Sunset beams over Paris

From our beautiful Paris balcony, this beautiful sunset on our last weekend here.

Today is also a very special day for the long - awaited LHC. (link here) The first beam will happen today at 9:o6 Paris time. There is live coverage all day. The Paris news has had been reporting about it for the last few days. Yesterday there were three articles in Le Monde. It's an exciting day for the scientists.

This is my last entry reporting about Paris and France from Paris as I leave in a few hours or as the French say, I will be starting my rentree. Undoubtedly at home we will still be basking in the afterglow and there is still is so much to tell! I hope I find the time to share those stories with you. The things I know I will miss the most can't be packed in a suitcase.

Signing off at 8:11AM.
A bientot!

Start Spreading the News!

Start spreading the news, Im leaving Wednesday!
I want to stay apart of it - Par-ee, Par-ee
These vagabond shoes, are longing to stay
Riding the metro every which way. Par-ee, Par-ee

I wanna watch strangers in the park, soak in the art
And find I'm on top of the Eiffel!

These Eiffel tower blues, are sparkly at night
I'll savor every last bit of it in old Paree, Paree!
If I can eat creme brulee and soak in champagne
It's been fun in - Par-ee Par-ee

Credits - Inspiration given to Frank Sinatra's NY, NY.

You can find a little bit of New York in Paris but the city does sleep. After 7PM you have to travel to the airport's 24 hour grocery store to buy milk or any other forgotten item or wait until 9AM tomorrow. There are laws on how many hours people can work and this is taken very seriously.

To make you feel top of the heap there is nothing else like the champagne bar at the top of the Eiffel Tour. You feel you are in the heart of it from the top seeing that white city on a sunny afternoon. On the way down you can take your tea on the first floor, sunbathing on the teak lounge chairs and palm trees and the view will continue to remove any of the blues that may be left in you.

The Eiffel is blue with the stars on it for the next six months in celebration that France is the President of the E.U. I call this the Eiffel's blue period. On the hour in the evenings for 10 minutes the sparkles go! It's the most sparkling thing I have ever seen!

Martian Invasion!

Beware! Martian men and women wearing green suits and ties may invade the Paris metro, bus or tram you are on! As the tram or bus stop, the martian gang will swarm the entrances like bees to honey looking for passengers without a valid ticket. In an almost orchestrated dance they board and demand you show a valid boarding ticket. Some escape and some do not. These martians will lurk in the metro halls and block all the unsuspecting humans until a valid ticket is produced. None can escape their clutches. Even those who start to run the opposite direction. I had watched many attack on the metro and trams. It's quite a site to see! A few times this summer, J. & I have had our close encounters and with their fancy machines checked our Navigo passes. Luckily we passed and we were set free.

Gotta Share an Eclair! - Act 2: From Gilded Eclairs to the Golden Arches

This blog entry is in honor of the new little one in the family, Madeline! (for those not in the know, my cousin had a baby early last week.)

On Saturday, J. & I metroed over to Place de la Madeleine to review the Fouchon eclair weekend. See previous blog entry Gotta Share an Eclair. In summary the eclairs' taste and presentation lived up to its promise but the in-house dining experience was disappointing. Fouchon's is an upscale gourmet shop where all the food is displayed like art and treated the same.


After a week of dreaming about the aromas of fresh baked eclairs like in an American donut shop when the donuts are fresh out of the fryer, it was disappointing to enter through the pink tinted sliding glass doors and smell something akin to the humidity of museum air. The pink tinted sliding glass doors was like looking through rose colored glasses. So what the shop lacked in aromas, they made up for in the presentation. The eclairs sat as art protected behind a clear plexi-glass counter-top like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre behind her bullet proof shield. This eclair art was priced like art too and cost as much as our bottle of Head & Shoulder's at $7/piece.



For breakfast we ordered a coconut ganache eclair, chocolate mousse eclair and gilded eclair! I don't believe I have ever had the opportunity to eat gold. We decided to eat in the outdoor street - side cafe with pink tables and chairs. The eclairs were laid out on a pink plastic tray and we were given two silver plastic forks. It just didn't seem right to be eating an eclair frosted with gold upon a plastic tray and with plastic forks. It just didn't do justice to the beautiful regal eclair. That's all the gold did for the eclair too. The gold did not add a metal crunch nor add any flavor. The fork easily cut through like a lightly frosted cake. The taste of the eclairs was good but not out of this world.

For lunch we ordered a chicken curry and smoked salmon with peas to go. Each eclair was crated like a piece of art into their own special pink boxes and wrapped in pretty packages.

