And now for something completely different

Me and my travel partner to Jamaica

My vacations aren’t vacation. They’re Trips. They include museums, sightseeing, ancient monuments, foreign languages and little to no rest. I usually come back exhausted, not to mention jet-lagged. And since I’ve been freelance writing, they’ve not been true vacations. I’ve written in Morocco, Slovakia and France. I leave my day job behind but not my writing commitments. Even weekends aren’t for relaxing, they’re for catching up on all the writing work I don’t get to during weekday evenings.

My parents, on the other hand, know how to kick back and soak up the sun when they leave work behind. Tropical drinks, sandy beaches, and the hotter the better is their style.  The day Brian and I were flying back from frigid Prague last winter my folks were headed south for fun in the sun.  I had to wonder who was wiser, the girl who froze her way through Central Europe or the suntan-lotion toting parents.

I haven’t been on a beach vacation since my honeymoon 13 years ago. I guess I haven’t been on a real vacation since then.  But I’m about to.

Breezes Rio Bueno, Jamaica

Under strict orders from my travel partner and mom to Do No Work, I’m bound for Jamaica, mon! My first time to the Caribbean, I’m going in the company of a woman who knows that you start the day at the swim-up bar with a Mudslide, because it tastes like coffee. I think I’m in good hands.

For five days we’ll lounge about in beach chairs, venturing out only for a pedicure, languorous dip in the pool or a bit of  snorkeling.  We’re staying at one of those places that includes everything in the price, so I foresee many mojitos as I re-introduce my office-worker-pale skin to the glories of the sun (with appropriate SPF of course). There are many magazines and cheesy books to be read, and I can do all the catching up with my mom that I need (despite our near-daily phone calls, there’s always more to talk about with your mom!).

Real vacation, here I come!

Eating Lexington

How much food could a food writer eat if a food writer had to eat at ten restaurants in 24 hours?

I have a new sympathy for guidebook writers and for Top Chef judges.

On the summer solstice weekend I was assigned by Kentucky Monthly magazine to eat my way through Lexington. In order to recommend where to go for appetizers, cocktails and desserts for all the visitors landing in Lexington for the World Equestrian Games this fall, I had to choose and eat at ten restaurants in one weekend and write up my  tips for the Games guidebook. Best assignment ever, right?

Yeah, pretty much.

Have notebook, will eat.

But saying you’re going to eat at 10 restaurants, and actually doing it are two totally different matters. Allow me to give you a peek at the kind of assignment I’ve been dreaming of since first dabbling in getting money for my words, and show you the decidedly unglamorous work aspect of it

I had two days to come up with my recommended list of ten (to give the magazine time to make the arrangements)  — not a problem if it were Louisville. But I’ve eaten in precisely none of the fabulous Lexington restaurants. Thank goodness for the internets. My facebook friends and peeps in Lexington came through with lots of great recommendations. I spent a full evening reviewing restaurants menus online and skimming reviews in order to settle on my ten.

Then I needed to figure out what order to hit them in. We’d go over after work on Friday which would get us there around 8. Most places are only open at dinner so we’d have to do the bulk of the eating Friday night and Saturday night. I’d need to have my game on.

Oh, and we needed to figure out what to do with the dogs since we’d be staying in Lexington Friday and Saturday night.

But it all came together and we sat down to our first bite and sip on Friday night. I’m not going to give you the rundown of where we ate and what we had … you’ll need to buy the guide for that! But I’ll mention a few highlights : )

Though I was famished by the time we sat down, I paced myself, having only half my cocktail and a few bites at Cheapside, the place mentioned probably most often in all my friends’ responses. I got a good full page of notes and plenty of photos. Moving on I sampled my great weakness, a gussied up fried cheese. I split the plate evenly with Brian after moving it to a window to snap some photos in natural light (to the evident discomfiture of people nearby). At our third and final stop I couldn’t not eat my entire share of the gorgeous seared ahi tuna and some perfect scallops after trying to get some shots with people in the restaurant *not* looking at me.  The manager knew the diners in a group out for a fun night, and asked them if they’d mind being in the article. Two (a man and a woman) got up and left the table (I wonder why they didn’t want to be in the shot). I asked the rest to continue eating and drinking and in general act like I wasn’t there. Right. Every photo included one or more people looking directly at the camera smiling for all they were worth. At least I got a nice shot of the bar. And found a place I’d love to return to — Wines on Vine, a bistro inside of a wine shop.

