The coup d'etat Napoleon III staged in 1851 involved him staging a banquet featuring sausages for a bunch of army officers (a veritable Napoleonic sausage party), who then rode around in the streets shouting "long live Napoleon! Long live sausages!" I am doing my part to live and breath French history while I'm in Paris by eating des saucissons. Long live Napoleon.The last few days have been eventful (it's hard to have an uneventful day when you have no leisure activities to speak of.) I led an excursion of bright-eyed UC undergrads to the Parc de la Villette way up in the 18th arrondisement, in the NE part of Paris, while it was raining buckets. I spoke a lot of Franglais to Pierre, the TA from Santa Barbara who's, you know, French. I finally started reading for my dissertation and looking for the periodicals I need on the essentially incomprehensible website for the Bibliothèque Nationale. Then I had a sumptuous feast with my fellow grads, courtesy of the other historian in the gang (who somehow managed to make a three-course meal in a kitchen the size of a standard American closet.)
My note du jour regarding Paris itself: I think one of the big reasons people remember it so fondly is that despite being a very, very large city, it still operates on a human scale. You can cross the entire city in the middle of the day in 30-something minutes on the Metro. You can walk anywhere in the city center. Despite the massive changes wrought first under Hausmann in the nineteenth century and then again under De Gaulle, D'Estaing, Mitterand and Chirac a century later, it's a city in which people live, eat, work, and relax within the same neighborhoods. It is, in short, the polar opposite of metropolitan nightmares like Los Angeles in which the actual functions of life are spread out over 100 miles. Paris is tight, man. It's dense. That's been my favorite thing about it so far.
Tomorrow I'm going birthday shopping for my girl and seeing if I can find a boulangerie that stays open on Sundays in hopes of fresher bread than the supermarket stuff I've been living off of...
Tune in next time for notes on French men's fashion.
5 comments:
maybe things have changed but Nothing is open on Sunday, as I remember, so get out there ASAP a boulangerie mon ami.
Glad to hear you're having many adventures, and leading bright, young undergrads through Paris. Long live sausages! And I'm looking forward to the fashion post. Good luck finding anything that stays open on Sundays...
How are the sausages? I live, perhaps predictably, under the simplistic assumption that all food in France is better than what I eat here, pretty much all day every day.
Er, except Sunday, apparently.
That assumption is largely true. All the stuff at the monoprix is of really high quality, except that the bread is pretty mediocre. That said, I just had my first real-deal baguette and pain de chocolat from a proper boulangerie and they were *bitchin*.
uuuuuhhhhh pain au chocolat, dark chocolate stick inside buttery flaky thingy hot and fresh *drool*
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