Afterwards, we walked around Place de la Madeleine. It's a square with a big church in the center surrounded by upscale gourmet food shops. The front steps of the church are flowers. All around the square are upscale shops of mostly gourmet foods from mustard shops to truffle shops. You can find 5000 Euro phones and truffles for 490 an ounce. There was a wedding at the church and we watched the bride and groom arrive in a white old fashioned Rolls with a green striped Lotus and red Ferrari close behind. From the steps of the church you can look down the Boulevard to the gold topped Egyptian obelisk on Place de la Concorde and further along the road to Invalid's gold dome. The sun really made them shine!

In the morning it was gilded eclairs and gold domes and in the afternoon it was back home to the golden arches of the Denfert -Rochereau Metro stop. Behind the pointed golden arches of the metro sign is the rounded golden arches of McDonald's. Here you can order via the kiosks shown below, log on to the free wifi or choose between beer or Pierier as your beverage. You can order the American, Canadian, British or Australia burgers, regular fries or thick fries, ketchup or pommes-frites sauce which is a sweet mayonnaise. Among the desert options are chocolate mouse and citron topped pies. The burgers come with a spicy sauce as opposed to plain ketchup. J. said he just read an article in the NYTimes that said almost everything in the French MickeyD's is made in France. This might explain why the price tag of eating at McDonald's is like $25 for two meal deals. In perspective of of the eclair breakfast which did not include a beverage or a side dish only fancy boxes, this felt like quite a deal.













This is only one weekend's food adventures in Paris. It only gets better from here! So more to come on the food adventures in Paris this summer.

Blessed by the Brand New Bishop

Friday night I decided to head out to Notre Dame just to watch the lights go on. I love watching the city lights as the sun sets. There is that magical point where the lights of the city and the light of the setting sun equal in luminosity. At that moment it feels like time has stopped. This moment makes me smile and count my blessings. This night was especially nice with a beautiful sunset. It was seredipidy that I had picked this night. It also was the night that two new auxiliary Bishops of Paris were being ordained at Notre Dame. There were Monseigneur Eric de Moulins-Beaufort and Monseigneur Renauld de Dinechin. As I arrived at Notre Dame, I had run into some security and barricades but thought it was preparation for the Pope's visit next Friday, Sept. 12th. I had no idea that this event was occurring. The angelic choir accompanied by Phantom of the Opera meets new age organ music flooded the outside courtyard making this moment truly mystical.

From the back of the courtyard I spotted light spilling out from the monstrous doors. These doors are not normally open. I approached the doors and at the gate I easily peered inside to watch the mass. Inside there were T.V. screens on the pillars so all could see, 12 men in red chasubles near the gold alter and the congregation all dressed up. If I had thought to bring a radio, I could have listened to the mass on the Notre Dame radio station. The bells started ringing and a parade of grey and black clothed nuns,
priests in white robes wearing red or rainbow stoles and Bishops with red chasubles and diamond studded or embroidered mitre's strolled through the doors. There was clapping and cheering as the two new Bishops emerged from church with crosiers in hand and mitre's on their heads. Everyone gathered around to receive a blessing including me! I was blessed by the new Bishop without a beard in the pictures below.

It was a picture worth a thousand words as nuns with smiles cheek to cheek looked up to the new bishop, kissed him and then were blessed. Oh, to have been a little angel to fly up above and snap a photo of that moment. It would have spoken for me.

Macaroon Mania

When I hear the word macaroon, I think of those baked caramelized coconut confections. In fact when I lived in Chicago, Au Bon Pain, a self-proclaimed French sandwich shop, was my favorite spot to treat myself to a tennis ball sized coconut cranberry chocolate dipped macaroon. They were half price after 6PM. I highly recommend them if you have not tried one.

So it was intriguing to me to find that macaroons in France in no way resembled those sold at Au Bon Pain. The macaroons (macaron in French) displayed in the patisserie windows were round jam or frosted filled little cakes the colors of a merry-go-around. Sometimes they had a little bling of sprinkled sugar. They sat on the shelves of the window like the sugared candy dots on the paper strip. Which was the true one? Which was the false one? I really wanted to try one of these mysterious macaroons.



My first taste of the French macaroon was at the famous Laduree (pretty pics available on their website) on Place de Madeleine. My friend Sophie and I sampled a plate of six petite macaroons. As the French would say, each one was exotically "perfumed" with violet, chocolate, pistachio, strawberry, coffee and tea. It was love at first taste. I had to learn more and learn how to make them for home.

I didn’t have to go far to get the recipe. Among the 20 sushi cookbooks on our bookshelves at home the only other cookbook was one on making macaroons called Lecon macarons. It has a lot of great demonstration photos and holds the 10 secrets to making great macaroons. The recipe is all in grams except for the liquid measurements. As far as I can tell the the recipe call for a big spoon and little spoon but not anything as precise as teaspoon or tablespoon measurement. I kind of confirmed this my friend,Chris, who has taken extensive French cooking courses in Paris. If I get more information on this I will be sure to let you know.

