Making the most of a "work" trip to Paris
At this point I have exactly 2 hours before I must grab my taxi to Airport de Charles de Gaulle as I sit in my room with the sun coming through the window on a 6am in Paris in the spring. The week was one that started and ended with great adventure, while in between were life lessons that can only be learned through boring day-to-day interaction in the world of a foreign country. As I reflect, this trip was all that I expected and of course, included things that I could not imagine (though deep down inside, I knew it would be, as this was my first business trip outside the timezone).
I departed my lovely home of Austin, Texas at 2pm Saturday afternoon. The flight was uneventful and as expected, lest a margarita at the Dallas airport at the best airport restaurant I’d ever been, not that it would be special outside the gates of the airport system. The Texican enchiladas were delicious, and the margarita put me in a sublime state to peacefully board the plane like the piece of cattle I am in a world where fuel prices are what they are.
Nevertheless, after perhaps a total of one hour of near-sleep that is the 9-hour journey from Dallas to Paris, I enjoyed it as much as it could be enjoyed. My traveling companion Austinite coworker and I arrived in Paris by 10am and a Parisian coworker collected us at the airport for our indoctrination into a day in the life of a Parisian from Paris, France.
Having been 10 years since I last set foot in Europe, the day started with the usual revelations about the size of vehicles there compared with the USA. Our friend’s car (which he’d borrowed from his girlfriend) was the typical Parisian car with power windows in the front and manual windows in the back, of limited length and weight, and completely in the metric system and including a fuel gauge that had a strange symbology. We worked our way through the dual-liftgates that prevented multiple vehicles from passing through while one car pays. It is the same concept as the blocking devices that prevent multiple people piggybacking a single ticket at the Metro, Paris’ underground train system.
As we drove the streets, I reminisced about the last time I was in Europe and gasoline was $4 a gallon (that is, in today’s valuation .68€ per litre). Now that gas (that is, petrol, if you’re from Europe), is about $4 a gallon in the USA, I thought we had caught up to Europe. Cest la vie, on that day, gas was 1.39 € per litre (over $8 per gallon).
Nevertheless, we made it to our host’s apartment. Like any apartment in one of the world’s biggest and most cosmopolitan cities, it was a modest flat with the charm you’d expect from a cosmopolitan city, including a balcony with a view of the lovely weather of Paris in the Spring and the Maserati dealer across the street.
We sat on the balcony as we sipped fine scotch in preparation for our lunch, which started off with some prosciutto followed by the crusty love that is a French baguette. At that point, our host pulled out some velvety Bordeaux which he had procured from the wine cellar that was part of his Parisian flat (which also included a sweet parking space not nearly big enough to fit the average American’s SUV, but big enough to fit his girlfriend’s car + his motorcycle).
Next up on our random-day-in-the-life-of-a-random-Parisian’s-lunch was some homemade couscous reminiscent of that I’d had in Morocco, France’s neighbor across the Mediterranean that shares the French language among its top two. The couscous was delicious, of course. It was followed up by a cheese course that consisted of whatever our host had in the fridge, which was an array of cheese outside anything that most Americans have ever experienced, let alone had in their refrigerator at any one moment. Of course, I was prompted (and submitted) to try the most powerful cheese of them all, Roquefort. It smelled like my feet did later that week, but tasted lovely nonetheless.
Afterward, my Austinite and Parisian co-workers discussed the Playstation 2 and Rock Band setup that was shipped from the USA to France via American Airlines. Rock Band is still not yet released for the european version of Playstation, so my Austinite coworkers gave the gift that keeps on giving to their Parisian counterpart who had recently celebrated a birthday – a US-version Playstation 2 along with the full Rock Band instrument setup, including drum kit, microphone, and guitar.
Unfortunately, the US version utilizes 110 volts over a US-version plug. An attempt to utilize an adapter that changed the prongs from US to European-continent did not work, as the EU is on 220 volts. So, a converter was necessary to cut the voltage in half. Fortunately, they found one by week’s end and the vision of cross-culturally-pirated gaming systems was realized. A game that was over a year old in the USA could now be played by someone in a country that did not have it in his or her own version…. Kinda like NTSC and PAL, only a little deeper.
After a short nap that was not enjoyed by my Austinite coworker, I woke up to another random Parisian that arrived at the flat while I was in a dream. She was an attractive young lady that entertained my conspiracy theories about Genetically Modified Organisms in our foods and reminded me of the label on every cigarette box in France which said “SMOKING KILLS” in French as she puffed away on Gauloise cigarettes, which I figured were less deadly than those smoked by my Paresian coworker, Camel.
We ate sushi, which, by my reckoning, was good for being all the way around the world from where the quality of sushi is best. Fortunately, it was much better than the worst I’ve had in the USA, so longitude may not be as important as one might think. We got a ride to our hotel and crashed by 10pm, ready for a full week of business meetings that would begin the next morning.
