love - a belated valentine's day post

If P and I celebrated anniversaries together, we would have just rounded our 7th year.

22 year-olds P&P having lunch at the Maggie Benston Centre at SFU.  I really dug P's "Andrew-Jackson" coif back then.  He wears it differently these days.

After 7 years together I didn't really think that there would be much more to learn about each other...I kind of felt that we were now in "new-experiences-together" mode, and less the "getting-to-know-each-other" mode.  We're at the point where we anticipate each other's sentences and jokes don't need to be finished before we mind-meld into "pault" and crack up at punchlines that never drop.  We even got each other the exact same valentine's day surprise, each having secretly dropped by the same chocolate shop minutes apart from each other.  We have always spent a lot of time together...we like to.  Since coming to Europe we've taken it all to a whole new level, like we're in one of those machines that make diamonds from carbon (what do you even call those things?), it's as if we get super intense, highly-pressurized, focalized laser beams of each other.  All pault all the time.  And yet, I'm happy to report that we still manage to learn new things about each other.  Love and romance thrive on mystery, non?  Check out these new mystery nuggets that I recently discovered in my lover:

1) P CANNOT STAND middle-aged women with short, severe bobs (straight cut bangs, straight cut everything).  He can handle the two separately, he might even like either of those components in their own right, but just NEVER together.  I found this out when we sat across from a tall norwegian woman with that kryptonitic combination, paul was made irritable and uneasy that whole train ride.  

2) P HATES wind, or even breezes.  He gets fussy and unnerved by the slightest movement of air out of doors.  A perfectly beautifully, sunshiney day is, in Paul's opinion, ruined by the slightest traces of a breeze.  He gets so worked up about it.

   

Here we are on the windy west-coast of norway.  I am lovingly drawing P's hood, to minimize his exposure to wind.

3)P tolerates human cloning (this is a gross simplification of an hour-long debate) - like, really?  On a more positive note, we've come to the conclusion that we very much look forward to having traditional "mixies", rather than clones.

photos of the two of us together are rare.  This was at Ruby Lake on the Sunshine Coast.  Our friends V and S took us to a secret spot where we picnic-ed, swam and went to town on the rope-swing.

It's been 7 years, and P just doesn't want to hear it sometimes.

random things...

It's been a while so I thought I'd rummage through my photos to find some stuff that I'd been saving for posts.  I've given up on photo-documenting things, our camera sucks and I am SO not diligent about taking photos, so you'll have to bear with the lack of images that go with my ramblings.   French lessons are going great and we're feeling less socially/linguistically retarded here in France.  Since I last posted we had a visit from P's cousin Bjorn, and we've been hanging out with friends from school.  You can only imagine the hilarity that comes with a group of internationals communicating in their second/third language.   Random pictures as promised:

 

Typical lunch - a spread of the cheeses, saucisson/jambon or cornichons and pickles that we have kicking around, and we always have these things kicking around.  I generally dislike sandwiches and Paul lives for them, so this is a happy medium - we get all the components of a sandwich (bread, meat, cheese) without being bound by the form.  Crackers (good crackers) are hard to come by here.  The cracker aisle in the grocery store consists of different forms of dried toast, so if that's what you're into, you'd be in dried toast heaven here in France.  

I was missing burgers a while back so we decided to make them.  Hamburger buns don't exist in grocery stores so we had to improvise a little.  The closest thing that I could think of was a brioche.  I'm going to make a generalization here: overall food quality is high in France.  I think people here are specific about what they want and demand a lot out of the food they buy and eat, which really means that a grocer or a store needs to meet those demands.  You can see it in the way customers ask for very specific qualities for the food that they're buying and you can hear it all the time, "I want a crottin that's not too dry", "a baguette that's well cooked", "I want smaller leeks" etc.  After having said that, the burgers turned out pretty lacklustre because of the beef.  Beef is just not as good (meaning tasty and fatty) here as it is back home.  I don't buy/eat beef all that often here and when we do it's usually for stew, and I made beouf à la ficelle one time, in which you boil beef until medium-rare with vegetables.  I know what you're thinking, "boiled beef?", but you just gotta think about cooking beef differently here.

