Foreign Parts

À AIMER: la cuisine "exotique"

That Vietnamese cuisine is considered "exotic" in Paris (along with Mexican food, North African food and even Italian food) is something à détester.  That it is readily available and quite authentic is something à aimer.  

I have found that nothing cures the Paris blues like a big bowl of pho, especially when that big bowl is eaten at Le Bambou in the 13th arrondissement, or at Tin Tin in Belleville.  When you've had enough of dairy and red meat, of apéritifs and digestifs and of wine in between, when it's 58 degrees in July and the potted palms in restaurant windows look as though they are shivering, it is time to take a trip to Southeast Asia.

Goodbye Paris, with your puréed soups so delicately seasoned, and Hello Vietnam! with your crudely chopped vegetables, your unwieldy noodles, your bold flavors.  When that big bowl of chicken soup is placed in front of me I'll inhale deeply, savoring the scents of star anise, garlic, and cinnamon.  Then I'll reach for the condiments — sliced onion, bean sprouts, blades of coriander, Thai basil leaves, wedges of lemon, sticky plum sauce, and maybe just one fiery chili pepper if I'm feeling daring.  One slurp and I am transported from North to South, from West to East, from cold to hot, from here to there.

Thank you, Vietnamese people of France.  You have saved me on so many occasions.  

À AIMER: la Fête de la Musique

Yesterday was France’s annual Fête de la Musique, a nationwide celebration of the fifth art. According to the Ministry of Culture, more than 10,000 organized concerts were held throughout the country. 

What I love about la fête, though, are the unofficial performances — the impromptu jam sessions and street corner acts that pop up all around the city, day and night. I stumbled upon this dark duo at 11 a.m. as I was strolling near the Panthéon. Their Goth mumblings didn’t rock my world, but they sure made me smile.

À AIMER: le Parisien

 

The newspaper, not the city dweller.  Le Parisien is the daily journal of the Ile de France and, like all great metropolitan papers, it is a little bit informative, a little bit sensationalistic, and unflaggingly proud of its roots.  When you're reading Le Parisien, you know you're in Paris.  Even if you are a transplant like myself, the stories from the streets around you — les sans-papiers (illegal immigrants) who are on strike against the restaurants that employ them and the government that refuses them working papers, the installation of a new floating bridge on the canal de l'Ourcq, the day's traffic and air quality reports — pull you in and make you feel as though you belong, as if you're a part of things, maybe even a tad parisienne yourself.

Of course, that's not always a positive thing, Parisians having the reputation that they do.  Yet Le Parisien even celebrates that — the very worst of its denizens' traits — with an advertising campaign that has a good, cynical laugh over what it means to be un parisien.