Easter Resurrection

"And on Easter Sunday, the blog arose, as if from the dead..."

Hey folks. I's been a while. Since last we spoke, the gray, dreary, un-ceasing and sun-less Parisian winter has blossomed into a fragrant spring. The outdoor 'terasses' of cafés have exploded with sunglass-clad clientel, cigarettes in hand as they gesture to the waiter for another midday 'demi'. I've awoken from my drawn-out midwinter slump and realized that my hibernation dreams of living in the best city on earth are the reality of Paris in the Springtime: magnifique. And I've decided, (following a few recent 'whhhhhhhy aren't you bloooooogggging anymore?' emails) to recommence sharing my life in this magnificent city with all of you. Joyeuse Pâques! (Happy Easter!)

And now, a corny Easter franglais joke:

Q: Why do the French chasse aux oeufs de Pâques (Easter egg hunts) always end early?
A: Because for the French, one egg is un oeuf ('en-ough!')!


The flower shots are from a trip to Giverny (the garden town famous for being the home of Monet) that I chaperoned last Friday for the study abroad company I work with. It's true that the journey is getting a bit repetitive at this point, but if visiting Monet's house, getting a comped three-course lunch and having two hours to read among the flowers in the afternoon is becoming routine, I feel that I haven't got much to complain about with my job.




Easter is sort of a big deal in France. Schools have practically the entire month off to celebrate: a two-week spring break followed by a national holiday on Easter Monday. The day itself is a family affair, rich suppers and wine for the adults and chasse aux oeufs for the enfants to discover the delights delivered by the Easter Bells that fly from Rome. Yes, they actually believe that over here. True comment from one of the girls I tutor: "American children think rabbits deliver eggs? But rabbits don't even have hands!" She was incredibly smug while saying this, as if sure that the superior logic of her 8-yr old brain had defeated me. I can't say that I blame her for her incredulous attitude, though--even if the belief in inanimate belfry benefactors seems a bit silly, it must be a bit of a stretch to take an animal best known as a main course with Dijon mustard sauce and suddenly make it into a hero. No, here it is not the rabbit, but (perhaps more logically) the chicken who is ennobled and immortalized in advertising in the windows of the chocolaterie. One shop on the road I worked actually had four live chicks running around day and night under heat lamps in a window display. Another had this larger-than-life model (for an idea of scale, yes, that's an American football the hen just laid):

The hen worship makes sense, though, when you see the care and craftsmanship that goes into her eggs:
Adventurous chocolateries like the following branch out from the traditional egg and chicken chocolates and tackle a more seaside-y theme...
Love Actually fans should note that there was (apparently) more than one lobster present at the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Not to mention the fish:
For me, the fish were a little too reminiscent of a different holiday that occurred earlier this month: Poissons d'Avril. This equivalent of April Fools is the day when you attempt to stick fish-shaped "kick-moi" signs to the backs of your friends and loved ones without them noticing; you also eat chocolate fish. To end with, here's the poisson d'avril I received as a gift from my boss, back on the 1st of the month.
Little did I know as I started to munch that I had actually received the Puppy Surprise edition, and out popped a surprise (sadly, as was also the case with the classic 90s toy, mine held far fewer 'surprises than originally hoped. Seriously, did ANYONE actually get '...or 4...or 5!' out of theirs?)
Happy Holidays everyone!

Chocopocalypse

According to an article I read recently, we might be running out of chocolate. To quote one of my favorite bloggers: PANIC!

As a chocoholic, I find the threat of a chocopocalypse deeply distressing. I use chocolate as a stress-reliever, an anti-depressant, a motivator and a reward for productivity--essentially, for everything, always.

As a word nerd, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to write about this to give myself the excuse to make the lovely porte-manteau in the title. Sorry y'all.

Fortunately, unlike in the case of endangered honey and mysteriously vanishing bees, a chocopocalypse is still reversible. Basically, the cocoa plant is a pain in the ass to grow, and not profitable enough considering the effort, so farmers abandon it in favor of alternate cash crops. The result is that the current demand is overwhelming the supply, so unless something changes, we'll eat through our stores until there is nary a Worther Bud or a Nestle Bittersweet chip left to nosh on.

In conclusion, savor those Hersheys bars (except Hersheys is honestly pretty shit, so I'd go Godiva or at least Cadbury's if I were you, but to each her own indulgence). You never know, a few years from now our children could be asking us "you actually tried chocolate?!?" in the same way we incredulously ask our parents if they remember life without color tv. By that point, there will be a whole new level of the "fiction" of Charlie's Chocolate Factory and Chocolat beyond oompa loompas and impossibly debonair river gypsies. And I have to admit, the death by chocolate river drowning (à la Augustus Gloop) will not seem nearly so horrible in the face of a chocolate-less existence.

My fifteen minutes of fashionista fame

So coming to me for me for fashion advice would normally be like consulting a LOLcat for grammar (can haz hanging participle?). But the situation has become dire, and if no one else is going to expose the inappropriate exposure of this fashion blunder then I'm just going to have to suit up and step up.

Ahem.

Leggings and tights are called "leggings" and "tights" because they are NOT PANTS! They are not a stand-alone article of clothing.

Don’t get me wrong; I rocked the leggings look all through my childhood. And now that my childhood is making a fashion comeback, I myself own a few pairs. However, there are strict rules governing their adult usage, and here are the acceptable cases:

Under age 10? Definitely. (But don’t be that weird kid that takes too long to make the switchover to jeans after that. That was totally me, and looking at photos, it wasn’t pretty.)

I'm the shrimpy one in the middle channeling a green Where's Waldo

Under a dress? Perfectly acceptable.

With boots, a belt and a baggy sweater? Sure.