Having multiple coworkers from France, I knew what I was in for. I’d sat in many a conference call as the conversation slowly migrated from English (which was spoken for my convenience) to French (which was necessary when those speaking in their native tongues needed to get into complicated topics of business that may or may not be required to be understood by those that only spoke English). To me, all I could hear was, “blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.”
At times throughout the week, in the conference room, all I could hear was…
“Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.”
“Blah blah blah blah blah”
“Blah”
“D’Accord,” which I knew meant everything is A-OK!
In the conversations I’d had with the lady at the cash register at the grocery store…
“How much is it?”
“Blah blah blah blah”
As I hand her the money as I see it on the register, she hands me back whatever. Trying to pretend I’m up on the current day-to-day situation of a grocery store transaction, I take my funds.
“Blah blah blah, Au revoir!”
I respond, “Merci.”
I walk off and count my change and realize I am 5€ short. I walk back and remind my cashier. She opens the register and corrects the issue, revealing that, like all registers in that store, it was designed to have individual slots for each coin, but one slot for all paper money. Of course, this is a nightmare that must be worked out by future European cash register designers.
That Friday began like every day since Monday, at the hotel lobby, grabbing my continental breakfast. It was clearly the best continental breakfast I’d ever experienced, but I’d guess about average by French standards. It had all the things of the American Continental Breakfast, that is, all-you-can-eat cereal, milk, fruit, dried apricots and dates, toast, water, tea, coffee, etc… but added everything that is French, not to mention the crusty baguettes!
First up was the croissant. It looked like any croissant available in the USA; it was a square piece of flattened dough that was hand-rolled diagonally into the familiar croissant shape. However, the dough was unlike anything found in the USA (though, again, average by Parisian standards). It is a lovely geometric and gastronomic delight.
Rumour has it that the dough for the croissant is different from the dough used by the pain au chocolat. Of course, the pain au chocolat is a flattened rectangle-shaped piece of dough which is rolled up lengthwise, and interspersed are two sticks of chocolate to make it the world-renowned treat that it is.
I asked my compadres what their favorite city in the world was (to which they had been, of course). My answer was Austin, but their answers ranged from Bali to Barcelona to some coast town in Mexico just north of Cancun. On this night, the city for all of us was Paris, France.
It all came together on Friday. The workweek was all a blur. It was a week of toil. The instant messaging with those in Austin began around 8am Austin time, which was 3pm Paris time. Fortunately for us in Paris, we had just gotten back from lunch at 2pm, so we were free to work until 6 or 7 or 8 pm after days that started at 9am. To the Austinites in Austin, 9am was 2am. One of them that read their email time-stamped 2am thought we had worked through the night. At the same time, they were trying to get out of the office for lunch at noon while I was trying to get out of the office at 7 to go eat dinner and go to bed before 3 am.
Why 3am? Well, on a normal night, the goal seemed to be dinner at 8:30. After happy hour and an arduous journey through the Metro that could involve up to two train-changes and a 5-block walk, I’d usually be sitting down to dinner by 9-ish. My best timing was Thursday when I was on my own for the first time. Of course, I went to a vegetarian restaurant. It was delightful.
In Austin, vegetarianism and veganism is common. I have friends that would be very hard-pressed to spend a long time in Paris without a great deal of research. Fortunately, I found the place, La Victoire Supreme du Coeur. It included a drink that I could only describe as Kombucha. At any rate, being a lonely vegetarian-like individual, I enjoyed a perfectly paced (that is quick, which indulges my impatience) dinner that was my first in 3 days that did not involve duck, goose liver, or an alcoholic beverage. That night, (Thursday), I fell asleep around 11pm, the same as Sunday. Those were my earliest nights.
My second-to-latest-night was Wednesday. After a dinner that included an appearance of the guy who could technically be described as “the man” corporately in charge of every single person involved in this entire story that somehow managed to pay the airlines for my trip in these times of $120 a barrel oil. He turned out to be a cool dude, the prudent judge you would expect to run such a rouges gallery of software development talent.
He bought the dinner, and the drinks at the jazz club we ended up staying at until 2am. The club was in the Chatelet region, famous for it’s “student” population. Student of what is undefined, but it is a free-spirited region, I can assure you. At the club, I had a brief discussion with the upright bassist who was playing that night.
“Blah, blah blah blah blah,” he said
I turned to my compadre at my table, “whadd’id he say?”
The bassist switched to English and repeated his joke to me about how I might have re-arranged his music. We then drifted into a conversation about jet lag, which he said can be solved by resetting your internal in two ways, one by the sun and the other by not eating for 16 hours.
