tombstones and a little tranquility from facebook...

Went to the Père Lachaise cemetery last week and wandered around just taking it all in.  It was really beautiful and still there, aside from the handful of tourists in search for Jim Morrison's grave (anticlimactic by the way).  BUT, check out this beaut - Oscar Wilde's grave.  It was recently re-done by a benefactress that was a fan of his work.  If you zoom in, you can see lipstick kisses all over it!!!  Love love love.  Shades of pink, reds and browns - lips on stone.  

There was a little bit written about him on the back, but also a lovely little epitaph:

And alien tears will fill for him

 Pity's long broken urn.

For his mourners will be outcasts

And outcasts always mourn.

More of what the rest of the cemetery looked like.

  

View from our living room. 

I joined facebook the other day.  It was a little overwhelming at first and I'm retreating to this blog as a security blanket of sorts.  It's so quiet here!  Facebook is like a highschool science fair, everyone's lives on display on a 3-panel bristol board.  Or maybe a highschool cafeteria, where there are so many people you can go and talk to in 5-minute intervals before moving on and getting in line to order your fries.  I'm more used to wordy blogs and lengthy emails of late - but that's because I've had time and lots of it.  I wonder if I am in actuality a homebody or if it is just being with P, ironically he happens to be the most socially well-received person I know.  But P loves being at home.  "Hate" is a strong word, but I'll say he was "glad to escape" Vancouver and all its (our) social obligations.    As I flip through photos on facebook and see myself and my friends I really question if I'm as homebody on the inside as I've come to be with P.  

Paris week 1 + visitors...it just doesn't stop

*sigh, what can I say, it's Paris and it's beautiful.  The food is beautiful too, and we've only been here a week.  We managed to stumble on a bakery that was voted "meillure boulanger 2008" in the 10th - had to buy a half loaf, could not resist.  More on Pierre Hermé later,  all that I will say is: they're expensive, and yes they're worth it.

Fraser struggles to mount the block, not the spry little guy he used to be, but just wait and crank some of Paris' "grime-y" electronic beats into him.  Note in the background how others are using the blocks to take pictures, using perspective to make it look like they're holding the tips of the pyramids.  Joke/gag pictures abound in Paris and the Louvre.  So many nude statues, so many opportunities and hy-larious photo-memories to be had.  Fraser never fully got up on his feet, something about his hip.

Ian waiting at our metro stop.  We're staying in the 5th for the month of May.  The apartment is a bit run-down, but the outside looks lovely...and it's super central.  

Lunch.

We went for a beautiful dinner at a restaurant in the 11th called "le Chateaubriand".  All male-wait staff in threadbare white shirts and scraggly french beards.  It was perfect.  So very casual, serving beautiful, seasonal and thoughtful food.  They do a 5 course tasting menu, starting with a cold tofu and fish foam for an amuse bouche.  Then it was seared mullet with fresh garden peas and a chicken liver mouse, cod with white asparagus and black olives, and a bavette with some sort of shallot and fish-roe sauce.  DESSERT?  Fresh mint ice-cream served with "sticks" of chocolate and vanilla meringue and a basil butter.  The basil butter was a gift that really kept on giving - basil butter burps, you get it.

Ian took this amazing picture (he's a pro and has shared some amazing photos with us).  This was off from the Pyramides from the Louvre.  This little girl was rapt with attention watching the fiddler.  Just her, and the guy, his fiddle and the music.  I died, it was so cute.

My best friend comes to visit

A and I used to always say that we were destined to be best friends based solely on our proximity to each other.  We met each other on the first day of highschool, and since then have gone through many of the best and worst times (thankfully) together.  We'd brave the treacherous walk up-hill after school (and even though it was completely unnecessary for me to walk up the hill, I'd do it just so that we could complain about it together), our dad's would take turns shuttling us to school and home from highschool dances and when we graduated they continued to do that for our little sisters.  There was also a rumored chance first-time meeting between our mothers at the mall, where they clasped hands as if they were long-lost somethings.

We'd went on to university together, partied together, moaned and groaned about boys together, moved out together, went to concerts, were jerks together, even went to thailand in matching outfits and backpacks together.  It was a trip that we'd talked about taking together ever since we saw "Brokedown Palace"...the last piece in solidifying our best-friendedness, and we were going to test it all with a Thai prison as a backdrop.

A moved away to NYC a few years ago and most of what we share fall more and more into the past.  I can't really describe how it felt to see her and J step off that bus in Toulouse.  It was bizarrely emotional.  A is like a living time capsule for me. Looking at her is like a collapsed view of so many things that made up my life...and it really underscores where I am (and where she is) and how far we've come since before we were 25.  It's difficult to stay close with the distance and the wonky time difference and I chalk it up to taking our "proximity" for granted - I never thought about what it would mean to not live 5 minutes away from her, let alone on a different continent.  So I'd have to say it's always a little bittersweet when we see each other in new environments, because she's her and I love her - but it's a strange reminder that we're not together in the same places like we used to be.   

After having said all that - here are some pictures of us in same places TOGETHER! I was ecstatic to meet J (he's wonderful and that's a relief) and to share a little bit of what my life has been like here in France with her.

We'd concluded that between our 4 entrees and mains, we had consumed an entire duck that meal.

Before we knew how much duck we were getting into.

