s really bad for you), hot sauce to cover the taste, and enough bleu cheese to cover Manhattan three inches deep, there must be about 1500 calories in each wrap.  So, for those of you who doubt my ability to stay svelte and slim despite being in the pastry capital of the world, I have this to say to you: WANNA BET?!

PS - as for pictures, they’re on my camera and I haven’t downloaded them yet.  They’ll come eventually, I promise.  In the meantime, Suzanne and I played with Photobooth on my computer today.  She was rather confused by some of the effects you can put on the pictures, as was I.