Saturday morning we checked out the Lexington Farmer’s market where I stumbled upon a creperie! I couldn’t resist inviting myself into the tent to try my hand at making one on a pro gas crepe griddle. I split a cheese and Broadbent ham and spinach crepe with Brian, which was a mistake. Even sharing one I was full. At two hours till lunch, I was already getting off to a a bad start. I needed an empty stomach for the hours ahead.

We had only one lunch, though the restaurant manager insisted on us trying three appetizers, in addition to dessert. We spent the afternoon walking off a bit of our lunch and a frantic shopping session for me to find a dress more appropriate for the oppressive heat than the black wrap dress I’d brought (for its expandable abilities).

The dinner marathon began at 4, which was when the Atomic Cafe opened. We needed to hit 6 places before closing time. Luckily everything was in walking distance. So far, so fun. I got my photos, took some notes, and we moved on. The next place didn’t know we were coming so I had to give my whole spiel, to the host, then to the manager then to our server. They really wanted me to try the scallops, but I already had scallops  the night before and didn’t want them twice in the same story. I took a few less notes and drank most of my cocktail. Must move on. At our next stop we ordered an appetizer and a dessert, but they decided to bring two additional apps to try. What part of ‘we’re eating at six restaurants tonight’ didn’t they hear? My notes said something about ‘old money’ and wainscotting, with a scribble about gentlemen in this place getting up when ladies arrive at the table. People made no effort to hide the fact that they were staring and commenting as I took photos.

Taking notes

Halfway done for the night we moved on.  By now I was a little weary of explaining my mission. Managers may have known I was coming but they didn’t always pass the word so again I told a stream of staff. I was also tired of food by now. How to pick a dish to appeal to all the people who would read about this, when the only thing that sounded good to me was a lie-down and maybe a piece of candied ginger (my favorite digestive aid). I also had the distinct feeling we were in the way, taking up prime time and real estate to have a drink and an appetizer. The duck confit in a green onion crepe was actually quite delicious, but I stared at my notebook, grasping for something to say. I couldn’t rely on memory, not with this many dishes in a night. I wrote something about the noise and the horse pictures on the wall. I was beginning to feel the pressure of relaying in 50 words the vibe of a place.

On the the next-to-last restaurant. It was 8:15. Afraid I’d miss a stop, I double and triple checked my list in the folder that kept dropping and sending maps and sheets fluttering every which way.  Ugh. Must I really eat more? So far since four, I’d at least tasted, and maybe had several bites of, sweet potato chips, mussels, lamb chops, pork belly, “hot brown scallops,” lemon lavender bundt cake with blueberry ice cream, and duck confit crepes. Not to mention part of a Bahama Mama and most of a bellini. Now I was going to have steak tartare. Seriously? And they couldn’t tell me the provenance of the beef. Oh well, it was quite good. I struggled to take some notes, struggled more in the failing light to take a decent photo, and popped into the sweltering kitchen for some action shots that didn’t turn out.

Finally it was time for our last restaurant. Since it was no longer a million muggy degrees out at 9 p.m., we sat at a sidewalk table for the last of the natural light. This, I will tell you was my favorite place — Le Deauville. I’m a sucker, of course, for French. The owner was Parisian and managed to not visibly flinch when I asked en Francais if he had any pastis. Even more charming, he brought both Pernod and Ricard for us to taste the difference. I tried taking some sidewalk dining photos but a blasted film crew coming down the street kept getting in my way. I stared dumbly at the menu, and flipped through my notes to see if I needed one more cocktail, appetizer or dessert to write about. I was simply incapable of making a decision, feeling as quick and with it as a rhino in quicksand right about now. I finally went with escargots.

