Things Found in My Bag

2 pacifiers

Ziploc with a single unused tissue inside

Used tissue. Mostly likely Le Petit's

Journal that gets even less action than this blog

Umbrella

My "to-go" corkscrew

Various pain au chocolat wrappers

Handful of American quarters

Handful of 20 cent coins

3 books: 2 in French, 1 in English, all borrowed

American phone - used mostly for playing Candy Crush

French phone - used mostly for fielding anal retentive texts from V

The lid to a compote

Lipstick I use to write notes

Prather Ebner LLP pen I can never find

3 sets of keys. One for my apartment. One for V's. One for an apartment in Chicago

Innumerable receipts 

1 flyer for a children's activity

Wallet containing 3 bank cards with no money on them, my Illinois driver's license, DePaul student ID

Water bottle

Scarf

Navigo pass

I just realized my life can be pretty succinctly and eloquently described by just the crap found in the bottom of my purse. And yes, I do need to carry all of it with me at all times.

Family Bonding

My cousin Cat came to Paris last weekend. Well, the weekend before last. But I'm not entirely sure where this past weekend went so I'm calling it last weekend. Getting visitors, by the way, rocks. Yes, my apartment is only big enough for about half a person to live comfortably, but that's not the point. The point is that it's Paris and we're young and if we have to snuggle and climb over mountains of suitcases to reach the bathroom, so be it. 

So Cat came to Paris on her way to South Africa to pet baby rhinos and I had a whole schedule planned. The first day we'd get falafel and shop in the Marais and then we'd get a nice dinner somewhere and then we'd go out. And on the second day we'd sightsee and have fancy lunch at a popular restaurant near me, then drink on the Champs de Mars and go out again. And then Sunday we'd have a nice long day of wandering through all the essential museums. Perfect.

This is not exactly what happened.

She arrived and I barely gave her enough time to change before I was dragging her to the Marais for falafel. I know you're all sick of hearing about it by now but I'm in love with that place. I can't help it. L'As du Falafel forever! F + K = <3. Then we wandered around the vintage shops until we were both so tired we were no longer able to carry on a coherent conversation. 

"That's cute..."

"What?"

"What?"

"This purse has a hole in it..."

"What?"

When we got back to my apartment we both collapsed on my bed for an impromptu nap which lasted until dinner time. After this, my carefully thought out plan basically devolved into a drink, nap, wander cycle that lasted the rest of the weekend. Sightseeing Saturday was whittled down to just Sainte Chappelle and Marché des Fleurs. Museum Sunday turned into A Couple of Flea Markets, Sacré Coeur, and a Failed Attempt to get to Musée Rodin Before it Closes Day. The drinking, however, commenced right on schedule and with vigor. This included Café Oz, bottles of wine on the Champs de Mars, and Nouveau Casino. 

Some highlights:

-Reflecting at Café Oz that however silly we got, we would never be silly enough to do a prolonged pole dance on stage at a bar. I honestly hope the poor girl who did this didn't remember anything the next day. It was bad. 

-This text on my phone: Hey Cat! It was great meeting you last night :-) I can't remember what you're doing tonight but we should meet up! -N

-And the resulting conversation: "Cat, did you intentionally give this guy my number instead of yours?"
"Yeah. Yeah I might have done that."
"How did you even remember the number?"
"I have no idea."

-Making new friends at Nouveau Casino. Yep, Mr. I'm Swedish No I'm from Liverpool Just Kidding I Actually am Swedish, I'm talking about you. He agreed that Life of Brian is better than Holy Grail. We had to be friends.

I do feel bad that we did basically nothing cultural the entire time she was here. It was, at least, a fairly accurate depiction of what my weekend life in Paris is like. Growing up is for squares.
 

5 Scotsmen, an Aussie, and an American Walk into a Bar

I was just going down to the metro, minding my own business, and then I heard them. English voices. English spoken in public places is like my siren song. It's not exactly uncommon around here but still, every time I hear a "hello," or an "Oh my god," or an "I know, right?" my ears perk right up and my whole body subtly shifts toward the speaker as if compelled. The voices on this occasion came from a largish group of guys that I heard as I pushed past them at the Châtelet stop. 

"Sorry," I said. Not "Pardon" and certainly not "excusez-moi," but "sorry" as if to say, "We are kindred. Be a part of my Anglophone brotherhood." 

Evidently taking my hint, the 5 Scottish guys and their Australian friend immediately struck up an eager chat. By the time the train arrived 3 minutes later, the Aussie was saying, "Well we're going to this pub called the Aulde something or other if you wanna join..." The offer was seconded by some of the other guys and I think I was on the wrong train anyway and oh what the hell. Sure. Let's go. 

They were loud, a little tipsy, and fun. the Aulde Something or Other is apparently the only Scottish pub in Paris, and I find it hilarious that their goal while in Paris for the week was to find the one Scottish pub. When we arrived the lads were shocked and dismayed to find that the supposed Scottish pub did not actually have Scottish beer. 