He told me on this night, the pianist lady wrote all of the music. I heard many African influences such as those of Mulatu Astatke, but most of all I noticed the time signature shifts. I would best describe it as “progressive jazz” or some fusion of classical and jazz. It was intermittent grooves followed by sometimes jarring key and time signature changes that worked well on paper and had their own groove, until the next shift. All in all, it was the first time I’d ever experienced that concept of Progressive-minus-rock, but it was wonderful.
When close of business finally rolled around at about 6 that Friday afternoon, the weekend was upon us. Friday was Friday no matter where you were in the world. In my world, Friday might mean its time to burn down some ganja. However, being in a foreign country that wasn’t Holland meant that the adventure would begin, because cannabis is illegal throughout the world. I took a right out of my hotel and walked down the main street on which it was. The town was bustling. Everyone knew it was Friday.
On the street, I passed tobacco smokers abound. From the general population that smoked machine-rolled commercial brands, to randoms smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, to the occasional cigar or pipe smoker, it was freely done in public. Of course, there are rules in place about smoking and in Paris; you cannot smoke indoors. Therefore, as you walk the streets, the tobacco-junkies are getting their fill.
I just kept walking until my main street somehow “dead ended” into a pedestrian-only area. There, I walked past some young gentlemen who were hanging conversing in the street.
“Parle vous Englais?” I asked.
“Non,” he replied.
I turned to his friend and repeated myself to the man. He nodded, in agreement.
“Can you find…. Ze shit?” I stuttered in broken English with the key word being “shit.” In French, shit means cannibis. Actually, there are two possible derivations. One is hashish, which is resin from the buds rolled up into a tarlike substance. The actual buds or shake from the buds, referred to as kif in Morocco (the herb), is supposedly much harder to find in Paris. In Paris, either form is known as ze shit.
At any rate, he nodded and said 55€. I said, “sure” and we walked with the group to a nearby corner. The man went with a friend and walked down the street, instructing me to wait by the nearby Pizza Hut where the delivery drivers took their motorcycles to deliver the pizzas to the customers. Fortunately for pizza consumers in Paris, motorcycles have the advantage of speed when it comes to delivery. Like California, motorcycles can go between two lanes moving in the same direction to get past traffic. Unlike California, motorcycles can go into opposing lanes and will often go onto sidewalks to get through traffic.
I made small talk with one of the guys that told me his occupation was “transportation.” We made conversation with the limited number of common words in our vocabulary (all of which were in English), discussing the weather and Texas. Every time I told someone I was from Texas, they would reply, “George Bush?” Of course, my politics on George Bush and those that give him his orders overlap nicely with those I spoke with on the streets of Paris.
The man that gave me the 55€ quote for ze shit was back from his endeavor. He gave me the signal to keep things on the down low and we separated from the others. We ended up in a back alley behind a dumpster (don’t you always?) and he handed me a piece of hashish the size of a small cigar or maybe 4 sticks of pain au chocolat merged. I handed him the 55 and he said it would be 75. Knowing it was worth it, I gave up the 20. I patted him on the shoulder and thanked him with a “Merci beaucoup!”
Now, I was in Paris with a huge piece of shit and no way beyond eating it for consumption (I wasn’t about to eat shit). Earlier that week in Paris, I had done my fair share of consumption of other things. There are so so many ways to consume in Paris. First of all, there was the dinner, which started with a basket of bread, and a glass of wine. Next up was the entrée course, which was the salad and/or appetizer. Unlike entrée in English, this word meant “entry” into the gastronomic delight that is dinner in a restaurant in Paris. After you finish that, you get your main course as the feast continues.
Of course, any great dinner includes a great dessert. The French have all the bases covered. My favorite of the week was crème brulee. There is also crème caramel. In the rest of the world, that dessert is known as flan. In France, they have their own flan. I also had some of the best ice cream I’ve ever had. There is no comparison, grass fed Genetically-Modified-Free is the way to go. Also, I tasted the chocolate ice cream, which was the richest I can recall.
I personally have had a mostly-vegetarian diet with occasional fish for the past couple of years. However, restrictions were lifted to partake in the life of a Parisian. The last time I was in Paris, I got recommended-into eating the raw boeuf hamburger that is a French delight. On Monday, this happened to my American coworker. I had duck for two dinners in a row (both of which were eaten around the 23:00 hour. The first was a cut of duck that was pretty much a red meat like any of the larger mammals with its fair share of gristle and fat. I draw the line at gristle and fat, but the meat was great. The next night I ate a leg of duck that was called confit de canard. It was cooked twice to give it that rotisserie-chicken taste. I really liked that, it was probably my favorite dinner all week.
Earlier that Friday, I was taken by a French coworker to buy perfume for my girl back home. We could have gotten an 18% VAT rebate at the Paris de Gaulle Airport. The Value Added Tax is a European standard that includes a fee on all items purchased. Fortunately for consumers, it is included in the posted price when you buy something (no sales tax on top). Also, it takes care of paying the service industry a predictable wage. Therefore, tipping is not required; rather, a rounding-up is customary.
