hail to the king...'s cake

Jean-David and I were invited over to a friends house to partake in the mid-winter tradition Galette des rois which translates to “Kings Cake”. This year I was prepared to partake in this French holiday tradition, armed with the knowledge of what is expected in such a circumstance.

This tradition, as many French ones are, is based around food. In this case a flaky, buttery cake filled with sweet almond paté and one ceramic toy hidden in the cake. When you buy the cake it comes with two paper crowns….hence it’s name….King’s Cake. When everyone is settled with a glass of hard cider in hand (the beverage served with King’s cake….because let’s be honest, after age 10 this cake tradition is boring without a little bit of booze) then the fun begins! The eldest person is sent to cut the cake while the youngest person gets under the table and dictates who gets which piece. After the mortification of squeezing yourself underneath a small coffee table in a 150square foot space crammed with 8 people you are allowed to eat your cake.

If by chance you are the lucky one that has almost broken your tooth on the ceramic gizmo hidden in the cake you are the King! Or the Queen! So now, your knees are sore, you may have broken a tooth and the game isn’t over yet! You get to choose from the group of people your crush and crown them your king or queen. As a 24 year old the prospect of choosing a king doesn’t scare me, but imagining myself at 6 years old in front of a cafeteria filled with mean children pointing to my crush dredges up old elementary school dramas of hiding in the bathroom because Colin Sternagal was teasing me for having a crush on a certain Luke Hammond.

Thankfully this year I was spared from crouching under a table and sadly once more I didn’t chip a tooth and become Queen for a day…but I guess I can wait another year to try again. OR I can just buy a cake for myself and eat it all…then guess who wins…Hail to the Queen-I-ate-an-entire-cake-to-myself…

moveable feast

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Yes I did it. I quoted Ernest Hemingway from one of his great oeuvres ‘A moveable feast’. Can you blame me? Well you shouldn’t. Ernie and I have oodles in common. Though my best friend isn’t Gertrude Stein, and I’m not pal-ing around with the sparkling writers of yesteryear, he and I have an eerily similar back-story.

Finally having read this tale of the brilliant, unknown ex-pat who was hungry for life-experience, beauty and above all a crisp white wine and a flakey croissant, I feel that I too may take my place as a brilliant, unknown ex-pat who is hungry for this seasons Louis Vuitton…I’m drinking crisp white wine right now…and a seasoning of all Paris has to offer.

I suppose that I am technically not an ex-pat, but I think that is just a question of time. And while I am not subsisting only upon my music making, I am here to diversify my perspective and soak up the richness of culture that has been touched by thousands of artists, musicians, and poets unknown or famous. The thought that they rambled up and down the same boulevards that I ramble down reflecting upon their art as they watched the summer sun glint of the Seine is magical. Undoubtedly they were thinking of Cezanne and not of Vogue, The September issue 2010.

I used to want to be French. This was a wish that started blossoming in my heart after living in Paris in 2006. Really, the only reason to be French, other than not having to undergo all the hoop-jumping for Social Security, or being a natural size two, is to be fluent in their beautiful language. But allo…anyone can learn to speak a language, but to be a natural speaker of the sumptuous English language is a true gift.

In short, or rather, shorter than Hemingway’s 126 pages, the reason that American’s decide to pick-up-sticks and pack off to ‘gay Paree’ is to be an American in Paris. Comme ça you can get away with cultural murder. I can pick and choose, the things I love-not about the States are left behind, and the things I love, with an exception of all my chères amis, I use liberally all the time (American honesty anyone?!). The question “why have I moved to France” can really be summed up in two words; l’amour et la musique.

Or:

1. love
2. music
3. wine (red, white and rosé)
4. food
5. fashion

That’s five, but you get the drift.

kebab and couture

Can you imagine anything more lovely than sipping scalding tea, eating small tangy Clementine oranges alternated by stolen bites of a sumptuous café éclair or a densely chocolatey-tarte aux chocolat, listening to Mozart playing in the background as you spend your sunny solitary Saturday afternoon reading a comforting novel?

Did I mention that this charming afternoon is taking place at 115 Avenue de Clichy, 5^th floor chez Jean-David Levy et Lauren Van Kempen?

This makes it all the more perfect.

Finally, after 6 months of apartment searching and then waiting we have arrived in our blissful Parisian apartment. 30 square meters (300 square ft?), a teeny-tiny one-bedroom with a galley kitchen and lots of personality (mainly in the form of our rather camping-esque bathroom) I couldn’t be more thrilled.

When our landlady finally said that the apartment was ready for us… …I jumped up and down with glee. Two days later, fingers sore from using steel wool and a variety of cleaning products, plus a wrecked back from humping 100-pound suitcases up our 5 flights of stairs, the realization that we could feel the metro passing underneath our building, compacted with our shower which distinctly resembles a telephone booth was enough to dampen my enthusiasm a tiny bit.

