This past weekend was the Bing Trip. We visited Flanders (which pretty much means Northern Belgium plus a little of France and the Netherlands), but really only three cities, being Lille, Gent and Bruges (in that order). By the way, I'm not sure if Gent is supposed to be spelled Gent or Ghent, so I'm just going to go with Gent, because it's shorter. If you don't want to hear about the trip in detail, I'll summarize it in a few words: freezing, and boring tours. If you'd rather hear about it in detail, read on and I will elaborate to a greater extent than you probably care about.
We left on Friday on a train from Gare du Nord at about 11:00. Not a particularly interesting train ride, since the French countryside is pretty plain. A lot of flat farmland, with nothing on it because, surprise surprise, it's winter. More on that in a bit. We arrive in Lille around noon, drop our bags off at our hotel (Hotel Brughel--pretty nice) and go to lunch at a brasserie called Les 3 Brasseurs (the three brewers). For the record, brasser means "to brew" in French, so technically a brasserie is a place where they brew beer. For the most part I think they just serve beer, which is alright as well.
Lunch was not spectacular, but definitely satisfying. We got a couple beers on Stanford's tab, as well as a decent meal. After lunch we set off on the first of our walking tours for the weekend. Our guide, a middle aged French lady, ended up being one of the worst tour guides I've ever had, not accounting for the fact that there isn't much to see in Lille and it was about 30 degrees. Winter kind of snuck up on me this weekend. I looked at the weather forecasts, which called for weather in the low 30s, which is only slightly colder that what it's been like in Paris for the past few weeks. Didn't think about wind chill. Boo.
So the tour was stupid and difficult to understand (because it was in French). Even Mark Applebaum was making fun of the tour guide by the end of it, mostly in the style of our falsified tour on Wednesday previous. Pretty much the only redeeming factor. Then we got on a bus (with eight seats and a table in the very back) to go to a small city a little ways off that was famous for its wool products. Needless to say, the delinquents sitting in the back of the bus (to remain unnamed) were a little too loud and obnoxious while the tour guide was trying to talk at a bus full of sleeping people, and Estelle (the director of the program) had to tell us to pay attention, which they respectfully didn't really do. Oops.
The museum in the little town (whose name I don't recall) was housed in an old bath house, which was actually pretty cool (and by far the best part of that day). The bath house, constructed in Art Deco style, was very pretty, and the tour was short and warm, and the tour guide wasn't awful. Greatly improved from earlier. Then we piled back into the bus and headed back for dinner on our own and the rest of the night free. Dinner was nothing exceptional (frogs legs, lamb tajine and a brioche, and beer, of course), then I passed out pretty early for a brief night's sleep.
We got up at 8:00 on Saturday to eat and load on the bus at 9:00 to go to Gent, for which no one was particularly excited. Turns out it was the best part of the trip. After an hour bus ride, partly consumed by more of Mark's absurdities, we arrived in Gent and did pretty much the same thing as the day before, except for longer. Dropped our bags off at our hotel (which was actually a Best Western, in Belgium. What?) then took another walking tour, to which I gave my complete attention and did not in fact listen to my iPod. The guide was, in fact, better than that of the previous day. Lunch was on our own, so we went to some restaurant and got terrible service, waiting an hour for our food and not getting waffles or moules frites (mussels and fries).
Lunch was followed by a tour of a chatêlet (little castle) that had some interesting history and lots of holes in the floor to drop things on attacking troops. Nice view of the city, but altogether underwhelming. Anyway, it was a decent time, despite losing most of my extremities to frostbite and getting severe hypothermia and going into shock. Needless to say I was happy to get back to the hotel to warm up briefly before heading off to dinner at the Belgia Queen, right on the river that runs through Gent (I don't know the name).
Dinner was amazing. Great food, great service, great atmosphere, great time. When we got to the restaurant, I our tables weren't ready, so the sent us up to the top floor, which was somewhere between a bar and a club, for apertifs. We waited around there for a while, making conversation, drinking kirs and listening to bad techno for an hour or so until our table was ready.
So our tables (two long tables) were on the same floor as the open kitchen, so I located myself in a position from which I could watch the food being prepared, but I forfeited my seat to Heimunn who wanted to gawk at the attractive kitchen staff. Michael and I preferred the sole female waitress, who was quite gawk-worthy herself. The food was excellent. Also one of the better meals I've had since I came to France. Kind of modern food, but not pretentious or too avant-garde. Good stuff. Scallops starter, chicken main course and chocolaty not-entirely-cooked kind of cake thing for dessert. Also, excellent wine. Probably the best wine I've had since I got here. Then back to the hotel for more sleep.