Anyway, you can get duty-free perfume with the rebate. However, in order to get the rebate, you would have to go through a gauntlet that was clearly not documented the day we arrived at the de Gaulle Airport to go home, let alone the fact that NOTHING is clearly documented at that crazy airport, including the way the terminals are numbered. Nevertheless, there was also a possibility of a corporate discount offered through the corporate hierarchy. Neither worked out in the end, but I bought some Parisian stuff which would likely make my lady and my Parisian coworker happy. Throughout that week, our French hostess would give us gifts of French desserts. Our final lunch was at a place that had just about anything you can imagine on a baguette. I got some salmon with lettuce and tomato.
Friday evening… it was time to consume the shit. All I really needed was a lighter. You could burn the edge and it would slowly smoke like incense. I went to the tobacco store and the line was out the door. The guy in front of me bought 5 cheap cigars. I bought one. The cigar was pretty much the same size. There isn’t really any place to smoke shit in Paris, especially at that time. The hotel room seemed risky, but was likely my best choice.
Unfortunately, my decision at that moment was a small garden park sandwiched between the street and a brick wall which behind included a 100 foot drop into the subway train tracks. Worst case police-state scenario, the shit can be thrown into the train tracks below. As the incense burned, people passed by, bustling to get to their Friday Night. In the distance, I heard a siren blare. It was not the same sound as the ambulance siren. It was the police. The siren went away, but the police car parked across the street from the garden. He then put on his lights and I knew it was time to put out the shit. Not wanting to have anything on me, I thought about some options and decided to stash it there at the park. I ended up sliding it through some bricks and behind into a location that may or may not be accessible by future smokers (though I told some coworkers about it later that night).
I casually (but forcefully) light up my crappy cigar and walked the streets back to my hotel to meet my friends. We entered the Metro and arrived at our destination, an Italian pasta restaurant. I somehow ended up with two beers and an aperitif sitting in front of me at the same time through my course-ordering, but the dinner was some good homemade pasta. I didn’t partake in the wine, but my friends passed it between the four of them and, of course, like any French etiquette, when pouring, always poured for someone else first and always left a small glass-worth in the bottle. It often happens that the person to finish it will determine the next round.
After dinner, we went to have a drink at Footsie, a bar that has a price board with all of their drinks fluctuating in value within tolerance. The price of a Kronenburg could go from 4.10 to 6.50 in a span of five minutes. Afterward, we took the Metro to a place with a cover band where the price of a 12-ounce Guinness draft was 9.50€. The band belted out Sweet Home Alabama with a French accent that was unmistakable.
On our way to the Guinness, we walked through a square where a man offered us some shit. At that point, having my fill with the shit, I declined, citing that there was no place to smoke it. At that moment, we all agreed, but after a few hours and a few Guinesses, my friend and I decided to look for him. Not finding him, we began the prudent approach of asking those that might know based on appearance. The first was a group of black men. My French counterpart asked them and they replied in the negative, but laughed as they said to us in French that we only asked them because they were black.
We found a man smoking a cigarette standing next to a car. We asked him and my friend translated. “If we had ze shit, it would be ze best shit around.” I got in the back seat with his friend. He pulled out a small bag of French schwagg and sold it to me for 35€. Now, all we needed for consumption was some papers. We ended up outside of a club and met a guy that was into dark metal and he reminisced of bands from Texas in that genre. I rolled a joint and he rolled a joint. Mine was a tiny pinner made with a single small rolling paper. For his, my counterpart used two papers to create an L-Shaped paper and used that to roll a spliff. He insisted that we insert tobacco and put in some of a fresh cigarette to mix. We passed it around. Of course, my tobacco intolerance made my heart race and gave me that “tobacco rush.” I reminded them of the rush and they told me that the rush was ze shit.
I returned to the tavern with the cover band playing Portishead and they jammed through the night until 5am. At that point, they ended it with “Just a Gigaloo” with a kazoo. I had many conversations with the people around me regarding many things, but one that stuck out was the ways that we represent numbers with our hands throughout the world. The number one (un) is represented by the thumb in France. In the USA, it is the index finger. In Singapore, it is the pinky. All three number systems differ through number 3.
Overall, friendships have been made and culture has been learned by me (note the passive voice in that sentence common by the French speaking English). I’ll always remember that my Parisian counterparts are more interested in the enjoyment of others than themselves. They stuck with us the entire night until we took the Metro back to the hotel room. The metro, of course, ends around 1am during the week and 2am on Friday and Saturday. Fortunately, we had stayed out until after it began again, around 6. I sat in my room for a couple of hours to write most of this, and then got a cab to the Airport. Evidently, the start the meter when you call the cab company in Paris. This dude’s credit card reader was busted, and we had to stop for cash. He told me 50 but I pulled out 60. The meter ran to 55.50 and he dropped us off at the first terminal, thinking I had only 50 (though I forgot to communicate to him about the 60). We had to take the train to the other terminal. The flight from Paris to Dallas was 9.5 hours, and a 7-hour time change. Good times.