Having escaped the deathly solitude of the 16^th arrondisement we are situated in the cusp of a brilliantly chic area and the land of halal butcher shops, kebab stands, cheap shoes and the Walmart’s of Paris. Welcome to the 17^th arrondisment. A stones throw away from Montmartre and literally 5 flights away from a kebab restaurant (our neighbor…did I mention that?), but hey it’s not everyday that you can buy a pair of shoes and a lemon tart for the same price.

However, turn the corner and you are in the bourgeois-bohème chic-ity-chic center of the 17^th…this we call Batignolles or in lay-men’s terms, “Price-yyy!” Or to get a little earthy, “that’s where all the white people be at”.

In this dichotomous world we live in, we have already established rituals…Rue des moines is the big market street where we buy our Sunday chicken and go to market, to market to buy our groceries just like the faux-bourgeios we are, and Rue Legendre is where we go Sunday nights to buy our pizza’s from Domino’s Pizza just like the American I am…

All that being said…Bienvenue…wilkommen, welcome and won’t you be my neighbor? We have a very supple floor just begging to be slept upon…so buy your plane tickets and start using the stair-master.

Food! Glorious Food!

Food! Glorious food! I love food. And that fact is now more excruciatingly evident than ever before. The reason? Well I’ll let you guess. It starts with a ‘d’ ends with a ‘t’ and there is an ‘ie’ in-between it. I’ve never liked dieting because I like eating. But because I like eating, I am now dieting. Fascinating how that works.

In France, the temptations are great. If you’re hungry or lusting after a freshly baked baguette you might as well stay inside munching on celery, because baby, this town is full of freshly-baked-baguette-carrying-Frenchies wafting the delicious smell into your nostrils.

Walking around Saint Germain or le Marais is torture. Everyone is eating and drinking, diving into their plates of golden crisp French-fries accompanied by a pan-fried sumptuous-semi-bleeding steak and a bottle of a rounded Bordeaux. Aaand if you’re really naughty you follow up your already calorie packed lunch with a plate of profiteroles (or bourbon vanilla ice cream filled cream-puffs) drizzled with warm dark hot chocolate. Excusez-moi but I am drooling.

One of the French dieting standards is quinoa. Hmm. No longer drooling.

The woman who says, “Oh, I just love quinoa! It is so versatile. Healthy too!” is dead on the inside and has chalk for taste buds. I’m going to go out on a limb and declare that there is no enticing way to prepare quinoa. I’ve made it like a risotto, put it in salads, substituted it for couscous like a tabuli and yet, it is still reminiscent of being force-fed a plate of hair.

All jokes aside ladies: if you were confronted in a restaurant and were given the specials, one being a tagliatelle in a white wine sauce with chanterelle mushrooms or anything with quinoa in it…which would you choose?

Hello! Heart-attack-on-a-plate-s’il-te-plait!

As my mothers hairdresser once said, “I’d rather be fat and eat my cheesecake.”

And as I say, “I wish I could eat everything and be a size 0.”

And as the world tells me, “That is impossible, suck it up and eat your quinoa.”

Nuit Blanche or Nuit Blah?

Late-night exhibits, hidden corners of the ‘City of lights’ exposed, amorous rendez-vous and drinking…lots of drinking is the definition of the once-a-year event that the charming little village of Paris calls Nuit blanche or “White Night”. The Nuit Blanche allows for the arty-party people to observe alternative art exhibitions all night long with an extended metro curfew and two-for-one drink specials all around town

So the question is…Nuit Blanche? Or encore a Nuit Blah? When I first lived in Paris (in 2006) I encountered my first Nuit Blanche when on my way home from dinner with a friend I noticed (around 10pm) that there were an enormous amount of people out on the street, the metros were packed strike-style and tourist areas were teeming with wine-sodden Frenchies oohing and aahing over something rather a-typical. Obviously I had no clue what was going on and went to bed early. Hence…a true and triumphant Nuit á la clueless American.

Fast-forward 4 ½ years, 6 lovely trips back to Paris, and my now residency of 6 months and I was ready to enjoy Nuit Blanche with all the superior knowledge of a faux-française. I was expecting-a fun night of bar-hopping, seeing friends in varying states of inebriation and walking around Paris in the cold crisp autumn air at 4am with mon chérie.

Thanks to the germ-incubators I get to watch every day, I was plagued with a cold and a gastro-intestinal virus, which was not aided when I decided to eat a steak tartare. To skip the gory details, lets just say that diarrhea medication and cocktails do not go together. Bar hopping and sipping an herbal tea valiantly while my friends were drinking mojitos was just the start of this years Nuit Blanche. After finishing my delicious and stomach-settling tea we jaunted off to a birthday party where the Spice Girls was pumpin’, the champagne flowin’ and the headache was commencin’.

After the second round of “If you wanna be my lovah” I left my boyfriend to fend for himself and I escaped from the hazy cigarette smoke filled apartment into the crisp autumn air. At 1am I was at home thoroughly enjoying a box of Kleenex and a few chapters of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

It wasn’t a total bust. I did manage to see an exhibit on line 9 at the deserted station of Saint-Martin. It was alive with theatrical lighting and art students duped into wearing black and doing performance art into the wee small hours. It lasted approximately 35 seconds.

