Expediccionado: Les Femmes Americaines

On Friday I went to French class and it went much better. I am finally catching on and understood most of what was going on, although I didn't demonstrate it very well. At one point the teacher came over to make sure my partner and I were doing okay with the exercise. We understood what we were doing, but didn't understand the question he asked. So he asked whether we understood and we said "no", at which point he painstakingly explained the entire grammatical concept again. Neither of us knew how to say, "It's not that we don't understand the concept, we just didn't understand what you said." Oh well.

After class I headed to Montparnasse to hang out with my old college roommate, Sabrina, and her friend, Hannah, who were in town for a few days. They were staying in a couple of beautiful loft apartments overlooking a great courtyard. Hannah's dad owns the properties and was renovating them for rent. I thought for a brief moment about trying to snatch one up, the quality of the apartments being superior to that of ours. The price was about the same, but a lot less was included in the price of the rent compared to what we have here. Also, our neighborhood really can't be beat. So here we are, still in our same little flat for the time being.

Sabrina, Hannah and I decided to have dinner at home rather than go out to eat. We headed to Monoprix, a supermarket chain and really the only decent shopping on that particular street, and bought a couple of baguettes, several hunks of cheese, some dried sausages and several bottles of wine. I even found some non-alcoholic champagne that actually tasted like champagne rather than sparkling grape juice. It was so believable that after I left, the people who do drink alcohol accidentally finished the bottle without realizing it (well, I suppose that could have had something to do with the amount of wine they had already drunk).

Our bounty in hand, we moved our operation out to the courtyard to enjoy the warm summer evening with some typical French fare.

Le cour

Le petit restaurant

Tall windows reaching up to the second floor illuminate each of the flats.

The garden dinosaur

Nice art in someone's window

Hannah uses her fancy camera and awesome photography skills to capture the beauty of this place.

Sabrina shows off her salad-making skills:

Le table

Saucisse seche

Les fromages!

Clockwise from top: Aged mimolette, Brie, Camembert, Chevre, and Bleu Danois

Les femmes

We ate and drank to our hearts' content and then I headed home. The next morning, we all got up early so that we could go to le Marché aux Puces de la Porte de Vanves, a large open-air flea market in the south end of the city. I left the house around 7:30 in the morning. As soon as I walked out the door onto the street I was smacked in the face by the smell of warm baking bread wafting out of the various boulangeries in the neighborhood. I thought to myself, "I love France."

As I neared the metro station next to the church I noticed that the sun was hitting the top of it in a rather impressive manner. I stopped to take a couple of pictures while the few locals that were awake watched, probably wondering what the hell I was doing being a tourist so early in the morning.

When I got to the apartment at Montparnasee, we sat around drinking coffee for a short while and then ventured out in search of breakfast. We stopped into a small patisserie where I had my first Pain au Chocolat.

If you've never had one of these, it is just a croissant, wet with butter on the outside and filled with a smooth chocolate paste. In short, heaven.

Then we descended into the metro and made our way to our destination. We got there just in time. It was late enough that the stalls were all set up and open but early enough that there wasn't much of a crowd to deal with.

It was a flea market a lot like any you might see in the U.S., catering mainly to antiques, except that in many cases the antiques you would see were far older than anything you might find back home. Most of what we saw certainly originated in France or at least Europe, but there were plenty of vendors with a wide variety of African artifacts as well. Here is just a small sample of what we saw. It took us a full two hours to walk the entire market.

Assorted glass, metal and wooden trinkets

Umbrellas and hats shield you from the rain while the vases catch it as it falls.

Old knowledge

Keys and a saucy bottle cork in the form of a lady in the upper right corner. If you put this in a bottle and pour it, the liquid comes out of her nipples.

The darndest things

A nice painting (yes, French women really do look like that)

Coins, magnifiers, letter openers, spectacles, tobacco pipes, scissors and bottle openers

The cutest chair in the world. Unfortunately, it was made for a kid so my butt would not fit in it.

Commemorative plates

Framed

Charlie's birthday present: An antique painted coffee grinder.

After our flea market outing, I headed home to prepare for Charlie's return after he had been gone for five days to southern France. I picked up a small candied fruit tart at the patisserie on the way home to celebrate his birthday. Later Sabrina and Hannah came over and had the same idea about picking up some sweets on the way over. When they arrived we made some of the good Guatemalan coffee we bought last week and essentially just had butter and sugar for dinner. It was great.