Sunday was not fun. Another early morning and hour-long bus ride, spent asleep. "Bruges is," as Colin Farrell puts it in the Oscar nominated film In Bruges, "a shithole." It actually isn't, but my experience there was pretty mediocre. It was about 20 degrees, and nobody was wearing enough clothing, despite the two previous days' experience of refrigeration. Seriously, no good. We got another boring tour guide, and I spent the morning wishing I were asleep, or at least inside drinking hot chocolate and eating waffles. We got an hour free before lunch, so we (me, Jen, Heimunn, Michael, Farah, Midori and Mackenzie) went to a restaurant across the street from the restaurant we were going to go to for lunch and got moules frites to satisfy one of the weekend's cravings. We got a table next to a gas fire and slowly began defrosting with our first lunch; after we finished, we ran across the street to our real lunch to eat again with the rest of the group.
Second lunch, at Huidevettershuis, was pretty good as well. We had some kind of fish with bacon to start, guinea fowl with potatoes and apple sauce for the main, and a fruit salad for dessert. (And a beer. The waiter who brought it was berated by Estelle for serving us beer when we weren't supposed to have it. Poor guy.) Second lunch was followed by a horse-drawn tour through the rest of Bruges, which was not great either. We saw a windmill, which I thought was more Dutch than Belgian, but it's alright. Then we went to a museum in an old hospital, which was awful because it was pretty dark and not very warm and everyone was falling asleep but we had to listen to the guide talk for another hour but nobody was really paying attention and it was all bad.
Finally, we were free for a couple hours before the bus left, during which we bought some Belgian chocolate and ate some waffles, of which I had two, and both were excellent. I ate a lot that day, to pack on the extra blubber that would help keep me warm. It didn't work at all. So we went back to the bus and watched In Bruges, which was an excellent movie, and we came to the same conclusion as Colin Farrell, except we didn't actually get shot several times or see any kids get killed (fortunately).
After a long day, finished by a bus ride back to Lille and a train back to Paris, I was ready for a good nights sleep. No such luck on that front. At midnight I was off to the Grand Palais to see an exhibition of artwork called Picasso et les Maîtres (Picasso and the masters) for Mark's class. We couldn't get in until 2am, so we went to a café to have a cup of coffee and stay not freezing. The show was interesting, to see stuff Picasso did next to comparable stuff by other artists (Renoir, Cezanne, etc). The crazy thing was how crowded it was at 2am on a Sunday night. Totally insane. There was a super long line (hundreds and hundreds of people) outside and TV crews and everything. Couldn't believe it.
We didn't leave until about 3:45, and I was very pleased to find that it was snowing, despite the incredible cold. It was quite beautiful and romantic, being in Paris on the Champs Elysées in the middle of the night with the snow (big powdery snow, not crappy slushy snow) appearing out of the darkness and powdering the sidewalk in a cushion of white. That was really cheesy, but I'm ok with it because it was awesome. I shared a taxi back with Midori and Natalia (who also lives in Boulogne-Billancourt), so I got off with Natalia because I figured I could walk home from there. It was 4am by this point.
So I set off to find the Metro station, thinking I knew where it was (with a general indication of direction from Natalia) and I set off thinking it might take me fifteen minutes or so to get home. False. I walked about ten minutes one direction, and things just started getting less and less familiar looking, so I turn around and walk back the other direction (again, ten minutes, plus some) and things also don't look familiar, so I text Natalia and try to orient myself, and apparently at this point I was going the right direction, so I continue. It's still snowing, and still beautiful, but I have no idea where I am and I don't have a map. Good situation. Finally I come across this guy (what he's doing out at 4:30 I have no idea) and I ask him where my Metro stop is, and he tells me it's just past this hotel on the left, so I keep going, and I find a hotel and the wrong Metro stop. Great. Then I go back a little ways to where I saw a cop car sitting in the road, so I ask the policier where it is and they give me proper directions, and I walk another 20 minutes through the snow to get the proper Metro stop when I finally make it home at 5am.
Then I had class today, which was lots of fun. I also wrote a story in French about a dinosaur named Larry who battles some ferrets in the mountains for my French class. Good fun.
Also, I found out that Michel, my host mom's boyfriend, lives in Bretagne (Brittany), which is why he hasn't been around for the last two weeks. And that Boulogne-Billancourt is where they make (made?) a lot of French movies. Apparently it's a pretty good area. But it's still far away.
This is a record of what I've done in Paris and elsewhere.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Friday, January 30, 2009
Bigger is Better
(Author's Note: I wrote this for my other blog, which I haven't posted to in a long time, but it's also somewhat appropriate for this blog, so I'm posting it here too.)
Well, not exactly. Different sized bills are better. The size of the Euro increases as the denomination increases, which results in small 5€ bills and big 100€ bills. I'm fairly sure that there's not a direct correlation in size, but maybe it's logarithmic or something. Anyway, I really like the Euro. It's colorful, aesthetically pleasing, with varying designs on the coins. I guess good, old-fashioned American currency is pretty cool too, but it's not nearly as charming as an orange bill. Here're some of the things I've observed about the Euro so far.
