With my recently renewed antisocialness, I ended up feeling bad that all I do is read and walk around Paris. My first practical made me realize how badly I needed to learn French. The chef would give us instructions on what to do or how to do something, and I'd always have to whisper to a fellow student, "What'd he say?" Plus, the chef was a really friendly guy and had I know the language, I coulda befriended him as well. So I asked some of the students what they did to learn and they all just said that I should talk to anyone and everyone. Thus, my realization that being a loner may not be the best way to capitalize on my time here.
So I set off to an area I had read about, a little market area about a 15 minute walk from my place and right next to the Eiffel Tower. I sat down at a small cafe that specialized in crepes and struck up conversation with the family that owned the place. They were really friendly and it turned out really great! (The lady forced me to have a dessert crepe after my savory one, and by forced means that she gave it to me for free!) We struggled to get our points across but we talked about percentages of cocoa in chocolate, so I'm sure something I said must have been getting across. I figure, if I keep up with this, 3 months later I may not be absolutely horrendous at French. I'm even trying to use different tenses!!
On Saturday, a friend from school (Merrie) and I decided to go to a farmer's market that is only open on Wednesdays and Saturdays. We really were there just to look at it so we were chatting away, walking past the booths. All of a sudden, I stopped listening to her and started staring at this basket of little, dark brown, mound-like objects. Truffles!! We were both so shocked because we had never seen a truffle before. So we decided to buy it and decided to make dinner out of it and had a little dinner party. Since Merrie and I are both pastry students, we had our cuisine friend come over and handle dinner.
So what chef students do for fun at a dinner party? Well...apparently it's "impossible" to swallow a teaspoon full of cinnamon powder. Everyone was thinking, "how can something like that be impossible?" We got three of the kids to do these "cinnamon shots" of which 2 ran to the sink to spit it out and came back saying, "Oh my god, it really is impossible. Your mouth is immediately dry right when you put it in your mouth." One kid actually swallowed the whole thing after struggling, but can't really stand the sight or smell of cinnamon anymore. Traumatizing, to say the least. Try it sometime. Maybe as an icebreaker at a party?
2 comments:
I had a really bad taste in my mouth after reading this...;)
Your last entry was so random. I expected you to go on about truffles or the cuisine student's cooking ... and then when you started the topic of cinnamon, I thought you'd go on to tell us how you and your friend decided to try to shots ... but it was very anti-climactic.
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