Drinking pastis, sitting at a sidewalk cafe outside a green corner storefront that looked like it had been plucked in its entirety from a street in Paris, and waiting for escargots I felt a strange displacement as if I didn’t know quite where I was.  The escargots landed sizzling and blooming with the perfume of garlic, presented on a doily. Correct, as they French say. I’d like to say my delicate constitution prevented me from eating much, but I dug in like a farm hand and polished off my half of the snails, and tore off chunks of my baguette to dunk in the heavenly sauce. I managed approximately two sentences in my notebook and pondered the cheese list.

We sat for ages, resting after the gauntlet of food. And we toasted each other with our little Ricard glasses, dubbing each other champions. The owner wouldn’t hear no to his “suggestion” that we finish with chocolate mousse, so we took our final bites, heaved ourselves up off of our seats, and lumbered down the sidewalk into the night.

(And I was halfway done — the eating was only the beginning. After came the photo editing and the writing. Dessert will be the paycheck and the byline!)

The champions at the end of the night. Photo by Angela Anderson who happened to walk by and see us.

Hard, hard, hard

Listening to instructions about the process

I don’t mean to sound overly melodramatic, but I feel like everything in my life will be either remembered as before I killed an animal or after. Anything before I stood outside yesterday, sweat flowing freely down my arms, hands shaking almost comically, if it weren’t so deadly serious, as I prepared to slash my knife and take the life of a chicken, anything before that seems like a different life.

I knew this would be hard. I had nightmares and bad vivid daydreams about a killing yard. I really didn’t want to cry and have a huge emotional reaction in front of people, but it was completely out of my control. From the moment Tom, the farmer at RiverSong Farm, began to kindly and calmly explain the process I began to bite my lips and try to fight it off. Nobody else was crying, but I suppose we were all there for different reasons. I’ve spent a lot of words in recent posts explaining why I need to know where the animals come from that I eat, but standing there in the brutal sun, feeling like the earth was tilting under my feet and hearing a strange roar in my ears I questioned why this was so important.  I felt quite as if I may pass out or possibly throw up at any moment, so why subject myself to this? I wish I could explain eloquently but I can’t. I only knew that if I’m going to eat meat, this was something I had to do. If animals can lose their lives for my dinner, I just needed to feel that I paid my own price, that of  feeling the pain of taking one’s life.

I never wanted to hug Brian so much in my life as when he stepped next to me and told me he wouldn’t want me to be any other way than the way I was at that moment. I’m glad he’s ok with such a crier.

So I gulped ice cold water and took lots of deep breaths, and watched up close as Tom hung a chicken from its feet from the “killing tree” and demonstrated how to circle your left thumb and forefinger around its neck, beak against the palm of your hand, and quickly make the deadly cut. I wanted more than anything to close my eyes or look away but I watched. For one, I had to know how to do it myself, but I also remember someone telling me years ago that if you close your eyes in the scary part of the movie you’ll have bad dreams. Watching it was awful. Knowing I had to do it was worse.

The killing tree

Tom and his partner Sarah killed two, and showed the group of us there at the workshop how to scald, chill, pluck and gut them next. And then people started taking their turns. I wanted to go first to get it over with but then realized everyone would be watching. If I passed out I didn’t want to do it in front of an audience. Brian went before I did, and made a perfectly clean cut in two swipes. Some of the other people were blood-spattered from head to toe, but Brian didn’t have a drop on him.

I went last, while everyone was busy processing their chickens. Tom stood right next to me. He is a good soul, and so is Sarah, incredibly patient and empathetic, they never made me feel ridiculous for my reaction. Trying not to sound like I was about to completely lose it, I asked him to take the knife if I couldn’t do it right away — I didn’t want to cause any more pain than I had to.

My hands shook so badly I didn’t know if I could physically do it. Holding that chicken’s warm, pulsing neck in my hand, knowing I was about to take its life was the saddest and most horrible feeling I’ve ever had. I felt like this creature trusted me as I held his life in my hands. But I did it. It took three swipes and the head was off and in the bucket. Tom had to remind me to step back because it was shortly going to begin flopping.

I hadn’t cried while I did it but I couldn’t stop the tears or the shaking now. It took me several moments, along with a cold, wet towel to my face to even remotely regain composure. My hands shook so badly I could hardly remove the chicken from the tree. I then took the steps to transform what was two minutes ago a living animal into meat — I scalded and cooled, then plucked it.