ATMs don't just give you $20 bills. In fact, they don't give any $20 bills, because they would be pretty useless here. Instead they give you 20€ bills, as well as 10€ and 50€ bills just to spice things up a little. What this means is that you can withdraw increments that aren't multiples of 20€ ! It's insane ! I'm putting a space between the last word and the exclamation point because that's how they do it here in France ! I'm not sure if they do it in the rest of Europe, but they do it here. When in Rome... (or Paris, I guess...)
Pretty much everything you buy is paid for in increments of 0.10€. That's ten centimes, but I don't know what the sign is for centime on my keyboard, so it's 0.10€. Like, un café is usually 1.10€ instead of like, $3.18. It's not that I'm getting a really cup of coffee either, it's just that it's really, really small. And it's a multiple of 0.10€. So my point is that pennies (or the Euro equivalents) pretty much don't exist. You only deal in pennies (I'm still using this word for convenience) when you go to the grocery store. It's kind of nice, because you don't have to carry around a bunch of change, but it's also kind of bad because sometimes I feel like I'm being ripped off by people rounding up all the time (if they in fact do round up, which I'm not sure about).
Different sized bills are both a boon and a burden. They're great, because you can easily tell them apart (good for blind people, of whom it seems there are a many), but also kind of a pain in the butt, because when you try to fold a stack of them in half, you're usually not folding the smaller ones in half, but instead in some weird fraction that isn't a half (terrible for OCD people, of whom there are 497--there's actually a record of this in la Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, which I visited yesterday.) Stuff like that. I could come up with more but I have to wake up early tomorrow, so maybe I'll write more about this later.
Au revoir. (Or would it be au relire?)
Well, not exactly. Different sized bills are better. The size of the Euro increases as the denomination increases, which results in small 5€ bills and big 100€ bills. I'm fairly sure that there's not a direct correlation in size, but maybe it's logarithmic or something. Anyway, I really like the Euro. It's colorful, aesthetically pleasing, with varying designs on the coins. I guess good, old-fashioned American currency is pretty cool too, but it's not nearly as charming as an orange bill. Here're some of the things I've observed about the Euro so far.
ATMs don't just give you $20 bills. In fact, they don't give any $20 bills, because they would be pretty useless here. Instead they give you 20€ bills, as well as 10€ and 50€ bills just to spice things up a little. What this means is that you can withdraw increments that aren't multiples of 20€ ! It's insane ! I'm putting a space between the last word and the exclamation point because that's how they do it here in France ! I'm not sure if they do it in the rest of Europe, but they do it here. When in Rome... (or Paris, I guess...)
Pretty much everything you buy is paid for in increments of 0.10€. That's ten centimes, but I don't know what the sign is for centime on my keyboard, so it's 0.10€. Like, un café is usually 1.10€ instead of like, $3.18. It's not that I'm getting a really cup of coffee either, it's just that it's really, really small. And it's a multiple of 0.10€. So my point is that pennies (or the Euro equivalents) pretty much don't exist. You only deal in pennies (I'm still using this word for convenience) when you go to the grocery store. It's kind of nice, because you don't have to carry around a bunch of change, but it's also kind of bad because sometimes I feel like I'm being ripped off by people rounding up all the time (if they in fact do round up, which I'm not sure about).
Different sized bills are both a boon and a burden. They're great, because you can easily tell them apart (good for blind people, of whom it seems there are a many), but also kind of a pain in the butt, because when you try to fold a stack of them in half, you're usually not folding the smaller ones in half, but instead in some weird fraction that isn't a half (terrible for OCD people, of whom there are 497--there's actually a record of this in la Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, which I visited yesterday.) Stuff like that. I could come up with more but I have to wake up early tomorrow, so maybe I'll write more about this later.
Au revoir. (Or would it be au relire?)
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Skype
By the way, if anybody reading this blog has Skype and wants to chat, send me an email (jdub.tsu@gmail.com) with your username and we'll chat sometime. I want to hear all about what's going on in the real world.
Dans Le Noir
So today there's a transportation strike. It's kind of lame, because the Metro is only running like two-thirds of the trains it usually runs. However, I probably had the fastest commute ever today. I didn't have to wait for a single train. It was great. Maybe getting home will be more trouble. Stupid karma.
Anyway, Tuesday was mostly uneventful. Jen, Midori and I spent a couple hours debating where we're going to stay in Amsterdam, (Michael, who is also coming, was in class). Once again, we had booking problems for the hostels, since Jen and Midori booked a room for themselves before Michael and I had a chance to do the same, then when we tried to book it, there weren't any rooms left. It's so dumb. Now we're debating staying at the same hostel for a greater price or getting the girls to switch hostels and forfeit their deposit, which would actually be cheaper than staying at the first hostel. Too much trouble.