I departed my lovely home of Austin, Texas at 2pm Saturday afternoon. The flight was uneventful and as expected, lest a margarita at the Dallas airport at the best airport restaurant I’d ever been, not that it would be special outside the gates of the airport system. The Texican enchiladas were delicious, and the margarita put me in a sublime state to peacefully board the plane like the piece of cattle I am in a world where fuel prices are what they are.
Nevertheless, after perhaps a total of one hour of near-sleep that is the 9-hour journey from Dallas to Paris, I enjoyed it as much as it could be enjoyed. My traveling companion Austinite coworker and I arrived in Paris by 10am and a Parisian coworker collected us at the airport for our indoctrination into a day in the life of a Parisian from Paris, France.
Having been 10 years since I last set foot in Europe, the day started with the usual revelations about the size of vehicles there compared with the USA. Our friend’s car (which he’d borrowed from his girlfriend) was the typical Parisian car with power windows in the front and manual windows in the back, of limited length and weight, and completely in the metric system and including a fuel gauge that had a strange symbology. We worked our way through the dual-liftgates that prevented multiple vehicles from passing through while one car pays. It is the same concept as the blocking devices that prevent multiple people piggybacking a single ticket at the Metro, Paris’ underground train system.
As we drove the streets, I reminisced about the last time I was in Europe and gasoline was $4 a gallon (that is, in today’s valuation .68€ per litre). Now that gas (that is, petrol, if you’re from Europe), is about $4 a gallon in the USA, I thought we had caught up to Europe. Cest la vie, on that day, gas was 1.39 € per litre (over $8 per gallon).
Nevertheless, we made it to our host’s apartment. Like any apartment in one of the world’s biggest and most cosmopolitan cities, it was a modest flat with the charm you’d expect from a cosmopolitan city, including a balcony with a view of the lovely weather of Paris in the Spring and the Maserati dealer across the street.
We sat on the balcony as we sipped fine scotch in preparation for our lunch, which started off with some prosciutto followed by the crusty love that is a French baguette. At that point, our host pulled out some velvety Bordeaux which he had procured from the wine cellar that was part of his Parisian flat (which also included a sweet parking space not nearly big enough to fit the average American’s SUV, but big enough to fit his girlfriend’s car + his motorcycle).
Next up on our random-day-in-the-life-of-a-random-Parisian’s-lunch was some homemade couscous reminiscent of that I’d had in Morocco, France’s neighbor across the Mediterranean that shares the French language among its top two. The couscous was delicious, of course. It was followed up by a cheese course that consisted of whatever our host had in the fridge, which was an array of cheese outside anything that most Americans have ever experienced, let alone had in their refrigerator at any one moment. Of course, I was prompted (and submitted) to try the most powerful cheese of them all, Roquefort. It smelled like my feet did later that week, but tasted lovely nonetheless.
Afterward, my Austinite and Parisian co-workers discussed the Playstation 2 and Rock Band setup that was shipped from the USA to France via American Airlines. Rock Band is still not yet released for the european version of Playstation, so my Austinite coworkers gave the gift that keeps on giving to their Parisian counterpart who had recently celebrated a birthday – a US-version Playstation 2 along with the full Rock Band instrument setup, including drum kit, microphone, and guitar.
Unfortunately, the US version utilizes 110 volts over a US-version plug. An attempt to utilize an adapter that changed the prongs from US to European-continent did not work, as the EU is on 220 volts. So, a converter was necessary to cut the voltage in half. Fortunately, they found one by week’s end and the vision of cross-culturally-pirated gaming systems was realized. A game that was over a year old in the USA could now be played by someone in a country that did not have it in his or her own version…. Kinda like NTSC and PAL, only a little deeper.
After a short nap that was not enjoyed by my Austinite coworker, I woke up to another random Parisian that arrived at the flat while I was in a dream. She was an attractive young lady that entertained my conspiracy theories about Genetically Modified Organisms in our foods and reminded me of the label on every cigarette box in France which said “SMOKING KILLS” in French as she puffed away on Gauloise cigarettes, which I figured were less deadly than those smoked by my Paresian coworker, Camel.
We ate sushi, which, by my reckoning, was good for being all the way around the world from where the quality of sushi is best. Fortunately, it was much better than the worst I’ve had in the USA, so longitude may not be as important as one might think. We got a ride to our hotel and crashed by 10pm, ready for a full week of business meetings that would begin the next morning.
Having multiple coworkers from France, I knew what I was in for. I’d sat in many a conference call as the conversation slowly migrated from English (which was spoken for my convenience) to French (which was necessary when those speaking in their native tongues needed to get into complicated topics of business that may or may not be required to be understood by those that only spoke English). To me, all I could hear was, “blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.”
