Going Native

When last we visited with our intrepid travelers, they had just come home from a wonderful evening at Cafe Prosper in the Place de la Nation on Monday night, filled with the fully fulfilling fullness that can only be fully achieved with new draperies.

Tuesday, we went out in the neighborhood to get stuff for dinner. I had something special in mind, and that's exactly what we wound up with -- something special.

Boudin blanc is a sausage "made from white meats", as it says in my French culinary dictionary. This is to keep it fully separated from its evil pseudo-twin, Boudin, which is blood sausage, which is not made just from white cells.

Veal and its close friends constitute major portions of boudin blanc. We found a butcher who made his own, and has won many, many awards for the best boudin blanc in Paris. We purchased two -- one with truffles, the other with veal sweetbreads. While the prices seem very exorbitant ($15 - $22 a pound), they aren't, really -- one sausage is enough for dinner, and they are about $5 each.

I had already posed the "wine" problem with Renaud, our wine guy, and he offered up a fruit-forward Burgundy, "to be drunk slightly chilled". The sausages are poached in simmering (not boiling -- don't want to burst the skins) milk, turned over, and when they read an internal temperature around 130 degrees, are removed from the milk and rinsed and patted dry. I made a vegetable melange of fresh zucchini, mushrooms, fresh tomatoes, shallots, onions and garlic that was properly spicy to set off the fairly bland sausages.

Once everything was ready, I fired up the grill pan and striped/crispied up the sausages. With Dijon mustard, they were extraordinary. The wine was a perfect accompaniment to the sausages.

We tried something new today -- we rode the busses. Same pass that works on the Metro; they have a GPS system built in so that a display on the bus tells you exactly how long it is to a stop. I was very surprised that they were faster than the Metro, primarily because there was a bus that went right where we needed to go without a 6 block walk to transfer.

We went out by the Pasteur Institute, to the Oceanography Museum. Not on our first try, but on our second. The first place we went to, rather foolishly, was labeled the Oceanography Institute, and had the exact address of the museum, but the young man was genuinely baffled when I approached the front desk and asked for two tickets. As well he might be, seeing as he is the research librarian. In my defense, as soon as we saw the stairway into the building, I said "I didn't expect this to be here", thinking it was around the corner. The museum, in fact, WAS around the corner.

Not much of a museum -- I'm sure they do some fine work with children -- I know this, because we arrived at the same time as 35 adorable kindergarten-aged French children with name tags strung over their necks, hanging in front of them like bibs, with first and LAST name. They were very, very active.

We went in to watch the movies. They were in French (imagine!), and were between 15 and 25 years old. They involved all manner of odd things, including the distribution of tube worms, and the walking patterns of Atlantic lobsters, which were demonstrated by suspending a rather irritated lobster in a stirrup-hanger gizmo and putting him with his legs just touching a treadmill. Regular, slow-motion, stop action, and reverse photography were simply riveting, until they were replaced with sonograms, or "voice prints", of each of the lobster's legs as it walked. Protractors and retractors, etc., etc.

Then we watched shrimps have sex. It was mercifully brief.

We saw some static displays of intertidal areas ("le littoral ), which sadly did not include the marine snails Kelli ate a couple of weeks ago, the bulots. Then, we went shopping to purchase a Christmas gift for our daughter, Maureen. The best part of that was that it was I who knew Maureen's sizes........we'd tell you what we bought, but if we did, she would pick this Blog to read (she's only read one so far on the whole trip) and it would spoil what I'm sure will be quite a surprise for her........I WILL tell you, it's not new draperies.

Came home, had dinner, watched a couple of episodes of Nip/Tuck on the slingbox, and turned in rather early, as Wednesday is the day the Louvre is open from 9 am to 9:45 pm, and we planned to hit it early, hard, and often.

Wednesday morning. Alarm went off, Kelli got up, showered, and made coffee. I got up, got into the hot, hot shower, and shampooed, then soaped up fully. Just at the instant that I was reaching around to put the soap back into the tray, the hot water went off.

All the way off.

As in, from 110 degrees to 56 degrees, in about two seconds. I know how cold it was, because I tested it with an instant-read thermometer. 56 degrees -- that's cold enough to require a wet suit.

I had to choose between hypothermia and slippery stinky soapiness for the day. I was all for slippery stinkiness, but someone messed with the damned butterfly ballots in Florida and hypothermia stole the election. George Costanza knows of what he speaks, folks. Shrinkage, boy, howdy!

I dried off (pretty quickly, since the temperature in the hot-water-heated bathroom was plummeting) and went out to the kitchen to look at the heater.

