I Hope I Don't Get in Trouble with the French Government for This...

But I'm going to share with you the secret of French cooking. 

Are you ready?

You're sure?

Oh alright then. Here it is.

A little grain mustard and some crème fraiche.

That's it. Particularly the crème fraiche part. Crème fraiche goes in everything. We put a little crème fraiche in purées, baked goods, virtually any sauce, on chicken, beef, I've never made soup here but I feel pretty confident that any recipe includes a little crème fraiche. Not that I'm complaining of course. I mean, have you ever tasted crème fraiche? 

So, here is the sauce I have on basically any meat I eat here. In the skillet in which you've just cooked your chicken/pork/steak/what-have-you, add a dollop of Dijon to the leftover juices and stir. Then add a slightly larger dollop of crème fraiche. Add a little chicken broth or white wine for good measure. Pour over everything on your plate and congratulate yourself on mastering French cooking. 

How to Spend All Your Money and Dignity in Paris

I finally arrived home yesterday morning at around 6:30, with two tipsy friends in tow. We stumbled into my tiny apartment and passed out like kittens in a heap on my bed. I didn't bother to even wipe off  my mascara or brush my teeth. I just vaguely hoped I wouldn't kick Sophie in the face during the night (morning) before I fell fast asleep, dead to the world, until my babysitting job in approximately five and a half hours. 

I am so tired. After 3 and a half months of spending at least half the weekend holed up with a bottle of wine and a movie, I suddenly have plans every night. I guess this means I'm cool now. Christ, that took a while. 

Let's back up. Two weekends ago was when Eloise and Astral's visitors from home were here; the night that I was in the fight outside Sacré Coeur. (Ok I know that I wasn't actually part of the fight, but it happened really, really close to me and I've never been in a fight, so I'm calling it, ok?)

The weekend after that was a doozy. For starters it began on Wednesday, and didn't end until the following Monday, which was a holiday. These are the establishments I patronized in those five days. 

Wednesday: Earth's Kitchen

Thursday: Bo Zinc

Friday: Tribeca, O'Sullivan's, The Apartment of A French Person I've Never Met and Am Unlikely to Meet Again

Saturday: That Crepe Place By Montparnasse, Bo Zinc again, Bar On Grands Boulevards I Can't Remember

Sunday: La Campanella, L'International

Monday: Jardin des Tuileries, Starbucks

I was pretty much wiped by Monday, so wiped in fact that I didn't wake up until around 3 in the afternoon. That weekend was spectacular for a number of reasons. The first being that my long lost childhood friend, Connie, arrived in Paris with her new French boyfriend Mathieu. That is the reason I was in a strange Parisian apartment. I didn't just follow somebody home one night, I promise. Suddenly tasked with showing people a good time in Paris, I did the best I could. I dragged them to a couple only slightly overpriced restaurants in my neighborhood and then out to the few going-out-y neighborhoods I know of. I think I did pretty well. I'm calling it a success anyway. Mathieu was lovely and Connie and I got along as if we'd never stopped hanging out. It was like if you're really hungry but there's no food in the house and then suddenly you realize that that jar of Nutella in the back of your cupboard isn't empty after all. So you take to that thing with a spoon and zero shame and it is awesome. (I'm kinda poor right now, so please don't judge. This is legitimately awesome in my world). We drank, we laughed, we made inappropriate jokes. What's ten years, anyway?

I capped this spectacular weekend with early evening wine and cheese and strawberries in the Tuileries with Bea, where we soaked in what sunshine we could and admired ourselves for our Parisianness. 

Well this last weekend wasn't quite so long, but certainly eventful. Friday I met Astral, Astral's best friend from Scotland, her other friend Ellyse, and their adorable accents. I'm sorry, I just can't get over how lovely Astral's Scottish accent is. Say English, but pronounce it, "Eyngllesh." Ah. So beautiful. 

Anyway, we met at Bastille and per Ellyse's suggestion, just went into the loudest bar on the street, called Charlotte Bar. Pros: As soon as we entered, the doorman/host-type-person/MC/bartender brought us to a table which was already occupied by three guys. He kicked the guys out, and we moved in. Mean? Unfair? Sexist? Sure! No, of course I didn't offer to give the guys back their table. Cons: We missed Happy Hour, which meant that I paid 20 euros for two drinks. Ponder that for a minute. No, seriously. The music was deafening, I think my ears are still ringing, and the place was so packed I got at least ten other people's sweat on me. It was fun though. They played a lot of Jay-Z, etc and we made friends with some lovely gentlemen inexplicably wearing Viking hats and carrying inflatable axes.