We also bought tickets for Barcelona for the end of February. I'm probably going to make reservations for this awesome restaurant I went to with my family a couple years ago called Comerç 24. It's awesome, and a little pricy, but totally worth it. I'll tell you all about it if I end up going, otherwise I'm just going to write about everything else in Barcelona.
On the topic of haut-cuisine, Mark Applebaum took his classes out to a restauant called Dans Le Noir (in the black). We went on a three hour walking tour of Paris beforehand, stopping at interesting buildings to give falsified histories of the structures. It was fun, but not nearly as fun as dinner.
The concept of Dans Le Noir was that you can't see anything. Your group is led into a completely dark dining room by your blind waiter, hand on the shoulder of the person in front of you. When I say completely dark, I mean completely, utterly, unforgivingly dark. There is no semblance of light. You cannot see your hand an inch in front of your face, nor which direction the exit is, nor the location of your cutlery and glass, let alone the food on your plate. It's quite an experience.
The food was pretty good. Probably not the best meal I've had, but certainly one of the most interesting. We were told how to pour our own drinks, only knowing when to stop when you can feel the liquid on your finger that you were instructed to put into your glass. Also, you never knew if you've finished all the food on your plate unless your really scrape every inch of it with your fork, or feel around with your fingers. I was surprised a couple times when I found entire parts of the plate that I hadn't yet explored.
The most troubling part of the meal was that we didn't know what we were eating. You could identify some things, but other things were much more difficult to recognize. This problem was compounded by the fact that each course was made up of several subparts; the main course had a duck breast with shoestring onions, some kind of vegetable (maybe endive?) with gorgonzola, as well as several other things that now have escaped my mind. Dessert was a passionfruit sorbet, some kind of chocolate gelatin and a cookie, all surrounded by a net of carmelized sugar. It was quite delicious to say the least, but difficult and frustrating to eat.
Anyway, I still don't know what the dishes looked like, what color the table cloth was, what wine I drank, whether or not other people knew that I was making faces at them, who else was in the restaurant, etc. There's a whole aspect of eating that you lose when you can't see what you're eating. Anyway, it was a good time.
Anyway, Tuesday was mostly uneventful. Jen, Midori and I spent a couple hours debating where we're going to stay in Amsterdam, (Michael, who is also coming, was in class). Once again, we had booking problems for the hostels, since Jen and Midori booked a room for themselves before Michael and I had a chance to do the same, then when we tried to book it, there weren't any rooms left. It's so dumb. Now we're debating staying at the same hostel for a greater price or getting the girls to switch hostels and forfeit their deposit, which would actually be cheaper than staying at the first hostel. Too much trouble.
We also bought tickets for Barcelona for the end of February. I'm probably going to make reservations for this awesome restaurant I went to with my family a couple years ago called Comerç 24. It's awesome, and a little pricy, but totally worth it. I'll tell you all about it if I end up going, otherwise I'm just going to write about everything else in Barcelona.
On the topic of haut-cuisine, Mark Applebaum took his classes out to a restauant called Dans Le Noir (in the black). We went on a three hour walking tour of Paris beforehand, stopping at interesting buildings to give falsified histories of the structures. It was fun, but not nearly as fun as dinner.
The concept of Dans Le Noir was that you can't see anything. Your group is led into a completely dark dining room by your blind waiter, hand on the shoulder of the person in front of you. When I say completely dark, I mean completely, utterly, unforgivingly dark. There is no semblance of light. You cannot see your hand an inch in front of your face, nor which direction the exit is, nor the location of your cutlery and glass, let alone the food on your plate. It's quite an experience.
The food was pretty good. Probably not the best meal I've had, but certainly one of the most interesting. We were told how to pour our own drinks, only knowing when to stop when you can feel the liquid on your finger that you were instructed to put into your glass. Also, you never knew if you've finished all the food on your plate unless your really scrape every inch of it with your fork, or feel around with your fingers. I was surprised a couple times when I found entire parts of the plate that I hadn't yet explored.
The most troubling part of the meal was that we didn't know what we were eating. You could identify some things, but other things were much more difficult to recognize. This problem was compounded by the fact that each course was made up of several subparts; the main course had a duck breast with shoestring onions, some kind of vegetable (maybe endive?) with gorgonzola, as well as several other things that now have escaped my mind. Dessert was a passionfruit sorbet, some kind of chocolate gelatin and a cookie, all surrounded by a net of carmelized sugar. It was quite delicious to say the least, but difficult and frustrating to eat.
Anyway, I still don't know what the dishes looked like, what color the table cloth was, what wine I drank, whether or not other people knew that I was making faces at them, who else was in the restaurant, etc. There's a whole aspect of eating that you lose when you can't see what you're eating. Anyway, it was a good time.
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