At the last table I had trouble after removing the tail reaching in and removing the organs. I’d done work like that on a duck in France but that duck was cold, and I hadn’t killed it myself. In the end I couldn’t deal with the warm interior of the chicken and asked Brian to remove everything. That was it. We washed it, dropped it in a ziploc bag and put it on ice.

Free ranging chickens

Now we have two chickens to eat. They will literally be the first chickens I’ve cooked, so as horribly hard as it was, I do have some pride that  I killed my own first chicken. It lived a good life, so far as chickens go, roaming around eating whatever it liked, and I think I gave it as quick and painless of a death as I could.

But now that I’ve done it I have no wish to do it again. In some weird way I feel I’ve paid my dues and I can eat meat — when it comes from farms like this and Jim Fiedler‘s — with as clear a conscience as I can.

So I can meet my dinner, but can I k i l l it?

A chicken at the market in Marrakech

Last year in Morocco, my friend Tracy and I took a cooking class.  Our shopping expedition to the souks for our ingredients for the day included picking up chicken. Not tidily wrapped chicken segments, but clucking, feathery, beady-eyed staring you in the eye chicken.

I wrote a story about the day for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Discovering a feast of 1,000 spices in a Moroccan adventure, that started with this:

MARRAKECH, Morocco — Toto, we’re not in Whole Foods anymore. I stand blissfully unaware as my friend Tracy orders a chicken in her newly acquired Arabic. The merchant chooses one from the squawking, feathery crowd behind him and oooh — snaps its neck before I can blink, much less look away

My reaction, had I had time, would have been to look away. Granted, I wasn’t eating meat then, hadn’t for some eight years. But even so, it was interesting to me that something such an everyday part of life for this entire city, country, possibly even continent, was so exotic to me as to make the lead of my first big travel story.

Why? I didn’t grow up sheltered from the reality of where meat came from. I cleaned my plate when my tiny great-grandmother made fried chicken from her brood out in the yard. I knew perfectly well that she snapped their necks. I don’t suppose I thought anything of it. (I also made no note of the lard she fried them in, either as an evil substance or as a badge of pride for a foodie). It just was and I just ate it.

For good or for bad I’ve learned plenty about food and where it comes from and what it means for me and the world I live in in the years since. For a long time I chose not to be part of the meat world. That has changed, but I am, granted rather obsessively, learning exactly where my food comes from and testing my reactions and assumptions.

For the years I didn’t eat meat I liked to say that people who eat meat should be willing to kill the animal themselves. I still believe that, though of course I realize most folks cruising through the drive-in for nuggets aren’t going to go for that. It’s a little messier than the box or bag or whatever those things come in, for one. And the simple truth is, we don’t have to. Millions of us have the luxury of eating meat that we never met while it was alive. Someone else does the dirty work for us. That bothers me. If I’m going to eat the products of a farmer and butcher’s hard work, I should be willing to see things from their side. It’s not like I’m going to give up my easy access to food, but I want to understand what it means to transform a living creature into meat. And I want to know if I can, when it comes right down to it, be the cause of an animal’s death that’s going to end up on my plate.

So this Saturday I head to RiverSong Farm to see if I can put my money where my mouth is. My instructions say:

Remember to bring a non-serrated knife, a cooler to take your chicken home in, bottle of water (to drink, it’s hot), and make sure to wear clothes and shoes you don’t mind getting dirty and/or stained.

This is for real.

If the nightmares and the jolting awake sick at the thought that I’m going to kill something are any clue, it’s not going to be easy. I don’t actually know if I can really do it. Tom, the farmer, says he can do it for anyone that can’t. But if I’m taking that chicken home (to fry in lard!) I really want to take responsibility and do this thing.

But you can bet I’m having a stiff drink first!

