That's "Master" Garcia to You.

The summer has been fairly quiet. Charlie has been working at his internship and I have been writing my thesis and doing freelance translation. These activities have left little room for much exploration in and around our beautiful city. We're hoping to remedy that very soon though. Likewise, our social situation has been affected by the fact that most of our friends have either moved away or been vacationing elsewhere. They are just now trickling back in with the rest of the locals and/or students.

There have been a few notable events over the last couple of months though, many of them involving cooking, as you can probably imagine. For example, one day Charlie decided he was going to make a duck pie and voila! Suddenly, there was a delicious duck pie on my table. He does this sort of thing for fun, people.

One of the most entertaining experiences we had was when we babysat our friend's cat, Sriracha, for three weeks. This is the same cat that I rescued several months ago after she spent a few days trapped and starving in our apartment complex. She has since been enriching the life of Charlie's former classmate, Brian.

Anyway, Sriracha is adorable and playful, but also very mischievous and sometimes downright naughty. I had to put up bird netting on our windows because the last time she was here she attempted to jump from one of them down into the courtyard below. Later, I had to apply hot sauce to the bird netting to keep her from chewing holes in it. Within her first couple of days here, she also took the liberty of restructuring a roll of our toilet paper.

 I made you something.

This was the least of her many offenses, which included pooping in the bathtub, clawing the furniture deliberately (in retaliation for being scolded about doing something else), jumping onto high shelves clumsily and falling off, taking their contents with her, waking us up by bringing her string-on-a-stick toy into the bed or by running full speed across our bodies or attacking our feet, running full speed through the house for no apparent reason, using humans as claw-absorbing spring boards, etc.

But then she would do things like this:

 All is forgiven.

Even some of her mischief was cute. For example, she thought sweeping the floor was a fun game during which her job was to attack the broom and lay in the pile of dirt that I had neatly arranged. She also like to supervise dishwashing by standing on the countertop and peering into the sink. This supervision extended into bath time when she would watch us through the shower door for a while and then lay on the bathmat to patiently await our exit (probably for a chance to poop in the tub again). For her full-speed running fits, I devised a bullfighting game in which I would taunt her by holding up a blanket she liked to attack and she would dive into it head first, bite and kick my hands and then shoot out of it at full speed and into the next room. There was never a dull moment.

Chillin' in the laundry basket.

Charlie's 28th birthday arrived and I failed to make it a very special affair, mostly because we didn't really have any money to celebrate it properly. I had purchased a Spanish tapas meal for two via Groupon a few months back so we decided to use that. They were stingy with the portions, even by Parisian standards, and the food was the usual bland French interpretation of foreign cuisine of which there is no shortage in this city. The service sucked and the location was a pain in the ass. After a quick 30 minutes or so, several of which were spent waiting for the bill, we bailed. The one entertaining event that evening was watching this group of idiotic tourists attempt to jaywalk (or run) across the Etoile.

Only 12 streets converging at a single point. No big deal.

The following day, Charlie's old friend Nick arrived in town. We wandered around Paris, smoking cigars, ate dinner and visited the Eiffel Tower with all of the obnoxious tourists. The crowds were annoying, but the sites were nice.

Nick and Charlie at Robuchon.

And where there are cigars and Charlie, you know there is Smoking in the Park!

Smoking in the Park - Episode 9 from Marie Garcia on Vimeo.

That weekend we decided to have a proper birthday celebration for Charlie by having a couple of his classmates over for dinner. Despite my insisting that it was highly unorthodox, Charlie made his own birthday cake.

Fancy strawberry arrangement requires tweezers.

Meticulous

Vanilla beans as decoration

Michael and Charlie rummage through the utensil drawer while Leslie happily makes salmon burgers.

Charlie's amuse-bouche: tomatoes stuffed with cucumber, mozzarella, arugula and pesto sauce.

Smoking nun birthday card

A Dexter action figure to match his Dexter knife

"Look happy."

Cake afire

Charlie stretches Sriracha

Michael digests.

The following weekend Brian came back from the U.S. and retrieved his cat, who proceeded to make his life hell. It was decided that the best medicine would be tacos. Michael and Brian introduced us to a proper Mexican-run taco stand only a couple of metro stops from where we live (dangerous)! After collecting our treasure we moseyed down to the nearby canal to enjoy it.

Burron and torta

Nopalitos quesadilla

The following week Michael left Paris for good so another of Charlie's classmates, Margaret, hosted a little going away dinner at her apartment. Michael will be missed!

Margaret and me with smiley faces

Days later, more cooking ensued. One lazy Saturday morning, the two of us found ourselves with growling tummies and no food in the house. Charlie resolved to make omelets. Within 20 minutes or so he had gone to the grocery store, come back and presented me with this:

Mushrooms and emmental

The next day, he became similarly inspired about having some steak tartare and whipped up this little masterpiece of potential food-borne illness.

Yes, that is a raw egg yolk atop a hunk of mostly raw meat.

The summer came to a close with me handing in my thesis to my advisors and Charlie continuing at his internship with plans for a second one in a couple of months. Shortly thereafter I departed to the U.S. for a visit. Stay tuned for the next special "culture shock" installment of this blog.