At times throughout the week, in the conference room, all I could hear was…
“Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.”
“Blah blah blah blah blah”
“Blah”
“D’Accord,” which I knew meant everything is A-OK!
In the conversations I’d had with the lady at the cash register at the grocery store…
“How much is it?”
“Blah blah blah blah”
As I hand her the money as I see it on the register, she hands me back whatever. Trying to pretend I’m up on the current day-to-day situation of a grocery store transaction, I take my funds.
“Blah blah blah, Au revoir!”
I respond, “Merci.”
I walk off and count my change and realize I am 5€ short. I walk back and remind my cashier. She opens the register and corrects the issue, revealing that, like all registers in that store, it was designed to have individual slots for each coin, but one slot for all paper money. Of course, this is a nightmare that must be worked out by future European cash register designers.
That Friday began like every day since Monday, at the hotel lobby, grabbing my continental breakfast. It was clearly the best continental breakfast I’d ever experienced, but I’d guess about average by French standards. It had all the things of the American Continental Breakfast, that is, all-you-can-eat cereal, milk, fruit, dried apricots and dates, toast, water, tea, coffee, etc… but added everything that is French, not to mention the crusty baguettes!
First up was the croissant. It looked like any croissant available in the USA; it was a square piece of flattened dough that was hand-rolled diagonally into the familiar croissant shape. However, the dough was unlike anything found in the USA (though, again, average by Parisian standards). It is a lovely geometric and gastronomic delight.
Rumour has it that the dough for the croissant is different from the dough used by the pain au chocolat. Of course, the pain au chocolat is a flattened rectangle-shaped piece of dough which is rolled up lengthwise, and interspersed are two sticks of chocolate to make it the world-renowned treat that it is.
I asked my compadres what their favorite city in the world was (to which they had been, of course). My answer was Austin, but their answers ranged from Bali to Barcelona to some coast town in Mexico just north of Cancun. On this night, the city for all of us was Paris, France.
It all came together on Friday. The workweek was all a blur. It was a week of toil. The instant messaging with those in Austin began around 8am Austin time, which was 3pm Paris time. Fortunately for us in Paris, we had just gotten back from lunch at 2pm, so we were free to work until 6 or 7 or 8 pm after days that started at 9am. To the Austinites in Austin, 9am was 2am. One of them that read their email time-stamped 2am thought we had worked through the night. At the same time, they were trying to get out of the office for lunch at noon while I was trying to get out of the office at 7 to go eat dinner and go to bed before 3 am.
Why 3am? Well, on a normal night, the goal seemed to be dinner at 8:30. After happy hour and an arduous journey through the Metro that could involve up to two train-changes and a 5-block walk, I’d usually be sitting down to dinner by 9-ish. My best timing was Thursday when I was on my own for the first time. Of course, I went to a vegetarian restaurant. It was delightful.
In Austin, vegetarianism and veganism is common. I have friends that would be very hard-pressed to spend a long time in Paris without a great deal of research. Fortunately, I found the place, La Victoire Supreme du Coeur. It included a drink that I could only describe as Kombucha. At any rate, being a lonely vegetarian-like individual, I enjoyed a perfectly paced (that is quick, which indulges my impatience) dinner that was my first in 3 days that did not involve duck, goose liver, or an alcoholic beverage. That night, (Thursday), I fell asleep around 11pm, the same as Sunday. Those were my earliest nights.
My second-to-latest-night was Wednesday. After a dinner that included an appearance of the guy who could technically be described as “the man” corporately in charge of every single person involved in this entire story that somehow managed to pay the airlines for my trip in these times of $120 a barrel oil. He turned out to be a cool dude, the prudent judge you would expect to run such a rouges gallery of software development talent.
He bought the dinner, and the drinks at the jazz club we ended up staying at until 2am. The club was in the Chatelet region, famous for it’s “student” population. Student of what is undefined, but it is a free-spirited region, I can assure you. At the club, I had a brief discussion with the upright bassist who was playing that night.
“Blah, blah blah blah blah,” he said
I turned to my compadre at my table, “whadd’id he say?”
The bassist switched to English and repeated his joke to me about how I might have re-arranged his music. We then drifted into a conversation about jet lag, which he said can be solved by resetting your internal in two ways, one by the sun and the other by not eating for 16 hours.
He told me on this night, the pianist lady wrote all of the music. I heard many African influences such as those of Mulatu Astatke, but most of all I noticed the time signature shifts. I would best describe it as “progressive jazz” or some fusion of classical and jazz. It was intermittent grooves followed by sometimes jarring key and time signature changes that worked well on paper and had their own groove, until the next shift. All in all, it was the first time I’d ever experienced that concept of Progressive-minus-rock, but it was wonderful.
