I Will Now Forever Think « Sceaux What ? »

I must first excuse myself for writing what feels like extremely long blog entries, even though I sort of vowed to write shorter ones more frequently. Unfortunately?, Saturday was yet another full day in France for Trevor and I. I’ll try and keep this one short.

As I mentioned in my pre-departure to Sceaux a post ago, Trevor and I chose to go to Sceaux (pronounced « so »… get ready for the jokes). We basically chose a random city and found out that a reggae concert was scheduled to take place in the evening. Of course, I was über-excited for the concert, not necessarily because it was reggae, but because I finally had a reason to wear the Bob Marley shirt I bought before arriving in France.

Before our departure to Sceaux, which ended up being rather « Sceaux-Sceaux » (get it?)—but I’ll get to that bit later—I prepared breakfast (which was why I couldn’t write more in the pre-departure post) [wow, I love strange sentence constructions] Noisy-le-Roi style, M.A. form. Recipe: heat up the milk until it starts to volumise (don’t let it burn or spill over) and pour into a drinking bowl; add an ounce of dark chocolate and as much chocolate milk powder comme tu veux (as you want). It’s great for dipping your daily bread (Wow. Didn’t even try there; let me know if you get it.), and that’s exactly what we did. Despite our natural desire to not move after consuming that much food at one time, we headed for the Métro.

The ride to Sceaux took us about half an hour by RER, and when we got out, I immediately saw it as Noisy-le-Roi, only a bit bigger. The city’s quite charmante but because we’re still in the winter season, it was rather cold and dreary. En route to who-knows-where-we-were-going-or-what-we-were-looking-for, we found the pétanque court (I was really hoping some people would be playing that day), a church (the Church of St. Jean the Baptist), and the Sceaux château. Apparently, we entered the château grounds from the back (ps/ this backyard is amazing!); however, the château was quite small and was actually converted into a museum in the 1930’s-ish era. We walked through the château in perhaps half an hour and particularly after having visited in the Louvre the day prior, we weren’t exactly impressed. We did find perhaps the coolest thing in the whole museum: a toy tree house encased in a glass box. What’s more, Trevor was extremely fascinated by a hanging model lamp hung by a piece of string. It really could have been a rod for all we knew. But seriously, a piece of string that potentially hasn’t moved in perhaps more than half a century? Kinda cool, nê?

Right outside of the museum was an exhibit titled Images et Magies d’Architecture (pretty sure you can figure that one out on your own). This was perhaps my favourite part of Sceaux and it wasn’t even a permanent exhibit. In any case, it killed the most time for us so that was great as well. There were quite a few interesting photos, and I’ll have to upload them to facebook soon so that I can link them to this blog. Here’s an interesting one, though, taken by Trevor: http://trevorkt.wordpress.com/2009/01/25/whatevs/img_0378/. I asked him what the first thing he thought of was when he saw this. He immediately replied to volume meters (music playing); I immediately responded with genetics (DNA results and such). On our way off the château grounds, we came across a cat that Trevor wrote as follows in his blog: « Also, there was a cat at the chateau. Just chillin. A bof cat. »

We were getting hungry at this point and settled for a café called Félibres. I’m pretty sure we only wanted something warm to drink, but as soon as we entered, the waiter spoke in a quick, almost guttural form French that blended all of the words together. Within less than a minute, he showed us to our seats and somehow ordered lunch for us. I was rather surprised with the quality of the meal (for only 10 €), followed by another great, voluminous (is that the word?) chocolate mousse.

So, while we were at the château, I thought that in Paris we usually say « Dude, we’re in Paris ! » or « Pourquoi pas ?! ». Well, we thought we had some wonderful revelation when we came up with saying « Sceaux what ? » in Sceaux, to be said when something doesn’t make sense or seems to go awry. However, it seems that Sceaux got to that long before we ever did and when we visited the Animathèque (a sort of headquarters) for the MJC (Maison des Jeunes Culturelles... or something like that), found a poster that listed Sceaux What as the site for the evening’s reggae concert.

At about 17h10, we thought of seeing a movie in the only movie theatre in Sceaux (Le Trianon), but they only had one screening room and were playing American films for the rest of the night. It seems like there are at least 250 seats in the theatre, so perhaps all of Sceaux shows up for these showings. With that option crossed off, we went back into the centre of the city and did quite a bit of window shopping. Throughout the day, we bought quite a bit of food from the boulangerie-patisserie, and I finally found mangoes (3 for 5 €… YES!). We went into a toy store and would have finally bought 1 000 Borne, but they were out of stock. Thankfully, I was able to buy my French notebooks, as well as some pocket guide French books at a bookstore, and found more chocolate stores than I could have imagined would ever been in Sceaux. The pièce de la résistance of the chocolate excursion was definitely a giant bear made completely of chocolate.

Due to us still needing to wait for about 1,5-hours for the reggae concert, the fact that it was getting quite cold and we were running out of places to visit at night, and the thought that perhaps the entrance fee wouldn’t quite fulfil our expectations of a reggae concert, we decided to head back to Paris. We went home and cooked croque-monsieurs for dinner which definitely got better each round we cooked them, enjoyed our first cheese plate (4 out of the recommended 5, but beuf!), and ended with even more chocolat chaud (i.e., the NLR-MA form hot chocolate).

So much for keeping this one short, too!