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I arrived back home this afternoon after a surprisingly comfortable 12 hour direct flight from CDG - SFO. We taxied by the frame of the Asiana aircraft that crashed a couple weeks ago. It was a little bit haunting to see it sitting there on the tarmac. When I got home, I did the worst thing possible and immediately fell asleep. Whoops. So now it is 1:00 am and I am wide awake. Whee!

Last day

I woke up feeling a lot better this morning and had a fairly productive final day at work. I decided to buy some of my favorite foods for dinner. I stopped by my favorite corner cafe and bought the plat du jour with a soufflé au fromage and a fromage blanc with apricot sauce. It was excellent as ever.

 The plat du jour was a chicken leg with a thin tomato sauce on top with a side of ratatouille (pronounced rhaut-ahh-tooo-yuh) and rice. The tomato sauce reminded me a little of a French version of BBQ sauce. It didn't have the same spices, but the effect was similar.

My plane leaves tomorrow around 10:00 am. In celebration of my last evening here, I thought it would be fun to put together a list of my favorite things here in Paris.

1. Soufflé au fromage.

2. Parc Montsouris

3. Warm summer nights

4. Polite public transit patrons

5. Pain au cocao

6. Quiche lorraine (Full disclosure -- this is actually an egg pie with mushrooms. I guess I never took a picture of a quiche lorraine.)

 7. Good croissants

8. This list is very food oriented. 

Anyway, there are other things that I will remember and miss. Sleeping with my windows open, the screeching of purple martins as I drift off to sleep, attempting to say "Merci" with the French gutteral r. Who knows. 

I don't feel too comfortable blogging details of my work/research, but I think the most interesting work related thing I learned during my time here is that some electronic devices will not function under Argon. Good to know. 

Au revoir!

Feeling ill

Today I'm feeling ill again. It must be a Thursday thing. Anyway, I'm going to go to bed early to try to fight it.

Goodnight!

Chocolate bread

I saw these two bookstores today:

I also had a very good lunch today. I bought a quiche lorraine from a bakery on Rue Mouffetard, a small roll of chocolate bread, and a fresh peach. I've never had chocolate bread before, but this stuff is great. It is just like regular bread (think of a short, floury baguette) with some cocoa powder mixed in the dough with a few small chunks of chocolate. It is hardly sweet at all, and very delicious. I will add this to the list of French foods I want to learn to cook when I get home. So far my list is:

1. Soufflé au fromage

2. The flaky quiche crust they make here -- It involves rolling out the dough, coating it with butter, folding it over on itself, rolling it out again, etc. until you get a multilayered, buttery, delicious dough.

3. Chocolate bread 

We shall see how much success I have with these endeavors. 

Glode

At lunch today one of my group members looked at me and said, "Kathereeeen, you really like sandwiches." I didn't know how to respond to that, so I said, "I do like sandwiches," with a sortof confused look on my face. Then he asked me if I like normal food too. I looked around at the other people at the table, most of whom were eating sandwiches and asked, "What is normal food?" He responded by saying chicken and rice, or basically some meat + rice + vegetables thing. I told him that I do like that kind of food too, but it takes a long time to prepare. He then told me that I could buy already prepared normal food dishes at the cafe on the corner. 

I've been to this cafe many times, but for some reason I had always looked over their normal food section. So, I decided that I should try i for dinner tonight. I bought a meat + rice + vegetables dish and ate it with a fromage frais (French for yogurt -- sortof) for dessert. The meal itself was very good and incredibly filling. I can still feel it sitting in my stomach slowly digesting away. The vegetables were great. The yellow sauce tasted like a mustard-cream concoction and went well with the chunks of pork. The fromage frais though, it was fantastic! It was a little lighter than yogurt I'm used to in the US - it almost had a souffle-esque whipped texture. It came unsweetened, and was actually very delicious plain. However, I wanted to add some of the apricot sauce that came with it. The sauce was a little thinner than a marmalade and also had a very low level of sweetness. Together they made a heavenly dessert experience.

Quite tasty for a microwaved dinner.

After dinner I felt like a nice walk in the park. It has been very warm here for the last week and a half, and I love the warm evenings. In Berkeley, it is never warm at night. That is the biggest drawback of the place. The park across the street is a fantastic place to soak up the summer warmth. I took my kindle with me out to the park and sat by the pond reading the 3rd book in the Game of Thrones series while watching the ducks clean themselves.

A pretty duck giving himself a thorough cleaning.

I think I even spotted a blue heron up in the trees on the other side of the pond. She/he so elegantly glided down through the trees and then decided to hang out on top of a big bush that overlooked the pond.  He probably had a nice view from there.

