Beacoup de Manger!

---

On Thursday after class I hopped on the metro for a quick ride to the fontaine St Michel, where I met Catherine. The weather was nice, and we had a much needed café and croissant on the terrasse of a little café right near the fountain.

After our quick snack we headed to the marché which was very interesting. I got to see a lot of typical French food there, and everything looked and smelled amazing. We stopped to look around a little chocolate shop and tried some amazing samples!

A short walk took us to our lunch destination, a fun little place called Soupe et Quenelles. I had a bio vegetable soup and Catherine a mushroom soup. We also had salads with cut up fried quenelles, mine of fish and Catherine's of fowl. They were fantastic! Dessert was a fruity soup with white cheese, which was also quite good. We walked around the block to the companion store and looked at the types of quenelles and soup they have for sale as well.

After lunch we went to the church of St Germain de Près which used to be a monastery, most of which was destroyed during WWII, leaving only the church. The original stained glass that is left is beautiful.

After the church, we headed back to a store we passed that had a dress in the window that I found very cute. Unfortunately, it was only available in one size. I could only have made it work as a long shirt! I wasn't looking for a new shirt though, so I didn't buy it. I will keep my eyes out...now that it is officially spring I am sure that there will be more springy dresses for sale. I saw an interesting one the other day that was pure silk with a price to match...no thank you! However, monoprix sells clothes, and it is much more affordable, kind of like the French version of Target except with a fully inclusive grocery store! There is one one metro stop away from mine, so i may check it out one day.

Afterwards, we were going to cross a certain bridge on the Seine but were unable to due to the massive amount of security surrounding the inaugration of Simone Veil into the Academie Française. So we headed back to chez Catherine where I dropped off my schoolbooks and then we headed for tea at Angélina which we skipped one weekend because of the crowd. I had some Darjeeling tea and their specialty, a Mont Blanc.





It was quite tasty, though I think I liked Catherine's St. Honoré a bit more, in fact.

On Saturday morning I tried the Anglo-Francophone Synagogue in the 17th. It was very small, and I enjoyed the service a lot. The rabbi seems to be pretty fluent in French, though his accent is very very obvious. The other man whose title I'm not quite sure of I couldn't tell which was his native language, very cool for him! They have a community seder which I may be attending on the 2nd night of passover, but I am not sure yet.

Saturday evening I went to dinner at Catherine's with Agnès and Julien. For apéritif I had "martini" which is not the cocktail but a brand of Italian vermouth that I happen to enjoy quite a bit, as well as little sausages made both of veal and pork that were heavenly. Dinner was roast beef which was only cooked on the very outside and completely red within.....perfect in my opinion! I like my red meat to be red, not brown. Catherine also prepared potatoes au gratin (not the same thing as you find in the states, but made with crème fraiche and milk, no cheese) as well as a salad with a dressing that I thought was absolutely divine. After the salad was some wonderful Brie and something else that I can't recall, and finally, a wonderful chocolate cake brought by Agnès. Accompanying dinner was a red wine that I actually enjoyed, though I think it has less to do with the specific wine and more to do with the fact that drinking wine on a somewhat regular basis has started to get me acquired to the taste. I was quite sleepy with all the martini and wine already, when after dinner came a "relaxing" herbal tea which is quite delicious but I was already pretty relaxed, I think! Haha. I also tried just a taste of cognac and decided i do not like it at all! I made a pretty amusing face when the taste hit me, I think. With all that alcohol and tea it was very hard to follow the after dinner conversation, although I am getting much better at listening to fast spoken French!

On Sunday, I went to Catherine's again for lunch where I met Florence and 3 of her kids; Alice, Hugo and Félix; as well as their cousin Louis, who I had met previously. Listening to all the kids talk over each other was a bit difficult, but I was able to understand most of what was going on. We started with "briques" which are Moroccon pastries with tomatoes and cheese or meat in them. They were delicious! We also had a great couscous with chicken and vegetables as well as some more salad and little sausages. Dessert was ice cream.

After lunch Florence took Félix home and the rest of us went to see La Princesse et la Grenouille (The Princess and The Frog). It is the first American movie I have seen in French here, and the first American movie I have seen in French without having seen it in English first, so I wasn't wondering why everyone's voices sounded funny, haha! What follows may be a bit of a spoiler, so skip to the next paragraph if you haven't seen it and don't want to be spoiled! I thought the movie was pretty cute, Disney did make the princess a little more independent than most of their previous ones, though I was disappointed in them when she chose to give up her lifelong dream in favor of being with the prince. And of course she ended up getting it back anyway, since Disney has to give everything a happy ending.

After the movie, we walked the kids to the metro, and Catherine and I had another cup of tea at Unisex, an interesting little café on the Champs Elysées. Their menu had some strange things, like a bacon cocktail that I may go back sometime to check out!

This week is my hard week classwise since I have phonetics in addition to my other classes. But the weather looks to be holding out nicely, and I have found the best way to give my brain a break on my long days of French classes is to wander around in the jardin du Luxembourg or to find a nice place to sit with my book and a café. Although today and tomorrow are the salon du cinéma, so i may find a movie to go watch after/in between classes, since everything is showing for just 3,50€!

---