The bookstores are filled with cookbooks dedicated to the macaroons. There is even one of those gorgeous coffee table cookbooks with amazing photos of the macaroons called Un amour de macaron by Stephane Glacier. Since I share his name, I took this as sign that his books had to be good. This was further confirmed by the fact that Stephane Glacier was awarded the Meilleur Ouvrier de France. (more about it wiki) This is highly coveted award for the best craftsman through-out France and you carry the title for the rest of your life. If I read the intro to the coffee table book correctly, I think it said his specialty was the macaroon.

Most of the recipe books I skimmed had a brief history of the macaroon. The macaroon is thought to be first made by monks in abbeys in Italy. Catherine de Medici brought them to France when she got married to the King and this made them popular with the French royalty. The macaroon of the royalty was only an almond flavored little cake. I was told I could find the traditional macaroons in the campagne, the countryside. I had the pleasure of finding the treasured traditional macaroon in Yvoire, France, a medieval town on the shores of Lake Geneva. Thus the search to find the true French macaroon ended. I think they are my favorite!


According to an Elle magazine article in the spring 2008, the macaroon mania in Paris was revived by a gourmand’s blog entry entitled Desperate Macaron Girls. (link to english version) They were looking for a recipe to make the perfect macaroon in their own kitchens. The French are not the only ones mad about the macaroon as evidenced by the fact that French blog entry was recently translated into English. Who knew a blog entry could set a world wide revival of the macaroon. Has macaroon mania hit your neck of the woods? I might not have to learn to make my own if macaroon mania hits my neck of the woods. Let me know if you see them!

Oxford Style

Photo descriptions:
1st row - bridge like the one in Venice, Bodleian Library, All Soul's College
2nd row - view of street from top of St.Mary's tower, sundial,Christ Church college where filming of Harry Potter took place
3rd row - Radcliffe Camera, Queen's College where we stayed, the modern physics building

On August 17^th – 20^th, we had the great fortune to go and visit Oxford, England for four days to see some long time Chicago friends and J. could collaborate with some folks at the university. My impression of Oxford after my four days there is that it’s a town dripping in tradition and Cotswold limestone buildings with spiky spires that surround luscious green grass gardens that you are not allowed to walk on for fear of being kicked out.

We were being hosted by someone at the university. So, in following the Oxford tradition, they put us up in the senior lecturer guest room at Queen’s College. Queen’s college is 700 years old but thankfully our room was of the 21^st century and quite charming overlooking a church that has been on permanent loan as a library to another college and a cemetery where the gravestones are so worn you can’t read them any longer. There was a wedding in this graveyard one afternoon. I never did figure out who exactly was loaning the church. It was a luxurious room with a bathtub you could lay down in.

Photo description: (J. on his way to the physics dept. passed by the church we see from the window of our room)

Photo descriptions:

1st row - note about Queen's college, chalk graffiti on Christ Church college about who won the
rowing competitions, Christ Church dining room set for Harry Potter and inspiration for Alice in Wonderland,

2nd Row - old graffiti scratched on the door objecting to new elected school leader, view from top of University Church St. Mary's, the buttery!

3rd Row - St. Frideswide window, local saint of Oxford, in Christ Church cathedral; our room in Queen's college; funny sculpture outside of Oxford theater.

The University Church

Churches are a significant part of Oxford history as I learned while
touring University Church, St. Mary’s. Here you can climb the tower and pier out across the Oxford, spirescape and into the grass garden of All Soul’s College. (photo college 1, first row third photo) This church is where Oxford began. Scholars adopted this place to hold their lectures and great debates over religion. The church was home to Oxford’s first library. Students and scholars lived in houses surrounding the church. A couple of centuries later it became the place to receive your diploma and university government. It dawned on me that many other great institutions started out as divinity schools like the Sorbonne, Harvard and the University of Chicago. Religious studies had a vast influence on these scholarly institutions.

The Colleges (39 in total)

After visiting I now believe I better understand the spirit of the college system used at UCSC. Though not true at UCSC, at Oxford overtime wealthy people sponsored the building of colleges to serve as scholarly centers within themselves to boost up the education of their local pastors or to leave their mark on the world. The college buildings are built with mood ring like Cotswold limestone. Depending on the mood of the weather and the light the buildings go from pale white to sunset pinks. These buildings surround a courtyard garden of grass in which in you cannot walk upon but only stare at or is it for contemplation purposes? I don’t understand a garden with only grass but I found many of them walking around Oxford.

The students would affiliate themselves with a college where there were such perks as having a porter to clean the rooms and make the beds. So why are they looking so glum in this photo?

Each college must also raise their own money to maintain itself. Hey Bill Gates why not start a new college? Each college has dorms, a library, dining hall, chapel, and a room called the buttery located between the dining hall and the kitchen.