Although the lady on the far right has taken the robe look dangerously far into jedi knight territory

Under shorts? Cute.

This look always reminds me of Mickey Mouse

The last appropriate usage is any sort of theatrical use. Dance routines get a pass, as do any Halloween tributes to Freddie Mercury, David Bowie or the like.

When I was in third grade I used to laminate all of my notebooks

in holographic contact paper that looked exactly like these leggings.

Unfortunately, it seems that lately the boots, the dress hemlines and the sweaters have all been shrinking, leaving me faced with faced with more detailed information about strangers’ anatomy then I would ever want. If you wear your leggings like Snooki, then you're as big of a flop as she would have been less than a second after this photo was taken.

In summary, the key concept to take away from this is UNDER (or over, but only as in I am so over camel toe). Feel free to rock those leggings, tights or jeggings, but remember: if they're not beneath something, the style's beneath you.

And now I'm sure you're all underwhelmed with my layering punnery. Over and out.

The revival of Mobile Moments!

For anyone who didn't follow my former blog, I had an ongoing series called "Mobile Moments," featuring low-res photos from my everyday life that had little to no context and were taken with my mobile phone. It's a fun way to get a little insight into Paris' quirks, and a low-effort post for me, so I figured I'd keep the tradition alive. And so, without further ado...

To start with, here's are some chic, promotional Coca-Cola bottles, that apparently feature some Franco-german fashion designer and photographer (Karl Lagerfeld) but to me just look like Pulp Fiction's Vincent Vega in profile. In college we used to break up our all-night paper writing sessions with random Pulp Fiction dancing interludes, so every time I see this bottle I get the urge to start doing the twist down the store aisle:

A rainbow that I saw walking home from work along rue Daguerre one night:
A ridiculous pastry concoction I spied in the window of a patisserie in the 17th: basically a stack of éclairs topped with a réligieuse (a flat, round eclair made of two spheres stacked snowman-style, literally translates to "nun" and so named because they apparently look like a portly sister in her habit). I hope that these are meant to be portioned out to an entire family like a Thanksgiving turkey, because this "marquise" is way too many calories for anyone to eat in one sitting. At 3.30, it's great chocolate bang for your buck, though (euphoria for your euro?)--a single éclair is usually at least 2 euros.

A snazzy mural on the side of a building across from the Edgar Quinet stop, in the Montparnasse area:
A random Chinese restaurant from Avenue de Choisy in the 13th that makes me chuckle whenever I pass it because it seems ripe for an inter-lingual "who's on first"/ Dr. Who routine:
("Hey, wanna party with us tonight? We're going to Chez hu."
"Chez who?"
"Oui."
"Who's we?"
"Oui, Hu."
"Who?"
"Us!"....)

Children playing in the central place of the 14th arrondissement's town hall after school got out for the day:
A bizarre sighting in my local grocery store, where a man was apparently repairing the freezers. Most people seemed to walk by without noticing the feet protruding from in-between the peas and the pizzas (although one passing elderly woman almost had a heart attack when he shifted suddenly). I had a really strong desire to grab one of his shoes and make a run for it. Or tie the laces together. I'm a horrible person:
An impressive fish display from the same local supermarket, featuring a full-sized ray, a shark head stuffed with lemons and a swordfish skewering even more citrus. I think their fish guy is either an aspiring installation artist or just really bored:
Modern, Mondrian-looking building that seems oddly out of place in my neighborhood (and also has a depressing lack of windows):

A pretty "legit" looking fortune-telling shop. Every surface on the inside looked to be cram-packed with charms and potions, but I was too afraid of voodoo curses to attempt venturing in with a camera:
I'm not exactly sure what this sticker is advertising (a guerilla suburban antifascist squad?) but it looks pretty hardcore, whatever it is:
Sometimes Europeans will put random English words on products to increase their cool factor, especially kid's products or trendy screen-printed t-shirts in Zara. Here's a girl's diary/planner that seems to be attempting English but failing on so many levels--kiss me pissy?
And to come full circle, here's another promo Coca-Cola bottle--this time for the FIFA World Cup (yeah, so it's long past, but the bottles are still in grocery stores). The text in the blue block translates to "celebrate the goals!", but my (juvenile) anglophone mind always reads it as "celebrate the butts!"
Looking over these, and seeing how many of them come from the grocery store, I just realized that I must get my kicks in strolling down the supermarket soda isle. Which is ironic, considering that I don't even DRINK soda, although logical enough when you consider that by the time I make it to the store at the end of the day I'm usually a bit punchy from fatigue.

Or maybe it's just pathetic. Hmph. Well if that's what you think, dear reader, then I have three choice words for you: kiss my pissy!

The Frog Princess

So I'm finally a legal, semi-permanent resident. Youpi! I have my titre de sejour, le-voilà:
I wrote last year about the ridiculous process involved in getting my carte de sejour to go along with my student visa in my passport. Happily, this time around the process was practically painless. Sure, it involved multiple metro rides to the other end of town on strike days, paying 50 euros for an official translation of my birth certificate (with my and my father's names spelled wrong...*sigh*) and sure, I still had to pay for 30 euros worth of civic stamps and stand in line for longer than I would have liked. But considering that I managed to avoid getting my chest x-rayed, or getting snagged in the bureaucratic catch-22s that marked my apartment search, I'm going to call this episode a win.

To celebrate my new froggery, I decided to--what else?--do a goofy, gender-bending, stereotype-fueled photoshoot. The facial hair was skillfully crafted from Nutella so as to not be out-Frenched by the props: a beret, a baguette, black clothing, wine and a tricolor boa (a vestige of the short-lived French World Cup enthusiasm from this past summer). Don't act like you're not jealous--you know you wanna look like a Foux da fa-fa extra, too.