Here's another picture from our window - bored of them yet?  The sunsets and the sun rises have been really beautiful the last few weeks and I tried to do my best with our crappy camera. 

CHOCOLATE.

Our school offers a series of activities based on a given theme each month.  Well wouldn't you know that february just so happens to be "gastronomy".  We spent an afternoon at a chocolatier (Maison Pillon) learning all about chocolate (the process of growing, harvesting, processing, extracting the oil etc...).  But really.  We were there to see melted chocolate running endlessly out of machines and riding there, all aloof and delicious on conveyer belts.

This super nice guy gave us the tour and here is him snapping pieces of honey ganache onto the conveyer belt.  The little tablets of honey ganache ride patiently at the start of the belt, each waiting for their pass under the chocolate curtain.

 

Et Voilà.  Shiny and all chocolate covered.

Each chocolate has it's own mark or design.  The honey ones get a  diagonal line made by a little pick dipped onto the top while it's still wet.

The chocolate continues on the yellow conveyor belt through a cooling case, where it comes out on the other end PERFECT.   They get picked off the belt and packed onto a tray or boxes.  It was early February and the Maison Pillon was already starting their production for easter.  We got our fill of chocolates during the tour, but still picked out a few for tea treats at home.  Probably some of the best chocolate I've had.  Winners were: ganache of bergamot and passionfruit.   The texture of chocolate and the ganache was smooth and cool on the tongue.  The flavours were perfectly balanced, the chocolate didn't get upstaged by the flavoured ganache...like they were more than happy to be on the same team, think: Fresh Prince & Jazzy Jeff, Marx & Engels, W. Strunk Jr & E. B White, Penny & Brain, Monsieur & Madame Curie, Carl & Harriet Winslow, Austro & Hungaria... 

Visitors...

Ten days, two couples, 35 sq. metres in France - I'm going to pitch it as a reality tv series.  It was pretty cozy up in our studio, and I'd hate to disappoint but there wasn't the drama worthy of reality TV...maybe just a pseudo romance between Jordan and Paul, but that story was years in the making and if it didn't get made while they were tenting up together in the Yukon...it's probably never going to get made.  My dreams of producing reality tv aside, it was GREAT!  Jordan and Vanessa were super guests - they indulged me in my food craziness by being interested and hungry (all the time), they cooked some great meals for us, did dishes AND got us some really thoughtful gifts.  And it was just fun to share Toulouse and our little transplanted life in France.  All fun, all food all the time.   

Ask anyone, I'm always the first one to fall asleep at sleepovers.

Vanessa and I decided that Jordan needed a haircut.  There was a whole series of photos, but I thought I'd spare some of you the photos of people you don't know cutting hair in a bathroom.  The end result looked pretty good to us (but that's because we're not professionals).  Good work everybody.

Riverside, outside our apartment.  On sunny warm days, there are a lot of djembe drummers, and we hear them from our fourth floor apartment.  Our Toulousian friends warned (more like mocked) us about it...like we should have known or something.  

The boys decided to grab a drink at Cafe des Artistes and delegated grocery shopping to us.  This is them saying good bye.  I'm posting thumbnails these days, so you can't really zoom in to see, but trust me they look smug.

On our riverside walk - this is looking at the other bridge.  I should know what it's called, but all we ever see and think about is Pont Neuf...which means "new bridge", but is actually the oldest bridge in the city.  

Jornessa & Pault in Aix-en-Provence

The 4 of us took off for Aix-en-Provence after a week in Toulouse.  It was a cute little town and, from our conversation with the roadside chicken rotisserie guy, seems to be overrun with Brits and Americans.  We went by train, but the next time we go to Provence should be by car...and should be in the summer time so that we get that whole fields-of-lavender-and sunflowers effect.

Lunchtime in a square in Aix.  Like a modern day Renoir - non? It's a pretty typical scene in France.