More photos from J's camera

This is l'eglise St. Etienne, one of our favourites because of all the churches we see around here (and we see a lot) it's the most interesting in a slap-dash patched together kind of way.  The church had run out of financing part way through construction.  It was slowly (in phases) completed over time, which accounts for the strange shape and afterthought-like look of the church.  Cathedrals and churches are generally shaped like a cross - this one, as you can see, does its own strange and wonderful thing.

When you walk by these buildings everyday, you kind of forget how old and lovely they are.    

Spring is in full force here in Toulouse.  Parks and gardens that we used to walk in during the winter look and sound completely different.  We were walking by this little pond/water feature when we heard the racket.  We spotted several of these guys croaking away.

Goodbye Toulouse...

We're leaving Toulouse for Paris next week...most things are taken care of and the next week will be relatively stress free.  We've had 2 sets of visitors since last week.  First it was A & J making a pit stop in Toulouse from their trip to Barcelona and then P's cousin J & S from Canterbury.  It is always nice to have visitors, it helps us re-see Toulouse for all its pretty charm and past the dog shit and whiffs of urine from small medieval alleys.

Here are some photos that J took during her visit - some rare ones of us at the market doing our usual market thing amidst older french women in fancy sunglasses.  They love their fancy sunglasses here.

Piles and piles of different types of salad.  I'm waiting to pay for radishes and red oak leaf lettuce.  We're at the daily market of Blvd. Strasbourg.  

Hands down, the coolest carousel we've seen so far.  Rather than garish horses and carriages on the typical merry-go-rounds, this one had different versions of old flying machines, boats, a giant bucking ant, rhinos and a crocodile.  After one turn, I saw a little boy go up to the old man who ran the thing and the old man pulled out a little candy from his pocket for the boy.  Love, love, love that.  

My blog has come to haunt me

When I created this blog I had all the best intentions in the world to post often and to post things of quality, but over the last few months it's become somewhat annoying.  Annoying because it's become a bit of an obligation.  The resulting entries are, watered-down, rushed and uninspired.   I just read a couple of my recent entries and can't believe the amount of clipped sentences and sentiments.  I mean why go through the motions of posting something if it comes from nowhere intended for nowhere.

What's the point of emitting or broadcasting something if it doesn't stick, and if it doesn't provoke feeling, thought or discussion?  I don't mean to launch complex debates or forums about what I write about, but I consider an entry a "success" if I can make someone think or feel something that's outside of their immediate experience.  Maybe in particular about food, maybe an entry about chocolate made you think about first time you tasted REAL chocolate - did your world change? From that point on would you continue to classify "smarties" as chocolate?  Or that first time you tasted something that was so perfect that it made you think all the way back to where it came from, how it was tended and what creativity and mastery was required to render it to the state of perfection in the form of a bite in your mouth.  

What I love about food, aside from the obvious sensory satisfaction, is that there's a sense of place, history, love and ceremony to making and eating food.  Maybe it's the food geek in me that wants to force a lot more meaning into food than what is sitting there in front of me on a plate.  And it's the same writing geek in me that wants words to be more than just what's on the screen/page.  There's a potential in making the experience of reading or eating as immediate or as transcendent as you want it, but the most interesting part of it all is where it meets - you.  The person, forming the relationship between the immediate sensory experience and everything else that matters or doesn't matter floating in time and space.

Maybe it's presumptuous of me, but I'd like to write for that end.  

Has anyone seen "the Watchmen"?  I'm starting to make myself out to be a real Dr. Manhattan.  I mean well though.

Just when we were getting into it...

It's mid-march and I'll be leaving Toulouse in a month.  A month!!  We finally got some of that southern france weather (the weather we came for) this weekend.  It was 19 and sunny.  yeah, I know.  Our landlord's mother, told us that this has been an unusually cold winter and that this 19 degrees business usually starts in February, but instead we were slogging through an extra rainy/cold winter.  But no complaints, we're going to make up for it this next month.  P and I went to lunch at Place St. Georges...or where the rich, beautiful and sunglasses clad french families go to dine.  *sigh, here in France, small children wear nicer clothes than I do - and by nicer I mean WAAY nicer,  like burberry trenchcoats and such.  

P got steak tartare (our first time here), and the thing came out as a raw hamburger mound with chopped up cornichons, onions and capers in it...AND a raw egg right on top.  I mean, we knew what we were getting, but it was still a sight for us non-raw-hamburger/egg-eating types.  It was a lot of raw beef and raw egg in one sitting, but we liked it and ate it all.  It comes with worsteshire sauce, mustard and tobasco sauce on the side - a nice lady sitting at the table next to us gave us instructions on how to eat and manage the thing.  Put the sauce on it, mix it through with the egg (much like one would prepare fresh hamburgers, only you don't throw it on the grill), then mound it onto bread and eat. 

When we're not pigging out on raw meat amidst beautiful french families, we're eating this:

Choucroute garni - it's an Alsatian specialty of saurkraut (warmed through) garnished with sausages, smoked meats and potatoes.  We walk by this stuff at the pig butcher stalls, but never tried it until last week.  We asked the lady to explain to us what to do and how to eat it and she packed up enough for a meal for the 2 of us.  In the picture we have: 2 types of sausages, a slice of smoked pork shoulder, some boiled potatoes and the choucroute.  Who knew a steaming mound of hot sour cabbage would be so good.  There's a butcher that specializes in choucroute garni and we're going to get stuff from there next time and see how the two meals compare.