Buttery

What is the buttery? My interest was particularly peaked b/c there is famous bakery in SC called the Buttery. Is it possible the Buttery in SC is named after the butteries I saw in Oxford? I saw butteries everywhere in the colleges. There was even a pastry and sandwich shop called the Buttery in downtown Oxford. One day at our tomato, egg and baked bean breakfast, we asked a very friendly young lady waitress about the buttery at Queen’s College. She said the buttery was once a place where students would go and get wine and beer to drink and to mark of their name at meal times. Today the room is only used by the wait staff to sit and take a break and store extra things like silverware and non-alcoholic beverages.

Other Buttery Facts to butter you up -

• Ale and wine were the water of the middle ages so I guess the students would need it.
  
• “The word buttery has nothing to do with "butter", but comes from old French "boterie" and the Latin "botaria", meaning "cask or bottle". “
• The person watching over the buttery was called the butler.
• The buttery was a central aspect of medieval castles and manor houses in England to store drinks and other household provisions and acted like a today’s pantries.
• Dictionary.com has a brief and useful definition under number 2. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/buttery

It’s still kind of vague for me if the Buttery could transition from medieval wine shop to modern day bakeries. I will have to do more research on the use of the buttery as a pantry. Any buttery scholars out there?

Meal time protocol. (photo Queen's college dining room.)

Where you are in the pecking order determines where you sit in the dining room. We were seated at the head table for breakfast. This is a table at the far end of the dining room that sits a bit raised up. This table is positioned perpendicular to the other tables which are arranged lengthwise of the room in long line. Christ Church dining hall(not shown to the left) is famed for inspiring some of the Alice in Wonderland events and was used during the filming of Harry Potter. During the school year some colleges require that robes be worn and the scholars sit on one side of the table and the students on the other side. They stand say prayers and then eat. It’s a rule that when you go to sit down you sit down next to a person and not leave any empty chairs between you and another person already seated at the table. We met a very interesting visiting scholar doing research at the Bodleian Library on sheet music of silent films.

The Library

The Bodleian library is where you can find a chalkboard that Einstein wrote upon. Next door is the Radcliffe Camera building, the gateway to the original science collection located under the streets around the square. I heard from a tourist guide that a book is checked out once every 16 years as it now holds mostly ancient manuscripts.

Oxford Time

You hear all types of bells around town on the hour and off the hour. It’s charming for a short stay but I would hate to live next door to one of these bells and I think it might be quite difficult to find a place faraway. When visiting Christ Church Cathedral Oxford the brochure reads, “Cathedral time is five minutes later than standard time.” Therefore if the choir sings at 6PM I think this means to go at 6:05 PM. I also learned that the clock tower for the Christ Church College used to ring 101 times at 9:09PM to ensure all 101 students made it back to the dorms for curfew. The college is bigger and there is no curfew any longer.

Tea Time

One of my favorite things in Oxford was going to high tea at the Grand Café and discovering that champagne is included with the tea! The tea comes in mugs that say, "First cafe to serve coffee in England." I thought this a bit ironic now that their claim to fame is high tea. One waitress was able to tell us that during the plague you had to bring your own coffee cup to the cafe but that is all she knew about the coffee and the tea history of the cafe. High tea also comes with a three tiered platter full of goodies. The bottom tier has the spicy salmon sandwiches, the middle tier has the scones, which are more like sweetened biscuits with clotted cream, and the top tier has the chocolates.

On Friday I sat and waited for J. at the new physics building and heard the receptionist answer inquiries on where people were by saying, “They must be at tea.” I heard this at least 15 times. Indeed at tea that afternoon the folks we had tea with confirmed that tea time is taken very seriously. They also alerted me that sometimes you order High Tea but it does not include the tea. Tea time often leads into pub time. You enjoy a local pint of ale which leads to one then two then three and soon enough it’s time for fish and chips.

Oxford, the town

Oxford has many other interesting things around town such as

• One of the first museums in England,
  
• Indoor covered markets where you can find Ben’s ginger and chocolate chip cookies and hear butchers pronounce the letter “t” in the word fillet,
  
• Down the street a rather disappointing castle mostly used to hold prisoners.
  

It’s a town where you can stand on any street corner and look down the street to some sort of tower be it a clock, a bell or just a spiky spire. Another fun thing is called punting which is just a flat bottomed boat you gently push along the river using a long pole against the river bottom.

The Eurostar Surprise

We traveled to Oxford via the Eurostar to London and then a double decker bus that England is so famous for. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that J. had booked us first class for our journey home to Paris. It was such a grand ending to our visit of a grand university. We had a little corner all to ourselves, a delicious organic meal with of course all the champagne I wanted. It was one of the best meals I have had in Europe! There is no better way to travel.