It sure was off. We called our downstairs neighbor, Martin, who cheerfully came up, spent an hour trying to get the heater to re-light, then finally called the company that installed it, asking for a service person, since there was no hot water OR heat in the house. They were properly abashed that the system they had just pronounced "healthy" two months ago was not functioning, and offered to drop by sometime Thursday afternoon.

Martin also told us of the building's history -- 100 years old, it is the third and final building from the street frontage -- "built for poor people, it has no elevator. It was built to house the cadets at the Ecole Militaire, with cold-water flats (boy, we now understand just what that phrase means)." It was built at the same time they were tearing down a train station, and it "creatively re-uses" many of the materials from the station -- including paving stones, bricks, cobblestones, and rails, in its polyglot wall composition.

So, off we went to the Louvre, right on schedule at 12:30.

We saw a good deal of the Louvre last year, but we found out today how lucky we were -- we saw the crown jewels in the Apollo Salon which had JUST re-opened a week or two before, and we got a sunny day to dazzlingly light them up, and we took gazillions of photos. We also stood in line for a while (less than 20 minutes, which is no time at all) to see the Mona Lisa, eventually got to the front of the line, and took terrifyingly bad photos of a small painting displayed behind bullet-proof plastic that is thicker than the painting is wide.

On this visit, we learned that, because certain of our co-visitors over the years (I won't name any names, but about half are American, and the other half anchor down the Pacific Ocean's opposite coast) are apparently too stupid to understand a two-foot-square pictogram of a camera with a flash bulb going off, with a huge slash through the middle . . . well, now it is forbidden to take ANY photographs whatsoever of ANY of the paintings in the Denon wing, which includes the entire Italian masterpiece collection. Thank you for playing, please accept these lovely pointy shoes with the bells on them and this long, tall, cone-shaped cap as our parting gifts, you jackasses. It's not bad enough that it's just plain rude (and ruins the photos most of the time) to use flash, it also fades the colors of the artwork, which is only important until YOU have seen them, then, who gives a tinker's damn, right?

So, anyway, we decided to go see the Medieval Louvre exhibit, and the History of the Louvre exhibit. Hot Diggety Damn! The first place we went, the History of the Louvre (the largest palace in Europe, with about 800 years of history to learn about), is CLOSED ON WEDNESDAY! Of Freaking Course it is! It's just the sort of thing people would go look at on a day when they could take 12 hours to view the museum, so let's close it then!

Having gotten our obligatory daily closure out of the way, we went to the Medieval Louvre exhibit, where we were taken underground to see the base of the battlements, the walls, the wells, and even one of the old rooms from the 13th century fortress that started it all. It was a lot of fun, especially in the final room, where they displayed cases of things discovered when they dug up the courtyard to build I.M. Pei's magnificent glass pyramid entry. One of the things they found was a golden ceremonial helmet from King Henry the something or other, Fourth, I believe.

MEA CULPA, MEA CULPA, MEA MAXIMA CULPA. Your loyal correspondent, not having married into the Medici family, or the Henry family, has been mixing his monarchs. Catherine de Medici married Henri II, NOT Marie de Medici, who, irritatingly enough, married Henri IV.

Even more irritatingly, Henri II was a Valois king, a member of the Angouleme branch of the Valois. He was killed to end his reign, but not by an assassin, as I earlier reported - instead, he died of wounds inflited on him during a tournament by Montgomery, Captain of his Guard. The joust had been organized to celebrate the marriage of his daughter Elisabeth fo Philip II of Spain. There is no word on who wound up paying for the wedding when Liz's daddy proved unable to sign the tab after the final waltz.

Henri's third son, Henry III, was the last of the Valois line -- his father had started the Wars of Religion (Catholics vs. Protestants -- the Irish are latecomers to THAT party), and he, after a short interregnum of 16 years after his father's death, took the throne and continued to prosecute those wars. His extravagance earned him nearly immediate and widespread disfavor. He also proved adept at making enemies -- he not only fought the Protestants (supported by Denmark and England), he also turned on the Roman Catholics (supported by Spain, whose king was married to his sister). This nasty business, coupled with the fact he was so unpopular he had no heirs, led to the accession to the throne of Henry IV in 1610, after Henry III had recognized Hank-Four as his rightful successor (Hank-Four was leader of the Huguenots, the Catholic faction that Hank-Three supported). Hank-Three was then nearly immediately stabbed to death by a Jacobin priest (Roman Catholic).