Meeting my dinner

With Jim Fiedler and his porky mug

Eating meat is a curious thing. I do it now, but have such conflicting feelings. I see so many compelling reasons not to, but can also understand the reasons that it can make sense. All I really know is that I want to do it mindfully. And part of that, for me, is not only knowing where the meat comes from, and who raises it, but seeing the animals themselves. Could I look a cow in its serene eyes and be ok with eating a steak? Watch a lamb nurse from its patient mom and still like lamb chops? Or watch baby pigs frolicking around and still enjoy bacon in all its glorious forms?

Well, yes.

But not without a lot of internal conversation and vocal debate.

Brian and I spent this weekend at Fiedler Family Farm. Jim Fiedler was kind enough to let me invite myself out to his land in Rome, Indiana, to see firsthand how he raises his animals. I wanted to know, academically, about the life of the animals, but I wanted too, to test my emotional reaction. Knowing meat comes from animals is one thing. Seeing those very animals up close and personally as they swish flies and otherwise go about their daily business is something else. I’ve not bought meat at a grocery store, I’ve not eaten it at a fast food restaurant but that’s not enough to quell the conflict inside about eating animals. I wish I could say that seeing how happily the cows graze and the pigs roll in the mud and the lambs play in the field made me feel all happy and ok with eating meat but that’s not entirely true.

I can feel very, very good about how these particular animals are raised. They are without a doubt living the life that an animal should. No drugs or hormones, no corn for the cows, no anything horrible. They have lots of land (1100 acres worth) on which to roam in rotating pastures, they eat a diet that nature intended, and up until its their time, they seem pretty darn happy (so far as I can tell, though I’m no cow whisperer). What hurts me, and this came out over a dinner of slow roasted pork ribs and lots of wine last night, is to connect the dots in my mind about what happens between the time these beautiful sentient creatures are living their lives and the time they arrive on my plate. Jim said something about cows teaching their young, and I had to respond: “The very idea that we would eat an animal capable of teaching its young so distresses me.” Jim replied with a statement he once heard Wendell Berry make. I can’t attempt to match Berry’s eloquence, so I’ll just offer my short interpretation: The beautiful land of Kentucky is simply not made to sustain agriculture that could in turn sustain people without meat. It works for sustaining animals.

Salad, ribs and potatoes fried in lard

Well, who am I to argue with Wendell Berry? And I know full well that a vegetarian lifestyle is absolutely a luxury made possible by consuming foods brought to us through means that cab be just as heavy in carbon production as raising cattle. I know this. This is part of what helped me make the decision to eat meat again. Tofu from soybeans grown in China isn’t helping the environment.

I could muddle through this all day and it still wouldn’t be any clearer for me. I will probably never arrive at a satisfactory answer. But for as long as I’m going to love tucking into BLTs, potatoes fried in lard, gorgeous rare lamb chops, ethereally delicious bone marrow and all the other extremely tasty products from the animal kingdom, I’m going to continue to seek them out from people just like Jim Fiedler. I may not be 100% ok with my decision to eat meat, but I can sleep much more easily at night having seen the very animals that I’ll be buying from him at farmer’s market.

Would you care to meet my dinner?

More photos from the weekend

Must travel

On top of the world in Switzerland, our first trip - 2001

I was talking with a friend a while back, a perceptive and wise beyond her years friend (you know who you are) who suggested that now that I am doing some more interesting and fulfilling things than I have done before that I may no longer feel the need to travel so much. It really made sense. Packing up for Russia when I lived in a small town and worked a piddly job brought some drama and excitement to my life. I’m not living the life of my dreams (I’m not in Paris am I?) but I am writing a lot more and meeting so many fascinating people with my food writing that every week I think about how fortunate I am to get to do the freelance work that I do. With that and my husband and dogs and friends, not to mention a full-time job on a Creative team, shouldn’t that be enough? One would think.

But I can’t quell that insistent need to go. To plan and dream and pack and ultimately get on that plane and cross an ocean and land somewhere I don’t speak the language. I have a generous amount of vacation time, so it comes down to a matter of paying for travel so I’m constantly calculating how long it will take to save for the next trip. I weigh every purhase with its equivalent in how much travel it could pay for. I obsess over my pocketsmith account, feeding anticipated savings into it to see when I might next board a plane.

