I love lentilles
by shoshanna
The French are so amazing, they can even make lentils taste good. How do they do it? With three different kinds of animal fat. The lentilles cuisinées à l'Auvergnate, that I got in a can from the hypermarché, has the little, dark brown lentils in a sauce consisting of lard rinds, lard, onions, duck fat, carrots, and some other typical canned product ingredients. I can't believe how good this is. I don't think I have ever before in my life craved lentils. I had them with couscous. Very excellent. I want to try making this in the crockpot when I get back to the States, although I'm not sure if Fred Meyer carries duck grease and lard rinds. CAUTION: If you are going to heat up lentils in the microwave, you should cover them. Otherwise each and every one will end up on the walls and ceiling of the microwave, which the cleaning lady already threatened to "enlever" if we don't clean it sufficiently after use.
Posted on November 20, 2005 | Comments (0)
Hey, guess what?
by shoshanna
I started this weblog a year ago. I only figured that out because I was narcissistically reading back over old journal entries from the Livejournal days. In doing so I found this, which I'd totally forgotten about. I also noticed how much better my writing was when I was doing it every day. It really is like a sport, it makes a really big difference if you are doing it all the time or if you are a weekend warrior.
This is totally unrelated, but once shortly after our arrival in France one of my uh... coequipiers? no that's not right... camarade de classe... um... one of the other girls in the program told us that she was watching a movie or having a conversation or something and she forgot it was in French, like it was just normal. I thought that was really pretentious at the time, but it recently started happening to me, so I guess now I'm pretentious too. I was watching Sex & the City dubbed into French with my dorm neighbors, like we do every Friday. I don't understand all of the dialogue, but I've seen them all before so I can fill in the missing parts, which are fewer each week. So we were watching the show, it was one of the episodes where Carrie is engaged to get married and there's all these, like, intense issues and whatever, and I was getting totally sucked into the show. It was just like watching it in the States, and I forgot that I was even in France, and then some typically insane French commercials came on, and then my neighbors started talking, and they were talking in French, and it was like, "Whoa! Oh yeah, I'm in France!" It was totally weird.
I was talking to my mom on the phone a couple weeks ago and she said something about how it must be nice to hear people speaking French all the time because it's such a beautiful language. I'd sort of forgotten all about that; when she said it I thought of the 18-year-old girls at my college who are all like "Eh ben...shai pas...putain" (basically, like, "Whatever...I dunno...what the fuck") all the time, with accompanying bratty facial expressions, or the ladies behind the counter at some office or movie theater or anything that has a counter, who give you a hard time because you don't have this or that form or ID card. That's not a beautiful language. But I thought about it more, and started listening to the sounds again, and my mom was right. When you are on the bus and it's full of drunken teenagers falling all over eachother and singing French drinking songs at the top of their lungs, that is a beautiful language.
Posted on November 11, 2005 | Comments (0)
Le centre commercial
by shoshanna
At the hypermarché they always have some special promotional theme going on. In September it was foire aux vins, where they featured all the different kinds of wine. They do it at the normal wine shops too. I am ashamed to say I still haven't been to a wine shop or even bought a single bottle of wine. That has got to change. Anyway, lately the hypermarché has been doing a "tastes of the regions" type thing where they showcase different specialties, especially meats and cheese, from different parts of France. I got this thing called "grattons de canard," which would probably be marketed under a name like "popcorn duck" in the US. It's crispy little bits of fried, seasoned duck. Sooo good. I couldn't figure out what you would do with them in a meal, apart from putting them on little toothpicks for an aperitif, so I just ate them. I think they would be good stir-fried with brocolli and stuff, in fact I was going to do that, but the grattons de canard never made it into the pan.
In Poitiers near the campus there are two hypermarchés, Géant Casino and Leclerc, both located in centres commercials (small shopping centers) with a handful of other shops. The two hypermarchés and their accompanying centres commercials are more or less the same, leading me to guess that there are places like this all over France that have the same stuff and feel the same. It's very much the side of France that romantic luddites don't want to believe exists, but I really like it because it's useful and comforting. In your centre commercial you have your hypermarché, which is like the mothership Fred Meyer in Hollywood, or like Target plus a supermarket plus Circuit City. Spreading out from the hypermarché there is a cafeteria/boulangerie combo and everything you need for basic survival: a pharmacy, a locksmith,a cobbler's, a post office, Claires, and a perfume shop. That's the basic formula, and then maybe you'll also get a laundry or a news shop or a sewing shop or a parapharmacie which, from looking in the window, seems like all the neat, non-medicine parts of a drugstore: all of the shampoo (phyto of course) with none of the allergy pills. I just like that it's called the parapharmacie because that's the most fitting, logical name it could possibly have.