 

We ate inside that day.  Here is me morphing back into my T1000 form.

"Have you seen this boy?"

I'm holding a contest for the best caption for this photo.

Goodbyes at the train station - Jordan and Vanessa were on their way to Nice, Italy and then Paris.

How did THIS happen?

It's 8:22 friday morning.  I've got class today at 9:00, usually it's 8:30 but 9 for fridays, not complaining.  P's got classes at 8:30 still and I love love love being the person that gets to stay in bed while the other has to get up.  I've been e-absent of late because long gone are the days when all I really had to do was wake up, think about food, read and cruise the internet.  We are full time, elbow-deep in French classes.  I miss the retirement schedule of december, but it's been so great to learn french.  Tradeoffs.  We've gone back to "easy" food for dinners and lunches, but the weekend is coming and I'm going on a market tear for saturday and sunday AND it's Chinois Nouvel An so gotta figure out something to eat...fish, I think it's a must for new years.

Nuther post to come.

Back to (Catholic) school...

School started this week and it was kicked off with some placement tests and a tour of the facilities.  We're taking an intensive month to month course at l'Institut Catholique.  It was established as a university in 1229 (OLD right?) and "inherited" by a Catholic institution.  So, here we are at a catholic school.  The university specializes in theology, philosophy and religious studies.  Aside from the polish monk that's in my class and the name, the French language program isn't all that "catholic".  They don't start the day with confession or anything - but we dress like catholic school children for a more authentic experience.  It was a cold walk for P in his shorts this morning.  P and I are in different classes, which means that we have designated time apart from each other, which was a bit of a surprise/let down at first - but really, it's better that we spend just 19 hours/day together instead of the whole 24.  This will be healthy, I often find myself at a near breaking point at hour 22 or 23.

We took a tour of the school on the first day, and I swear we went up a set of stairs right out of the Harry Potter wizard school - all dark wood and big, and then it led to a hallway with a locked armoire full of what looked like spell books.  For serious.  It better be french we're learning and not spells.

I'm in a level that's a bit further along than I think I should be, but I think I can follow along if I just put in extra time on my own...and if I work with the polish monk, because he seems to be the best in class at this point.  Show off.  We're learning subjunctives now, here's an excerpt from the text I brought from Canada:

For most verbs, the stem for the forms of the subjunctive is found by dropping the -ent  of the third-person plural form of the present indicative, and by adding the subjuntive endings: -e, 

-es, -e, -ions and -ent.  

I'm lucky I have this textbook which is written in ENGLISH.  IT's ALL IN FRENCH DURING CLASS.  I've never really studied a language before and besides my native languages, I don't speak anything else.  Learning a language is ha-ard.  I didn't even know what a "subjunctive" was before yesterday.   The truly difficult part is just knowing the linguistic and grammatical terms - imagine reading a sentence in english with words like, "direct object pronoun", "subject", "indirect object" etc..., just deciphering it in english is hard enough (this is coming from someone who knows just enough grammatical terms to mad lib).  Essentially it's like learning 2 new languages.  "Grammar" and French.  Mad props to anyone who is fluent in another language from studying in adulthood.  

Aside from feeling ESL as well as FSL (it's FLE in french), I'm really excited.  Yay, I love back to school and that perfect first blank page in a notebook where you write everything in the nicest, neatest handwriting (according to my friends I've got ugly handwriting) - the only difference for going back to school this time is that I didn't start the year with new LA gear running shoes.  Don't think the pink and white running shoes would cut it here in France.  

In other exciting news, we got a whack of books from Amazon.co.uk (a gift certificate; I wonder if spending it will help the British economy).  Among them, the biggest, most badass and most occupational-health-threatening to the courier is my "Larousse Gastronomique: the World's Greatest Cookery Encyclopedia".  I think it weighs in at 4-5 kilos (I'm all metric now, so convert it yourself) - I was just informed that it just crushed a stray hazlenut shell (christmas carnage). 

 and...WE HAVE VISITORS!!  J and V are staying for over a week, and eating only gets better with more people.