Do you see him sitting on top of that bush on the left?

I also just learned that the past tense of glide used to be glode, until it morphed into glided or glid. I think I prefer glode. It sounds more elegant than glided. Glided reminds me of slided, and that makes me think of screaming children flinging themselves down slides. I also like that glode and glowed are homophones.

Salade de gésiers

Well, I guess the consensus is that those creatures are not bats. I recorded a video of the creatures flying around outside my balcony so you can hear their screech and see how they fly. Let's see if this uploads:

Anyway, we will see if that works. 

This evening I decided to go by the corner bakery to buy a dinner of very typical French foods. I bought a salade de gésiers, which is apparently very typical to this part of France (or at least that's what they tell me). Okay, these screechy things are going nuts outside! They must be so happy to get to feast on all the juicy July bugs out there. Anyway, it is a salad with chicken gizzards on top. The one I had tonight wasn't nearly as good as the one I had for lunch during our visit to Amiens, but it wasn't bad. It would be hard to compete with that meal.

Speaking of, I don't think I ever discussed that meal. I briefly mentioned that I went to visit the lab of a very respected researcher in our field last Wednesday. I went along with my adviser who gave a seminar there. It was a very fun day of talking about science and attempting to follow along with inorganic chemistry speak. Anyway, my adviser, our host at ESPCI, and our hosts at the university in Amiens all went out to lunch at this little French cafe near the school. First, I ate a salade de gésiers. That was enough to fill me up. I noticed that I ate much, much slower than everyone else at the table even though I wasn't talking nearly as much as they were and I felt like I was stuffing my face. I thought the French were supposed to eat slowly? I guess not. I will always be plagued with being the slowest eater at the table. After the salade, which was excellent, I had a white fish of some sort served on rice with carrots, potatoes, and onions scattered about on the plate. There were even a couple of pieces of chorizo mixed in there. The fish was tender and the vegetables and rice were well seasoned, but I would have enjoyed eating it more slowly. After that, they brought us desserts of a rice pudding type concoction. That was less awesome. It wasn't bad, but I think I'm not much of a dessert type person, so unless it is phenomenal, I would probably have preferred to skip it. I like warm, low-viscosity rice pudding with minimal sugar and other additives. This one was cold and covered with whipped cream and some raspberry sauce that was a bit too sweet for my liking. Anyway, it was very pretty, but when I remember the meal, I will focus on the salad and the fish.

Anyway, back to dinner tonight. So I bought this salade de gésiers from the corner bakery along with a soufflé au fromage and a little pear tart. The cheese soufflé was phenomenal, as always. Oh my goodness, if those turn out to be easy to bake, I'm doomed. The pear tart is one of those little dessert type things that I always see around in window displays, so I thought I ought to try it. It was pretty good actually. It had a nice custardy base and wasn't too sweet. The crust was a little powdery for my liking though. Anyway, it felt like an appropriately French dinner so I was satisfied. 

Wow, that video still isn't uploaded. I wish it would give me some indication for how far along it is. Anyway, I'll go ahead and overburden my connection by uploading a picture of my dinner too.

Dinner

The flying creatures are multiplying! There's a flock of 30 or so outside now. I do appreciate their culling of the bugs, but I wish they did it with more pleasant voices.

Bats?

Today is Bastille Day, a celebration of modern France as separate from the King Louis the XIV, XV, XVI reigns. I heard a bunch of fireworks last night and I'm guessing there will be many more tonight.

A pack of flying creatures that shriek like banshees day and night have appeared outside my window. I think they are probably bats, based on how they fly, but they certainly don't seem nocturnal. They are hard to catch on camera because they fly so fast, but here is my best shot:

A bat?

There are about five of them that fly around in circles in our courtyard. I've become accustomed to sleeping with my windows open, but recently I've been shutting them for fear of bat bites. 

Any ideas on what these might be?

This weekend has been refreshingly slow. Yesterday, I went grocery shopping and read a bunch. Today I worked on a little programming project for work. I enjoy the excuse to do some programming here and there. I plan to go to sleep early tonight so I can have lots of energy to finish up what I need to at work during my last week here. 

While grocery shopping yesterday, I couldn't help but daydream about being back in my own kitchen in Berkeley. All of the kitchen utensils here disappeared on July 1, so I'm left with only plastic knives and plastic plates. No pots, pans, or real knives. I stared longingly at the onions dreaming of making a delicious ratatouille. I then rented and watched the movie Ratatouille. What a great movie!