"Is there Scottish beer?" I asked. 

"Like one," replied Craig. "But still." (There was however an American bartender from Texas who had been away long enough that he now sounded English.) So everyone got pints of Pelforth, a French beer and therefore generally the cheapest. I didn't even have to pay for mine. Because apparently by following "a bunch of randoms" to a bar for no reason other than that the mantra "do it! do it! do it!" is basically playing in constant loop in my head, makes me the coolest girl ever. "Who just follows a bunch of randoms to a bar? That is so cool," said James. Only he's Scottish so he pronounced it more like "kel."

They were all cute in their own goofy ways but the Australian was attractive. Never mind the pretty hair and face and really impressive biceps, he had that general sort of beaming, good-natured Australian-ness that is so damn irresistible. I asked why he was in Paris, and he said he'd just finished University so he had some time and was just traveling. You and me both, my friend. 

Well the bar was going to close and the lads were on their way to a club. They asked me to come along but I had to draw the line somewhere. I had to work in the morning for Christ's sake. "Oh come on!" they said. "It'll be such a good story!" It would have been. But I had to get up at 8 and if I stayed out until 5 I would never survive the following day. And not all of their cajoling and teasing could change my mind.

As they planned their next move at the top of the steps I waved goodbye and skipped down to the metro. Before I got to the turnstiles I heard my name. It was Mitch the Aussie and his beautiful arms.

"It was really nice meeting you," he said, giving me the kind of big warm hug that I've been missing since I left America. And before I could finish saying "It was nice to meet you too" he was kissing me. I remember looking at his face and thinking If I didn't know any better I'd say you were about to kiss me, and suddenly he did. In the metro station. In Paris. Zooey Deschanel should play me in a movie.

"What was that?" I asked.

"A story."

Best. Line. Ever. 

Then he left, and I left, and I've been crying myself to sleep ever since because I don't know his last name, his phone number, or how long he's in Paris. Damn, I should have just gone to that club.

Is There an Attractive Way to Eat a Burger?

This blog has gotten away from me a bit. I realize that. But I'm back now!

So, news for this week:

Le Petit has fallen ill again. He doesn't seem like a particularly sickly child, but I must be wrong because he takes more medication in a week than I think I did for the first ten years of my life. The prognosis this time is asthma (minor), pneumonia, and potential tuberculosis. So he's not going to school at all this week. Instead I am taking him to the park, the zoo, a kids' theater show, and his after school activities. 

...

I'd complain less if this week I didn't also have to babysit tonight (14 hour day!) and work for another 8 hours on Saturday. That's 55.5 hours for this week in total. 55.5 hours of snot, spit, tears, rectal thermometers, inhalers, butt wipes, potties, Octonauts, cooking, and housework. I'm sorry, I'm just not ready to be a stay-at-home mom. How did this happen?

I did escape relatively early last night for a burger date with Sophie. There's a "Brooklyn Diner" close to my apartment that serves Aunt Jemima pancakes in the morning, some salads, and a variety of burgers. There's the 14 euro Chicken burger, the 15 euro "Oh Yeah!" burger, as well as the Chuck Norris burger which goes for an inexplicable 18 euros. What could possibly be in the Chuck Norris burger that's worth 18 euros? But there's also the classic cheeseburger which is only 6 (this is my favorite option). Who knew that adding bleu cheese, bacon, or caramelized onions can drive the price of a burger up to more than twice its original value?

The burgers are good, but to be honest, that's not why we go. We go because the most gorgeous man in the world works there. You know that fantasy about going to some European city and you meet an unbelievably attractive guy who swoops you up onto his moped to show you the "real" Paris/Rome/Athens and you end up in some deserted public park or on a roof somewhere and somehow he produces a bottle of wine and tells you you're the most beautiful woman he's ever met and you're just thrilled that he said "woman" and not "girl" and you immediately fall in love with him? Well this is the guy from that fantasy. The man of your dreams works at a faux-American burger joint in Paris. I'm not an ogler by nature but he's like a walking Levi's ad. I can't help it. My internal monologue goes something like this: Oh god oh god he's coming over. He's looking at me did he just smile at me? Don't look at me! Look at me! How do you say hello in French? How do you say hello in English? What did he just say? Do I have ketchup on my face? Would it be sexy or disgusting if I licked cheese off my fingers? I wonder if he's handy. I wonder if he could build me a kitchen. Or a house. Or a children's tree house...

But eventually Sophie and I finish our burgers and our drinks and we have no excuse to stay unless we order dessert which we can't do because 1: we're poor and 2: we don't want to look fat. Which is such a silly, girly thing to think and usually I don't but when the guy who will be bringing you the enormous cheesecake looks like some sort of French Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Marlboro Man conglomeration, you think about these things. 

Long story short, Beautiful Burger Guy did not write his number on our bill, get off early to wait for us outside, or invite us to a party he's having at his apartment later. But there's always next week.

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.