When close of business finally rolled around at about 6 that Friday afternoon, the weekend was upon us. Friday was Friday no matter where you were in the world. In my world, Friday might mean its time to burn down some ganja. However, being in a foreign country that wasn’t Holland meant that the adventure would begin, because cannabis is illegal throughout the world. I took a right out of my hotel and walked down the main street on which it was. The town was bustling. Everyone knew it was Friday.
On the street, I passed tobacco smokers abound. From the general population that smoked machine-rolled commercial brands, to randoms smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, to the occasional cigar or pipe smoker, it was freely done in public. Of course, there are rules in place about smoking and in Paris; you cannot smoke indoors. Therefore, as you walk the streets, the tobacco-junkies are getting their fill.
I just kept walking until my main street somehow “dead ended” into a pedestrian-only area. There, I walked past some young gentlemen who were hanging conversing in the street.
“Parle vous Englais?” I asked.
“Non,” he replied.
I turned to his friend and repeated myself to the man. He nodded, in agreement.
“Can you find…. Ze shit?” I stuttered in broken English with the key word being “shit.” In French, shit means cannibis. Actually, there are two possible derivations. One is hashish, which is resin from the buds rolled up into a tarlike substance. The actual buds or shake from the buds, referred to as kif in Morocco (the herb), is supposedly much harder to find in Paris. In Paris, either form is known as ze shit.
At any rate, he nodded and said 55€. I said, “sure” and we walked with the group to a nearby corner. The man went with a friend and walked down the street, instructing me to wait by the nearby Pizza Hut where the delivery drivers took their motorcycles to deliver the pizzas to the customers. Fortunately for pizza consumers in Paris, motorcycles have the advantage of speed when it comes to delivery. Like California, motorcycles can go between two lanes moving in the same direction to get past traffic. Unlike California, motorcycles can go into opposing lanes and will often go onto sidewalks to get through traffic.
I made small talk with one of the guys that told me his occupation was “transportation.” We made conversation with the limited number of common words in our vocabulary (all of which were in English), discussing the weather and Texas. Every time I told someone I was from Texas, they would reply, “George Bush?” Of course, my politics on George Bush and those that give him his orders overlap nicely with those I spoke with on the streets of Paris.
The man that gave me the 55€ quote for ze shit was back from his endeavor. He gave me the signal to keep things on the down low and we separated from the others. We ended up in a back alley behind a dumpster (don’t you always?) and he handed me a piece of hashish the size of a small cigar or maybe 4 sticks of pain au chocolat merged. I handed him the 55 and he said it would be 75. Knowing it was worth it, I gave up the 20. I patted him on the shoulder and thanked him with a “Merci beaucoup!”
Now, I was in Paris with a huge piece of shit and no way beyond eating it for consumption (I wasn’t about to eat shit). Earlier that week in Paris, I had done my fair share of consumption of other things. There are so so many ways to consume in Paris. First of all, there was the dinner, which started with a basket of bread, and a glass of wine. Next up was the entrée course, which was the salad and/or appetizer. Unlike entrée in English, this word meant “entry” into the gastronomic delight that is dinner in a restaurant in Paris. After you finish that, you get your main course as the feast continues.
Of course, any great dinner includes a great dessert. The French have all the bases covered. My favorite of the week was crème brulee. There is also crème caramel. In the rest of the world, that dessert is known as flan. In France, they have their own flan. I also had some of the best ice cream I’ve ever had. There is no comparison, grass fed Genetically-Modified-Free is the way to go. Also, I tasted the chocolate ice cream, which was the richest I can recall.
I personally have had a mostly-vegetarian diet with occasional fish for the past couple of years. However, restrictions were lifted to partake in the life of a Parisian. The last time I was in Paris, I got recommended-into eating the raw boeuf hamburger that is a French delight. On Monday, this happened to my American coworker. I had duck for two dinners in a row (both of which were eaten around the 23:00 hour. The first was a cut of duck that was pretty much a red meat like any of the larger mammals with its fair share of gristle and fat. I draw the line at gristle and fat, but the meat was great. The next night I ate a leg of duck that was called confit de canard. It was cooked twice to give it that rotisserie-chicken taste. I really liked that, it was probably my favorite dinner all week.
Earlier that Friday, I was taken by a French coworker to buy perfume for my girl back home. We could have gotten an 18% VAT rebate at the Paris de Gaulle Airport. The Value Added Tax is a European standard that includes a fee on all items purchased. Fortunately for consumers, it is included in the posted price when you buy something (no sales tax on top). Also, it takes care of paying the service industry a predictable wage. Therefore, tipping is not required; rather, a rounding-up is customary.