Saturday night we decided to go to Batofar, a rave of sorts on a boat that started at midnight and ended at six. We got there at one, all of us at least a bottle of wine in, got our cool-girl wrist stamps, and prepared to party. This was Bea's last Saturday night in Paris before she leaves this weekend, sob, so we made a pledge to go hard. And hard we went. I'm trying to decide what my favorite part of the evening was. One friend flirting heavily with the bartender and then yelling angrily at said bartender an hour later; making one gullible (French!) guy believe that I was French; actually dancing for the first time in probably years; calling out the creeps on the dance floor; meeting the world's least subtle MDMA dealers; the 700,000 pictures we took; fighting with the vending machine in the train station for barbecue chips... So many memories to choose from. 

Honestly, the thing I might like best about going out is recounting the evening the next morning with friends. You did what? I did what? Best night ever! It's just nice to have a friend there in the morning as you're unsticking the vodka from your hair and glugging water like you've just escaped a deserted island, and trying to deal with the fact that your stomach feels inside out and your head is trying to kill you, someone to confirm or deny whether you really were a complete and utter asshat the night before. This is how we bond, you see. 

Ah, to be young. Here's the truth about youth, all you nostalgic older relatives that I know are reading this: it's freaking exhausting. 

On the Steps of Sacré Coeur

In case you're not sure, Sacré Coeur is the cathedral at the top of the really big hill, and when you climb to the top of the hill to get to the cathedral, you look down onto all of Paris. It's a spectacular view, particularly at dusk on a clear night, when the Eiffel Tower has just been lit up. Also it's free. 

So drinking a bottle of wine with your friends on these steps at night sounds like a great idea, right? It definitely sounded fun when Eloise invited me. How lovely, I thought. How Parisian! How bohemian of us! 

Well. Eloise, Astral, Eloise's brother Angus, Astral's cousin Simone, and I arrived on the scene where apparently some concert had just ended. I had pictured clean, deserted steps with just us and our bottle of Johnnie Walker, but what we found was a decent sized crowd and steps absolutely covered in Heineken bottles, cigarette butts, and various snack wrappers. I wondered for a minute why exclusively Heineken bottles until I noticed the guys who were wandering up and down carrying 30 packs, and selling the individual beers, ball game style.

Relatively undeterred, we cleared off a cleanish space and cracked open the whiskey. Every now and then a Heineken bottle rolled down the steps and smashed. A large van with the words "Boom Bus" painted on the side rolled up below us. After some finagling, it eventually started playing dance music, and shooting out neon lights. Maybe seven people danced total, but it was fun. A little grubby but definitely cheap. 

I couldn't help but notice, however, that the crowd was mostly dudes. Which meant that our largish group of girls (not including Angus of course) attracted a bit of attention. Some of them were nice enough I suppose, but there was one dude, wearing a Bulls cap, which is bizarrely trendy in Paris, who seemed ready to hang out all night. Bulls Cap Guy has a girlfriend in every country he's visited, if you'll believe that. Bulls Cap Guy believes that if you have a boyfriend in a different country, he doesn't count. Bulls Cap Guy believes putting your hands all over your new friend's thigh is just friendly, and why are you being so uptight, you frigid bitch? Bulls Cap Guy was also apparently unconcerned when his very drunk and very huge friend passed out immediately behind me. Sort of on me, actually. 

"Um, is he okay?" I asked. 

"Yes, yes. He just had too much to drink, you know."

Well sure. Once you've identified the cause of your friend's passing out, there's nothing else to worry about, right? So when a couple other guys approached the King Sized Sleeping Beauty behind me, I asked them if he was okay too. They gave me a weird look, which I didn't understand at all until a few moments later. 

I felt Goliath stir behind me, and looked up to find him brandishing half a Heineken bottle, jagged edge up, at the two guys from before. 

I'd like to pause here to remind everyone that this is all happening right in front of one of the most famous and beautiful cathedrals in the world. 

Anyway, they started throwing punches and Bulls Cap Guy jumped up. They crashed into each other and then they crashed into us, and I felt a bottle smack the back of my head. As I registered the fact that I was just hit in the head with a goddamn beer bottle, with mixed feelings of rage and pride, I looked up to see that as they tumbled down the steps, they had somehow taken Eloise with them, rolling across the broken glass. I, very helpfully, yelled her name. But her brother was already there and pulling her out of the drunken, belligerent snowball.

When they got to the bottom of the stairs, the fight seemed to end somehow, and the last I saw of them they were stumbling away. And that's how we got rid of Bulls Hat Guy.