Catching Up

I put off posting an update last week, as I was hoping we'd be able to let everyone know when we'd be back in the US (this is near-entirely dependent on arrangements with my firm). We're still waiting on that answer -- at this point, it could be anywhere from the middle of May until the end of June. However it works out, we know that we're only going to have a few days between when we land in the US and when I'm back to work -- it's going to be an incredibly hectic move, but we're looking forward to getting back to 'real life' (these months in Paris, while amazing & wonderful, feel like a little bit like suspended reality). We'll try to keep everyone updated as soon as we have a better sense of what's happening.

We spent a really low-key Valentine's Day in Paris. The Six Nations rubgy tournament is in town, so we went out to watch the France-Scotland game. The place we'd intended to go was full-to-capacity, so we ended up back at The Moose, the same bar where we'd watched the Inauguration a few weeks ago. Matt tells me that Scotland never had a chance, although I really very little idea what was going on the whole time (I've done pretty well at learning how to watch a hockey game, so maybe rugby should be my next project?). Then we went out for pizza, the same thing we've done for each Valentine's Day we've celebrated together.

Valentine's Day doesn't seem to be nearly as big in Paris as it is in the US -- I actually had a hard time finding any Valentine's Day-themed greeting cards when I went to look. The restaurants didn't seem much more crowded than they do on any other Saturday night, and the price of flowers didn't shoot up (at least, based on their sidewalk display prices). It was kind of nice to have this much more relaxed experience -- just slightly better suited to our generally low-key, quiet preferences.

Matt had his spring break a couple of weeks ago, and last week was my turn. I had grand plans to get out and see some things that have caught my eye but not Matt's, but I ended up hanging around the apartment quite a bit, trying to get things arranged with the firm. I got a bit of getting-ahead schoolwork done, which takes a little bit of the pressure off as we move toward the end of the semester -- my final exams will happen in just five weeks! -- and also did some little projects around the house, including a fair bit of knitting.

Last weekend, we finally got to do something we've been looking foward to since before we even left the US -- attend the Salon International d'Agriculture. It would remind you of a state fair (minus the midway), except that the purpose is really much more exhibitional than competitive (there are just a few, already-award-winning examples of each breed of animal on display, plus tons of educational/promotional booths). The French still seem to have a conception of themselves as a very agricultural group of people -- toward that end, the event was huge and completely packed.

This is one of the exhibit halls -- there were six more just as big and just as crowded.

In addition to all the animal exhibits, there were two large halls full of displays from the different regions of France. I was incredibly excited to find that my all-time favorite beer ("the Dodo", which is produced on Reunion, where I spent an undergraduate semester) was on sale, as well as a few other of my old favorites (fried dumplings called samoussas; a kind of French take on curry). We also enjoyed wandering through the wonderful cheese, and meat, and wine, and chocolate, etc displays -- I think we might have to find time this weekend to go back and do some more shopping!

Absolutely nothing was accomplished this weekend

This one will be just a quick update, as we weren't very interesting at all last week. :) That doesn't mean that interesting things didn't happen: in fact, Saturday marked six months since our wedding in St Andrews! We had planned a nice day together -- which, unfortunately, was totally derailed by a migraine headache that kept me at home all weekend. (This happens to me about 3 or 4 times each year; kind of a "Murphy's Luck" situation that it had this be this weekend.)

We did get out to dinner on Friday night with our friend Sadie. (I've known Sadie since my 1L year, as we were in the same section. We also both ended up on the London summer program in July and August 2006, and now we're both here.) This was the first time we'd picked a restaurant from the great guide that Matt's mom sent me for Christmas -- and it was a resounding success. The guidebook said it much better than I could have done:

"If an anthropologist was looking for the ideal setting in which to study the way that the French relate to each other and food in public settings, he or she could do no better than this place, where everyone is skilled at the art of creating both privacy and conviviality in a small, shared space. Otherwise, it's just about as close as you can get to tasing homely old-fashioned French home cooking without being invited to dinner by a Parisian."

I think we've found a place that we'll look forward to sharing. I'm so glad for that book, as we would never have stumbled upon this place otherwise.

(I also want to digress from the more usual topics and brag about my little sister just a bit: over the weekend, she and her teammates placed second in the Kansas 4-H hippology contest...which qualifies them to represent the state at a national contest this fall. I used to do these contests, and can tell you that you really wouldn't believe the work involved in preparing for them. Way to go, Anna!!)

A little more French, a little more home

During our time in Paris, we've really been making an effort to learn to cook more, better meals. We think we've been doing pretty well -- our standard repetoire now includes spaghetti all'Amatriciana, salmon with agrodolce sauce, and mussels provencal(-ish), among other things. This week, we decided it was time to take on a French classic/stereotype: crepes. We found a crepe pan and a spreader-spatula thing (no idea what it's actually called, either in French or in English) at the store, and came home to give it a try. The first thing we discovered is that our crepe pan wasn't compatible with our stovetop, so we pulled out the skillet and kept trying.


The first few efforts were less than impressive, but we started to get the hang of things before we were halfway our supply of batter. We still need to work on making them thinner and rounder before we really feel like we've got it, but we're starting to come up with a reasonable approximation of what we'd get from a street vendor.


Over the weekend, we'd hoped to try again (and much earlier in the day) to visit the leopard cubs. Unfortunately, the winter wind came back to Paris, and spending an afternoon outside didn't sound at all appealing. Instead, we visited the Natural History Museum, a companion museum to the Evolution Museum we saw a couple of weekends ago.

The ground floor contained the collection of modern animals. We spent most of our time looking at the skeleton collections (we're both science-geeky enough to really enjoy looking at the inter-species differences), but there's also an extensive collection of soft-tissue dissections for those who are so inclined. Most of them are still identified with handwritten labels, completed so long ago that the card is yellowing and the ink is fading. "Once upon a time," many of the items in the display cases were really important to advancing the study of comparative anatomy and physiology -- it amazed me to think that I was still free to wander around and examine what some truly notable scientists had once spent so much effort to achieve.


The first floor was even more fun: dinosaurs! I don't remember having a "dinosaur phase" as a kid, but I may just have begun one right now :). Apparently, the Natural History Museum in New York has made casts of many of these fossils for display in their museum: but, the skeletons have been given different poses so they can indicate a different "mood" (e.g., the Tyrannosarus in New York might seem more ferocious).

The display cases in this room held a couple of surprises: several specimens which had been collected in Kansas. I knew that my home state has tended to be a relatively good place to go fossil-hunting, but was still pleasantly surprised to find a bit of my childhood home all the way overe here in our temporary home.