So this year, I’m going to chalk one up to experience. A few words of advice to escape a nuit barf…do not eat a steak tartare unless it’s fresh. To state it baldly, this Nuit Blanche was a grade-A-certifiable-insert-Copland’s-‘Hoe-down’-here Nuit Blah.

A Moveable Feast

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Yes I did it. I quoted Ernest Hemingway from one of his great oeuvres ‘A moveable feast’. Can you blame me? Well you shouldn’t. Ernie and I have oodles in common. Though my best friend isn’t Gertrude Stein, and I’m not pal-ing around with the sparkling writers of yesteryear, he and I have an eerily similar back-story.

Finally having read this tale of the brilliant, unknown ex-pat who was hungry for life-experience, beauty and above all a crisp white wine and a flakey croissant, I feel that I too may take my place as a brilliant, unknown ex-pat who is hungry for this seasons Louis Vuitton.…I’m drinking crisp white wine right now…and a seasoning of all Paris has to offer.

I suppose that I am technically not an ex-pat, but I think that is just a question of time. And while I am not subsisting only upon my music making, I am here to diversify my perspective and soak up the richness of culture that has been touched by thousands of artists, musicians, and poets unknown or famous. The thought that they rambled up and down the same boulevards that I ramble down reflecting upon their art as they watched the summer sun glint of the Seine is magical. Undoubtedly they were thinking of Cezanne and not of Vogue, The September issue 2010.

I used to want to be French. This was a wish that started blossoming in my heart after living in Paris in 2006. Really, the only reason to be French, other than not having to undergo all the hoop-jumping for Social Security, or being a natural size two, is to be fluent in their beautiful language. But allo…anyone can learn to speak a language, but to be a natural speaker of the sumptuous English language is a true gift.

In short, or rather, shorter than Hemingway’s 126 pages, the reason that American’s decide to pick-up-sticks and pack off to ‘gay Paree’ is to be an American in Paris. Comme ça you can get away with cultural murder. I can pick and choose, the things I love-not about the States are left behind, and the things I love, with an exception of all my chères amis, I use liberally all the time (American honesty anyone?!). The question “why have I moved to France” can really be summed up in two words; l’amour et la musique.

Or:

1. love
2. music
3. wine (red, white and rosé)
4. food
5. fashion

That’s five, but you get the drift.

Nanny Palooza

As I watched Rosalie sprawled face down on the shag rug pounding her feet on the floor screaming, “PAAAAPAAAA! PAPAAAAA!!!!!” whilst trying to put her pacifier (she’s three), her thumb and her favorite stuffed animal into her mouth I calmly turned the pages of the September issue of Elle and chanted under my breath “I have a college education, I have a college education…”

I am a musician. But right now you can call me “Mary (insert derogative and inappropriate word here) Poppins”. Nearly 5 years of college education, two diplomas (Cello and Vocal performance…ring-a-ding-ding) and an ungodly amount of student loans to pay back, my current profession is Nanny-Extraordinaire.

Let me explain. When I moved to Paris in pursuit of love and music I knew that I was going to have to get a job to support my hopefully budding career and my love of shoes...having just left my lovely sandwich-making job during my three month stint of living at home with my parents (anyone wondering as to my transcontinental move?) it was a given that I would find a part-time job once in Paris.

As afore-mentioned, I am a musician. My first contract in Paris was singing in the choir for the New European Philharmonic Orchestra for their tour of the Mozart Requiem. Pretty nifty. I was supposed to receive around 500EUR for five concerts. Of course when it came time to pay-up (after over 40 hours of rehearsal/concerts/travel) the group conveniently went bankrupt and I never saw one centime.

Long-story short, while I continued to look for other ways to get conned, I was hired to teach English to two very spoiled French girls. When I got hired along with several other young starving artists I told myself that I can do anything for a year, and ‘hey, at least it’s better than making sandwiches…’

But let’s just call this what it is. I am yet another parent substitute for two children whose parents work more than full-time and want to have a life of their own. Not only am I responsible for teaching them English through song, dance and puppetry, but I also have the happy task of teaching them manners, personal cleanliness and respect.

Amongst my many grievances (many of them poop-related) is the sentiment that I am ‘just-the-help’. No better than the Tunisian woman who comes and cleans for them. I have enormous responsibilities for these children, and yet when I encounter a parent of one of their little friends I must keep my distance, and at the park there is a complete division of the nannies. There is a bench for all the ethnic nannies, the mommies-wearing-Prada-and-reading-vogue, the young students, and of course the-I’m-a-someday-soon-gonna-make-it-musician-artist-actress-just-doing-this-to-make-my-rent-nannies.

Regardless of the division of the park benches…starving artists make the best babysitters. We are all the a-typical extroverted, can sing, can dance, can make-believe better than the nowadays over-technologized kids, and am able to cross the street and look both ways (most of the time ahem.). So right now, even if my hands are covered in snot and other little-girl excrements I can always work toward the day that my name will be up in lights.