Saturday was Valentine’s Day. It also happened to be the second one in a row that Lauren and I have not been in the same place for. She’s currently travelling the rest of the European continent while I’m battling through my homework; okay, really, she’s on her winter break right now. In any case, with it being Valentine’s Day and all, the jokes continued on between Trevor and I, as we went through our itinerary. Actually, we had spent quite some time planning out stuff to do during the day but, as Paris and (especially) South Africa have taught me, there is never such a thing as concrete plans, and you definitely have to go with it.
All of that planning aside, our Valentine’s Day travels eventually brought us to the MK2 movie theatre near Quai de la Gare. In fact, it was actually an MK2 bibliothèque, a film major’s kind of playground I can only imagine (Trevor, of course, was « not » all that interested in that…). We ate what was more like our lunch and got in line to watch a movie. Upon entering the screening room, I was amazed at the black and red motif, as well as all of the comfortable seats. Arm rests between pairs of chairs could be lifted up to create a love seat. Almost forgetting that it was indeed Valentine’s Day, we quickly began to notice that nearly everyone in the theatre were couples. Perhaps even more hilarious was the fact that we saw Ce Que Pensent Les Hommes (English title: He’s Not Into You). I quite enjoyed it and laughed to myself in the beginning when every new shot was of a big-name star. Following the cinematic experience, we went to Rennes to go to Hippocampus. However, once again, we forgot that it was Valentine’s Day and were taken aback when we saw that couples filled the jazz club. The waiter decided to be particularly funny and asked if we were a couple (we had the « right » to be, according to the waiter), but quickly followed up saying that they didn’t have any room. With that, we left and walked around, trying to look for a jazz club and eventually gave up, once again because it was Valentine’s Day.
Bearing in mind that the movie was at 7pm (we left, I think, around 4:30pm or so and it took us a while to even get there), by the time we gave up looking for a jazz club it was nearly midnight and we were getting hungry. So, we made our way back home and stopped off at Charles de Gaulle Étoile to try and find the dark chocolate-covered marshmallow bears that we’ve been looking for for what seemed like forever. Entouk, the candy store was still open (I wonder how late the Champs-Elysée stays open) and we found the bears! ALSO, I FOUND THE CLOSEST THINGS TO TANGY TOPS IN THE SAME STORE!!! That’s a problem, haha. Afterwards, in our quest to find the best pain au chocolat which, I think, is more like our quest to validate the fact that our boulangerie is the best in all of Paris, we picked up some pain au chocolat on the way back home. I made some baked penne with soft baguette and tons of cheese; that late at night, anything’s pretty much amazing. Though I don’t like to brag about my cooking, I must say that that was probably the best pasta I’ve cooked since I’ve been here. And of course, we ended with chocolat chaud brilliantly coupled with our pains au chocolat.
Cue Sunday, 7:27am. I woke up and decided to go back to sleep, as the Mass service I planned on going to was at 9am. However, when I woke up again, it was 10 to 10am and knowing there’s supposed to be a 10am family service, I decided to finally get up and go to the church. Bearing the flow of this anecdote in mind, there was apparently no family service this weekend. I went to the main part of the church and prayed for a bit and then, not wanting to waste time (as I had told Trevor I’d be back at noon), I decided to go grocery shopping. I bought quite a bit of stuff and heard the church bells going. I wasn’t about to go to church with bags of groceries (or wine and such), so I went back to my room and went right back out again. When I got to the church, I found myself in a traditional, Gregorian service (i.e., there was a bunch of Latin thrown in that threw me off my linguistic game just a bit). After Mass, I went to the boulangerie that’s in that area but that we never go to, as well as to the fromagerie that we never go to (ps/ cheese and fish are cheaper in their respective speciality shops than in the supermarkets!) to pick up some fresh bread and cheese from the original cheese wheel (so cool!). Okay, enough excitement for food (for the moment).
After eating lunch (considered, really, breakfast at this point), Trevor and I finally made it outdoors (ps/ the weather here has indeed been perfect this weekend, given the fact that we’re still in the winter season) and headed over to Père Lachaise cemetery, using our recently-utilised transport system, the RER (which has fewer stops, but as a result is a lot quicker than the Métro). There isn’t really much to say other than the fact that there are a ton of graves (I believe the estimate is 70 000); a grave is a grave. Outside of existing foliage, there’s very little colour. As a result, the colours that do exist there catch your eye very quickly. Colours come from plants left by visitors, stained-glass windows, and even doors on some of the graves. Père Lachaise is also a gravesite for the many thousands of people who have influenced French culture and society. With this said, there’s a lot of history buried there and culture that has grown from those great minds. There was a rather peculiar site, that of Jim Morrison’s, that I wasn’t a huge fan of. First of all, his grave seemed to be the only one in the whole cemetery that was barricaded, sort of like with the kinds of gates used to separate paparazzi from celebrities during a movie premier. Also, his site is « so popular » among visitors that said visitors have taken the liberty of scratching « Jim » (along with an accompanying arrow leading to his site) into the tombstones of other people. Not a huge fan. In any case, I shall leave the rest of our adventures in Père Lachaise to speak for themselves via the photos below.
Following our 2,5-3-hour excursion in the cemetery, we decided to come back to the apartment, and once there, we tried the stove once again. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this story (which, if I did, you have every right to skip over this bit), but our host family has an electric, fancy-schmancy stove top. We had spent a while yesterday trying to figure it out, to no avail. In the evening, Christine called us and we eventually asked her how to use the stove (even though she had at first shown it to us twice). Entouk, she told us that their stove top is thermo-conductive or something like that and as a result, there are specialised pots for use specifically for our host family’s stove top. Moreover, she said that my pots wouldn’t work in their kitchen (because it’s not specifically designed for it).
Before being told this information, we decided to bypass the stove-top for a while (just in case it was pulling a JK/LOL or taking a day off) and cook dinner upstairs. For dinner, we started off with apératifs (anyone else try « MA » (not referring to myself) yet?) and boiled potatoes with raclette (cheese) and ham. The next course was baked pasta shells with a bolognase sauce, topped (of course) with cheese. We also had some other colours with our meal, in the form of carrots and zucchini. I had a bit more of the comté I had purchased earlier in the day, followed by dessert and, after cleaning up, we went downstairs to work on homework and I did some laundry in the process. Oh yes, and we watched Top Gun (in English) during dinner. We both spoke to our respective families around midnight-ish and ended our weekend with chocolat chaud and pains au chocolat from the boulangerie we never go to.
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