We looked forward to maybe introducing a young member of our family to the travel bug this year. We planned to take our oldest nephew to Europe this fall. To our disappointment, when it came time to really make the decision, he told us he’s “just not a traveler.” That’s sad, and I think he’ll wish later he’d gone for the adventure. But we’ll move on next year — there are lots of nephews and a niece in our family — and for this year, start planning our own trip.

Since going to Morocco last year with my friend Tracy I’ve wanted to return with Brian. I want him to feel the magic, and honestly, to be impressed that I made my way around the labyrinth that is Marrakech. We tend to try to pile up the experiences — and points on a map — so we are entertaining the idea of flying into Spain, flying a budget airline to Morocco where we’ll spend a few days and hopefully make our way into the Sahara on camels, and return to Barcelona for a few more days. Why Barcelona? One of the best chefs I know said the cuisine of Barcelona changed her life. (I say ‘entertaining the idea’ but really I’m already racing ahead, looking into Sahara expeditions, reading about Barcelona restaurants, and contacting the riad where I stayed in Marrakech.)

I’d like to think I could settle down after this trip but I know better. Even if I were writing full time I’d still have that pull from across oceans and continents that drives me to plan trip after trip. So I think I’ll just keep traveling. And I’m ok with that.

Je ne parle pas Francais

Menu French I can handle

(“I don’t speak French”) I say this more than anything else I say in French, except maybe Je suis desolee, je ne comprend pa (I’m sorry, I don’t understand). Madame Koepplinger, my AP French teacher and leader of the French club at my high school, would be disappointed indeed.

I began studying French in 10th grade.  My first nine weeks I earned a D, the only only one of my life. I hated conjugating, I couldn’t remember the vocabulary, and I disliked doing poorly at something. But I got over it and grew to love it, especially with a new teacher in 11th grade. By my senior year I was in AP and the club, and placed out of the mandadory foreign language requirement at Queen’s College Charlotte my freshman year. I took what I guess was intermediate French anyway, and skidded through on what I remembered from high school.

Nearly ten years later I went to France. Finally. Brian and I landed in Paris at dark-thirty in Beauvais airport, way outside the city. I couldn’t muster up the nerve to ask the bus driver what time we left the airport even though I could form the words in my head. We got to the city and needed an ATM for francs for a taxi. I repeated to myself, over and over, clutching my little phrase book: Ou est un distribetuer de billets? I walked, fearful and awed, into my first Paris bar (the only thing open). I spotted what looked like a friendly woman. I opened my mouth. I froze. And, it pains me to admit this, but I opened my little book and bless my young, inexperienced self, I pointed at the phrase in French and smiled hopefully (or pathetically perhaps). She very kindly pointed me down the street (in English) to an ATM. I worked up the nerve to tell the taxi driver to gardez la monnaie (keep the change). He understood me and I had my first taste of the particular glee that comes from opening my mouth, uttering foreign words, and being understood.

In the years since, I’ve returned to France a number of times, and each time before the trip I make an attempt at “brushing up” on my French with varying degrees of dedication and success. Some of my methods have included reading le Monde and looking for a similar article in an English paper to see how much I garnered,  instructional CDs and podcasts (my grown-up version of listening to cassette tapes as I slept like when I was a teenager), French radio stations, French films with subtitles, and a picture book that I should really return to the Somerset library at some point.

Each time I arrive in Paris I am slightly more confident than the time before, but still stumble and bumble my way with the vocabulary of a slow four-year-old. To the taxi driver I say: “I stop here. Get out. I walk now.” And that’s if I’m even half as good as I think I am. I have pretty good restaurant French. I can make a reservation, order and generally handle all business related to food. A particular triumph on my last trip was when they charged me more for wine than they should have. I managed without even a book to say what I think was, “The wine is 30 euros? I think it is 20 euros.” Sure enough, they took my bill and refigured it and explained the confusion.

But I’d like to actually carry on a conversation. I have missed so many conversations because I can’t do much after I’ve introduced myself and say “I have a small dog. His name is Truffle.” I talked to as many people as I could last time — being alone on a trip propels me to try to talk to more people, but after initial pleasantries I’m stuck.