The Leclerc centre commercial is a 10-minute walk from my house and is where I do most of my shopping, except when I'm feeling like a romantic luddite and go to the open-air market. The cafeteria/boulangerie there is one of my favorite places outside of centre ville. Sometimes at the boulangerie side they open up the counter and put out these giant baskets with piles of croissants and pains au chocolate up to your head, hundreds of pastries, more than I've ever seen in my life. They do a special, four croissants and four pains au chocolat for two euros. It seems like a really good deal, but I'm afraid of what would happen if I had four croissants and four pains au chocolat. They also make crepes and waffles. In France you eat belgian waffles as a snack, from a napkin, without a fork or anything. It seems pretty obvious considering how utterly snacky they are, so I don't know why this hasn't caught on yet in the States. It makes the idea of eating a waffle on a plate with silverware in a restaurant vaguely ridiculous, but then, the more waffles the more often, the better. The snack waffles, at least at Leclerc, are eggy and crispy, something like a square popover. They are always just shy of burnt, but I'm not sure whether or not they're supposed to be like that. You can get them dusted with sugar, with jam, or with chocolate (nutella of course). Best thing ever. You eat them sitting on a bench with an old lady in front of the perfume shop or something. The old people in France are cool because they actually get around - you see them walking their dogs or buying bread or riding bikes around town. But it might not be that they're more active here, just that there are demographically more old people per capita or something. Anyway, Leclerc. They have a big, sunny cafeteria that totally reminds me of Ihop or something. You can get a cheap coffee or a full meal like in the university cafeterias. Even the cheap coffee is still decent espresso and comes with the little tubes of sugar and piece of chocolate. I love that. I go there a lot on Saturdays when I go to do my shopping. There are families with little kids eating lunch, old people having coffee, guys reading the paper, people doing whatever their Saturday ritual is.
The centres commercials are cool because they're one of the places you see the interface between traditional French culture and contemporary life. They're homogenous, but the same stuff they all have, perhaps excluding Claire's, is the same stuff you find in all the old neighborhoods. It's impersonal, but you still see friends and neighbors running into eachother and hanging out in the cafeteria and there's still a sense of a community that has its traditions. Even Leclerc has its boulangerie with fresh baguettes and regional specialties. But they're shrinkwrapped. Everything is generic enough that I feel at home, but weird and specifically French enough that I know I'm somewhere different and unique.
Posted on November 6, 2005 | Comments (0)
Rouler a vélo, c'est cool
by shoshanna
Today I rode a bike in France!
Posted on November 3, 2005 | Comments (0)
Tours
by shoshanna
Yesterday I went to Tours with Sheena. When we got there we were like "Wow, what a cool, gorgeous city! Let's just walk around the city all day." So we did that and then we were kind of over it and ready to go home. A lot of stuff was closed since it was a holiday, Toussaints. We went out to lunch at some random semi-British style restaurant that reminded me of somewhere Kevin's parents would take us. There was lots of carefully selected kitsch everywhere, like a big rhinoceros head. Sheena ordered a "salade mexicaine." I finally got to have mussels, fries and beer. It was awesome. Usually when you order something that has mussels in it you get like two mussels and you always wish you had more mussels and less pasta or whatever. But when you have a giant cauldron of mussels a la charantaise (steamed in onions, white wine and cream), there is no way you could possibly wish for more mussels. It was pure heaven. The combination with the fries and beer worked really well and made me feel all old-fashioned and cool. It also made me take a mental note to buy a vegetable when I returned to Poitiers. It's been a while. After lunch we got freakishly strong coffee that cracked me out for the rest of the day and night.
We wandered around for a couple more hours in the streets. There was a main street that ran into the Hotel de Ville that had lots of closed shops, cyclists and rollerbladers. It was really bright, sunny and glarey and when you looked down the sidestreets it looked like San Francisco. We went to a neat store and got stuff to send our boyfriends, then found a park and watched the fashionable families with their cute kids playing around. In the United States, there seems to be an idea that when you're a young, single adult, life is fabulous and fun, and then when you get married and have a family it's a sort of resignation that turns everything into mundane drudgery. You are no longer good-looking and life is no longer fun or exciting. But in France, they make it seem like family life is just a new, different kind of fabulousness. Here, having a family is cool. Families in the U.S. aren't cool, unless you're a painfully chic urbanite for whom your child in designer diapers is merely an accessory, and that's not really cool either. French parents with four kids are still fit and fashionable like in a J. Crew catalogue or something, and their well-groomed and well-behaved children seem to add to the sense of urban flair and charm rather than to diminish it. Of course I'm stereotyping and not getting at what I'm really trying to say, but there's something, I can't put my finger on it, that is different about families here.
Sheena wanted to see some castle and I agreed to be agreeable and because we had to at least do something, but I wasn't really into the idea. Luckily she wasn't that motivated about it and we didn't end up going. I feel like I ought to be interested in historical stuff like castles, but boastful displays of tacky, excessive wealth (amassed at the expense of the vast majority of everybody else who was working their butt off for nothing) just don't do it for me. In the train station, when Sheena went to look at a display of history tourism pamphlets, I gravitated toward the Selecta machine to see what kinds of weird French junk food were offered. There was Monster Munch, Tiger bars, and the ever-present Kinder bars. Despite their funny German appeal, I really don't get why Kinder bars are so popular. Tiger bars are better.
Posted on November 2, 2005 | Comments (2)
Best day ever
by shoshanna
Yesterday morning at 6 am I got to talk to my BF on the phone. I can always count on him for some good analytical deconstruction. After that I did lots of challenging school work, including creative writing in French which is pure torture but in a good way, and vocabulary memorization which is totally mindless but in a good way. In the afternoon I went to le Grand Large (strip mall) with the girls from my dorm. I got some weights at Go Sport, whose bike jackets and knit snowboarder hats made me nostalgic for REI. We went to Easy Cash, the pawn shop, and I found a bike for 30 euros! It's a total piece of crap, but in a good way. Then my dorm neightbor gave me candy and I dressed up all 60s mod to go out and felt fabulous. Then we went out and then we came home and I went to bed. The end.
Posted on November 1, 2005 | Comments (0)