Hungry much? I mean, I'm not mean, but...

This past weekend has been one of my favourites so far. On Saturday, I got up early to continue my search for a single pair of jeans. I had no success in this endeavour, and realised that an annoying paradox currently exists here in Paris. I'm not the only short guy in this city; indeed, there are many who are shorter than me, and that also happen to be wearing jeans. If they're wearing shorter jeans, that must mean that said jeans should be available for purchase, right? Aïe ! In any case, outside of this, the weekend was really fun.

I completed my early weekend purchasing with the purchase of my Euro bag (some would call it a "murse"). Entouk, it does the job. It was also beginning to snow (which I love over here), and I remember being rather surprised with the increasing number of shoppers in spite of the weather. I got back home around 2pm, and around which time Trevor and I had lunch (even more eggs; I must also say that I think Trevor has perfected his egg cooking). We then decided to go to the Musée du Quai Branly; cultural museum? (Of course!). The museum, architecturally, was quite huge and modern. The artifacts and such were not quite as modern (though we did see a yellow pointalist painting from '96 (i.e., 1996). I did see many interesting things, as all museums have their fair share, though I, of course, was interested in a few areas in particular:

OCEANIA: Australian, aboriginal artifacts
Philippines: It looks like they didn't put the Philippines in Asia or necessarily in Oceania. In any event, I kind of got the chills taking a look at potentially one of my ancestors' belongings.
AFRICA: Cameroon, South Africa (there was nothing from the Xhosa ethnic group, ps).
AMERICAS: Great Lakes regional artifacts (coolest thing was a grizzly bear claw necklace)

After receiving a text from Erin confirming dinner plans, Trevor and I left the museum and completed some much needed grocery shopping. Erin, Liz, and Meredith (though, the professors seem to be convinced her name's Meredyth), arrived and we presented them with our usual five-course hooplah (though I think they were originally supposed to come over for just the hot chocolate in the end. Nevertheless, we started out with apératifs (including pistachios and peanuts), moved on to a main course of baked pasta and cheesy bread, followed through with salad, included cheese and more baguette, and finishing up with mousse au chocolat noir with raspberries arranged differently for each person. Finally, we moved on to the ultimate test and the reason why they came over in the first place (chocolat chaud). I must say I was rather impressed because, after finishing all of that food, pretty much all of the hot chocolate was finished. We couldn't find any regular sized pains au chocolat, but Trevor did manage to find some mini ones for Erin, Liz, and Meredith to try. (ps, the title of this blog entry comes from the regular use of the phrase "I mean, I'm not mean, but..." during dinner)

As we were heading into early morning territory, we had to call an end to the night and we all walked to the respective Métro stations. However, Erin's Métro line was closed, so Trevor and I walked her to the Noctillien, the bus line that's in operation while the Métro is closed. However, as we would have had to wait (weird construction there) about an hour just for the bus to arrive, we thought (at the time) that it'd be a smart idea to just walk home. Eventually, we got to Erin's house and then realised we had to walk all the way back (I think it was about an hour/hour and a half-ish walk across Paris). Suffice it to say, Trevor and I got back to our apartment without much difficulty, and we have this story to tell.

The next day, i.e., Sunday, everyone woke up pretty late, but we eventually met up at Montmartre (second time in the past few weeks for me) and walked around the area for a few hours, making sure to stop at the Sacré-Coeur and the look-out point at the base of the basilica. After our afternoon journey (with beautiful weather, I must add) we stopped at a crêperie for a quick crêpe nearby, and then headed our separate ways. I aimed for St. Clotilde parish for an evening Mass service and got to the church with little difficulty. Although we were in [what I would call] a chapel, it was beautiful inside and felt as though I was in the main parish church. Upon my arrival back home, Trevor and I became stereotypical French (eating baguette and cheese alongside some wine). We worked on some homework and eventually the hours quickly strolled by; of note, Trevor and I also attempted to make post-mid-term travel plans, but luck was not on our side.

N.B. At the time of me writing this, I'm enjoying my weekend so far, even though we aren't doing much travelling.

We Officially Have a Sixth Course

Today was, more or less, perfect. I’m kind of tired, though, and want to jump ahead to the dinner portion of the day, so I’m really going to make every effort to make this a short post.

After deciding to go to the laundry place some other day (because we were still tired after working on our homework for about 5,5 hours last night), I got ready for my day and got to school on time. I had the best class with Elisabeth (Travaux Pratique) to date, as well as a great class with Odile (the immigration and citizenship in Francophone cinéma course). Throughout Odile’s class, she was able to help us all make sense of the movie we viewed last Friday, Touki-Bouki. I’m really enjoying the classes so far. Then, we had to stay for a group conférénce, this time focusing on French politics. Olivier, the political science professor gave the talk and was quite entertaining and informative, and the fact that I could understand everything he said was surely a positive sign. During the day, I was able to find a nice boulangerie near the school, and we were also told that we would be experiencing our first grève in Paris. A grève is, generally speaking, a strike; in Paris, this means an almost complete halt of all transport systems in Paris. The situation is anticipated to be bad enough that they’ve cancelled our classes for Thursday. It should be quite interesting to see how the city operates without such means of transport as the Métro not being in service.

Straight from class, Trevor and I walked to the Dupleix Métro stop, only to find it wasn’t working. So, we headed for the La Motte Picquet Grenelle stop and, en route to the stop, did some supermarché shopping. Finally back at home, I began preparing our dinner, which was yet another five-course meal. I’ve titled this entry as us having a sixth course, but we did only have five courses, with one of those courses being a possible sixth one in the future (hope that makes sense). EntouK (texting shortcut for En tout cas, i.e., In any case), our first course (i.e., the new one) was an apératif, followed by our first plat being a rather unconventional round for us: eggs. Trevor had a bunch of them, some scrambled, a few sunny-side; while I had cooked whites with sugared ham. We then finished off the leftover baked pasta, to which I melted Leerdammer and Gouda into an additional portion of pasta sauce, for round 3. Round 4 came in two parts: our cheese plate, alongside fresh mango slices. Finally, we had our dessert round, which included a special (and may I say, favoured) form of chocolat chaud: the 86% cocoa form. :)