And if Brian and I are ever seriously moving to France — and do we ever hope to — we seriously need to do more than make restaurant reservations. And if I’m limited,  Brian is a complete beginner. Bonjour and merci make up his vocabulary.

So am I ever excited that our new friend Grace Pau, 12 years in Louisville by way of Brittany, wants to do lessons with Brian and me. She loves teaching French, and says her method is nothing like the painful rote mechanisms I used in high school (I still run through in my head when I try to conjugate an -er verb: e,es,e,ons,ez,ent before I speak.)

I hope from her I can learn — besides more vocabulary — an ease, and and a comfort in speaking French. I am almost unbearably self-conscious about it, and will sit and laboriously try to work out a full, correct sentence before I speak. Often the opportunity is passed before I say it, or I chicken out and do it in English. I’m really excited about this and can’t wait to get started. If I can’t be in France, at least I can bring a little of it into my life.

Tuesday with Montalcino

I’m still around, just haven’t had the urge to blog since I’ve been back from France. But life must go on even when I’m not traveling.  And it may as well be fun! In that spirit we’re trying to do some more fun things here in Louisville.

Last week we went to a dinner with the French language club where I met, impossibly enough, a woman who lives a mile from Camont, where I stayed in Gascony. We’re going to a foie gras dinner this month so Brian can see for himself what all the fuss is about.

And tomorrow after work we’re going to one of my favorite places in town for a drink, the Brown lobby bar. It’s a wine tasting with the National Wine Trainer for Banfi wines (how does one get that job?) and small plates with one of my favorite chefs – Laurent Geroli, who always humors my painful attempts at French. We took his cooking class last year and I’ve been a fan ever since. I’ve had a bottle from Montalcino collecting dust for about four years that I haven’t had occasion to open, but maybe once I hear from this guy I’ll decide to crack it open.

Dana in Paris

You know how when you travel you wish you could have a nice photo of yourself in the destination? What you end up with too often is a little speck that is you, under harsh sunlight, with some famous landmark or another behind you. Nothing special that captures the magic of being in a place like, say, Paris.

I needed a headshot done and had the thought that it would be fabulous to have it taken in Paris, so I contacted Sophie Pasquet, who I took a photography workshop from last year. Luckily she was available while I was in Paris, and she suggested we meet in the Jardin du Palais Royal.

For two hours I got to feel a little like a movie star as Sophie’s camera clicked away. She said I was a natural, which is a nice way of saying that I’m a ham. ;) When I was a teenager my friends and I loved to dress up, make up, and take pictures. This was just a grown-up version of that. Despite the cold (and it was freezing – below freezing actually) I had a blast. Sophie brought little heating pads that I stuck under my shirt or between my hands to try to thaw out.

I couldn’t wait to see the result, and by the time I got home from Paris last night they were waiting for me. I loved them! She did such a wonderful job capturing my excitement and happiness at being in Paris, and has provided me with the absolute best souvenir possible of an amazing trip.

Smiles in Paris

I possibly look like a crazy lady in Paris. I talk to myself for one. I love this city but it’s big and busy and I’m keeping up with all my personal belongings and navigating — this takes some self pep talk. So I’m walking along talking to myself in a foreign language, but if that’s not enough, I occasionally break into enormous smiles for no reason discernible to a passerby.

Here are some things that made me smile yesterday:

Getting into a taxi at Gare Montparnasse where I arrived by train and being immediately confronted with the Eiffel Tower when we pulled into traffic (Caribbean music blasting in the cab)

-Looking out my room window directly at the Eiffel Tower

-Turning behind me as I’m walking and seeing, again, the Eiffel Tower

-Seeing the laundromat Brian and I were so befuddled by on our first trip to Paris (to Europe too!)

-Passing a store that sells only umbrellas. Fantastical, frou frou umbrellas.

-The sight of the great looming Notre Dame hulking over the floodlit Seine

-Biting into a macaroon that melts at the same time it releases an explosion of intense flavor.

It’s snowing a bit today in Paris with a high of freezing. Nothing like what’s going on at home but it’s odd to be here in such weather.

I’m finishing up breakfast (wifi only in the lobby) and am setting out. Here are a few photos from yesterday.