Anyway, you can get duty-free perfume with the rebate. However, in order to get the rebate, you would have to go through a gauntlet that was clearly not documented the day we arrived at the de Gaulle Airport to go home, let alone the fact that NOTHING is clearly documented at that crazy airport, including the way the terminals are numbered. Nevertheless, there was also a possibility of a corporate discount offered through the corporate hierarchy. Neither worked out in the end, but I bought some Parisian stuff which would likely make my lady and my Parisian coworker happy. Throughout that week, our French hostess would give us gifts of French desserts. Our final lunch was at a place that had just about anything you can imagine on a baguette. I got some salmon with lettuce and tomato.
Friday evening… it was time to consume the shit. All I really needed was a lighter. You could burn the edge and it would slowly smoke like incense. I went to the tobacco store and the line was out the door. The guy in front of me bought 5 cheap cigars. I bought one. The cigar was pretty much the same size. There isn’t really any place to smoke shit in Paris, especially at that time. The hotel room seemed risky, but was likely my best choice.
Unfortunately, my decision at that moment was a small garden park sandwiched between the street and a brick wall which behind included a 100 foot drop into the subway train tracks. Worst case police-state scenario, the shit can be thrown into the train tracks below. As the incense burned, people passed by, bustling to get to their Friday Night. In the distance, I heard a siren blare. It was not the same sound as the ambulance siren. It was the police. The siren went away, but the police car parked across the street from the garden. He then put on his lights and I knew it was time to put out the shit. Not wanting to have anything on me, I thought about some options and decided to stash it there at the park. I ended up sliding it through some bricks and behind into a location that may or may not be accessible by future smokers (though I told some coworkers about it later that night).
I casually (but forcefully) light up my crappy cigar and walked the streets back to my hotel to meet my friends. We entered the Metro and arrived at our destination, an Italian pasta restaurant. I somehow ended up with two beers and an aperitif sitting in front of me at the same time through my course-ordering, but the dinner was some good homemade pasta. I didn’t partake in the wine, but my friends passed it between the four of them and, of course, like any French etiquette, when pouring, always poured for someone else first and always left a small glass-worth in the bottle. It often happens that the person to finish it will determine the next round.
After dinner, we went to have a drink at Footsie, a bar that has a price board with all of their drinks fluctuating in value within tolerance. The price of a Kronenburg could go from 4.10 to 6.50 in a span of five minutes. Afterward, we took the Metro to a place with a cover band where the price of a 12-ounce Guinness draft was 9.50€. The band belted out Sweet Home Alabama with a French accent that was unmistakable.
On our way to the Guinness, we walked through a square where a man offered us some shit. At that point, having my fill with the shit, I declined, citing that there was no place to smoke it. At that moment, we all agreed, but after a few hours and a few Guinesses, my friend and I decided to look for him. Not finding him, we began the prudent approach of asking those that might know based on appearance. The first was a group of black men. My French counterpart asked them and they replied in the negative, but laughed as they said to us in French that we only asked them because they were black.
We found a man smoking a cigarette standing next to a car. We asked him and my friend translated. “If we had ze shit, it would be ze best shit around.” I got in the back seat with his friend. He pulled out a small bag of French schwagg and sold it to me for 35€. Now, all we needed for consumption was some papers. We ended up outside of a club and met a guy that was into dark metal and he reminisced of bands from Texas in that genre. I rolled a joint and he rolled a joint. Mine was a tiny pinner made with a single small rolling paper. For his, my counterpart used two papers to create an L-Shaped paper and used that to roll a spliff. He insisted that we insert tobacco and put in some of a fresh cigarette to mix. We passed it around. Of course, my tobacco intolerance made my heart race and gave me that “tobacco rush.” I reminded them of the rush and they told me that the rush was ze shit.
I returned to the tavern with the cover band playing Portishead and they jammed through the night until 5am. At that point, they ended it with “Just a Gigaloo” with a kazoo. I had many conversations with the people around me regarding many things, but one that stuck out was the ways that we represent numbers with our hands throughout the world. The number one (un) is represented by the thumb in France. In the USA, it is the index finger. In Singapore, it is the pinky. All three number systems differ through number 3.
Overall, friendships have been made and culture has been learned by me (note the passive voice in that sentence common by the French speaking English). I’ll always remember that my Parisian counterparts are more interested in the enjoyment of others than themselves. They stuck with us the entire night until we took the Metro back to the hotel room. The metro, of course, ends around 1am during the week and 2am on Friday and Saturday. Fortunately, we had stayed out until after it began again, around 6. I sat in my room for a couple of hours to write most of this, and then got a cab to the Airport. Evidently, the start the meter when you call the cab company in Paris. This dude’s credit card reader was busted, and we had to stop for cash. He told me 50 but I pulled out 60. The meter ran to 55.50 and he dropped us off at the first terminal, thinking I had only 50 (though I forgot to communicate to him about the 60). We had to take the train to the other terminal. The flight from Paris to Dallas was 9.5 hours, and a 7-hour time change. Good times.
Copyright 2013 © R.E.D.