After wearing out his first queen, Margaret of Valois, the royal widower married Marie de Medici, thus rather completing a semi-incestuous circle dating back to Henry II. It was all right, though, because he was not really a Valois, he was a Bourbon, and the founder of the house of Bourbon, the final (and current) royal dynasty of France. It was THIS rapscallion who was assassinated by Ravillac -- married to Marie, as I believe I earlier reported, but your debt of culinary gratitude goes to Catherine, not Marie.

Now, back to our story.

The helmet, found in the rubble, has been pounded out and put on display, but also used to fashion a casting to make a new one that looks like the old one would have. There's a photo for your enjoyment.

After that, we did Egypt. Great Thutmose IV, we did Egypt. We did about 30 ROOMS of Egypt. Did you know that Egyptian houses had windows? I didn't. No glass, but frames and wooden stuff inside the frames, kinda like bars. They were on hinges. We saw all sorts of things that were truly interesting, but Egypt isn't my thing, and 2 hours of it left me nearly numb. It also left me as far away from the coat check (where our sandwiches were laughing at us) as we could get. We went in reverse order through the Middle East, starting in medieval Crete and working our way back to Assyria, Sidon and Tyre, and all their happy deserty friends. There is a colossal column from a theater of about 3,000 years ago which I tried to photograph -- you would have been the first people in the world to see that photo, but, alas, it did not come out. Welcome to France.

We ate. We bought a thimble of orange juice and a bottle of some peculiar liquid they think is water here in France -- these folks have great taste, but they don't know from squat on water -- give me some Italian bottled water any day -- tastes sweet, quenches your thirst -- the stuff they sell here is just like the damned Paris tap water -- 200 grains of hardness from calcium, which makes it taste like you are licking the inside of a brass pot. And, both the thimble and the unsatisfying bottle of water checked in at just $7.

From there, we assaulted the second floor of one of the other wings, the Richielieu. We did serious justice to the northern school of classical painting - your Germans, and your Dutch Masters. Whole rooms of Rembrandts. Van Eyck's, Hieronymous Bosch, etc. We found, this time, the audioguides and rented them -- we basically blew off any room that didn't have something on the audioguide -- and probably listened to descriptions of 150 paintings this way. We are now frighteningly uppity about Dutch and German paintings, and can tell you why nearly all Dutch hunting-scene still lifes full of food also include a watch or clock.

From there, instead of taking the final hour to try to flog another floor of the joint, we left, rode up to the top of the Champs Elysees, and took the promised photos of the christmas lights and general foofaraw at the car dealers, as promised earlier. Those photos are included for your edification.

Karen called before the crack of dawn to talk about the water heater and tell me what to do when the plumber came.

So, I stayed home today to make sure the plumber would know what to do when he/she got here.

Scheduled to arrive "after 4" -- we called everyone on Karen's list to try to have a translator here, but to no avail -- oddly, everyone seems to be gainfully employed in the afternoon. Karen's delightfully dry-witted British friend Alison, however, offered to be available by phone for any required help.

Would but that I had needed her.

As the 4 o'clock hour rolled around, we were sweet-smelling, having taken remarkable sponge baths in the large bathroom sink -- I heated a couple of gallons of water on the stove, put half in the sink and used the other half for rinsing -- that "frivolous" instant-read thermometer I brought along was invaluable, as we did not scald ourselves on the water.

At 4:45, I called Martin to ask if I should begin to get obsessively nervous about the lack of vigorous knuckle-rapping on our door. He said no, not to worry until 6 at the earliest.

So, at 6:20, I called him, and he called them, and their answering maching said "what are you, nuts? It's 6:40, we're already home. Fuhgeddaboudit."

Alison has kindly offered us the use of her shower "if the situation gets desperate", and she appreciated when I said that I'd try to come by a day before it got "desperate."

On the other hand, I can just hope and pray that I get to sit next to a French plumber for the entire flight (non-stop) home next week.

Cooked some parts of dinner, sent Kelli out on her own to get the rest, since she would have been no match for the mythical plumber, Monseiur Godot. Had her go get two baguettes tradition and a cooked poulet fermier, or free-range chicken. The butcher played patty-cake with her over the counter, then cleverly slipped into her bag a roasted ramphoryncus. Until now, thought to have been extinct for millions of years, this flying dinosaur proved to be the utterly perfect cap to an utterly perfect day -- no touring, no museums, did not go out into the first sunshine in three weeks, no shower, no heat, no plumber, and, finally, a dinner which featured a piece of poultry whose breast meat was a shiny chestnut-mahogany color approximately 1/4" deep into the flesh.

Mighty damned tasty, though.