First of all, let me preface this long-awaited, much overdue entry by saying that I absolutely did not forget about you, loyal readers, wherever you are. I promise. It’s just that, quite honestly, Paris has completely devoured me whole.
In a good way, of course, and in the way that Paris usually tends to do, but also in a way that has left me with too many things to tell you. I found myself habitually staring at this poor empty little blog space for about 10 minutes a day, and then running to the nearest boulangerie to seek refuge.
For example, I could have definitely told you about the Algerian restaurant owners who couldn’t get over my Californian roots and spent the entire evening impersonating Arnold Schwarzenegger and asking about the seaside, before inviting us to dance around the restaurant to traditional music once all the rest of the tables had emptied.
I could have further mentioned the fact that food, and the experience surrounding it, is better when you have to work to acquire it in a different language. It usually goes something like this:
What I hear myself saying:
“Yes, I would like to have the beef bourguignon please, and if you could perhaps bring out another bottle of wine? That would be lovely, yes, thank you. Everything is definitely to our liking, of course! This is the best restaurant we’ve tried in Paris so far!”
What I am most likely saying:
“Yeeeesss, the beef bourguignon good. Wine more? Good, thank you kindly. We like it all! Best Paris food we eat!”
Regardless of the things I should’ve told you, there is one, and only one, night that fits the Balls in Your Coffee litmus test of awkwardness: the night of the doggie bag.
It was a dark and stormy night, and a group of six of us girls had braced the gale force winds and torrential Parisian rain in search of…Chinese food. Don’t get me wrong, poulet rôti is good any day of the week, but some nights deserve a steaming bowl of sweet and sour soup, broccoli beef or chow mein. This was one of those nights.
After wandering in the dark along a road spotted with signs in Chinese (which surprise, surprise, are not all restaurants. Ask the pharmacy owner who watched us huddle around a window searching for a menu), we caved to our growling stomachs and ducked into the first brightly lit and welcoming eatery we saw, which turned out to be a Thai/Vietnamese combo joint.
We took approximately 37 minutes to leaf through the Biblically ginormous menus and place our orders, and settled in, giggling about our American-in-Paris-picturesque adventures to date and eagerly plotting our upcoming weekend.
We ate, we passed plates, the food was delightful, we all made “Oh, now, would you look at this?? French Chinese food! What a riot!” faces, ignoring the fact that American Chinese food as a concept is technically just as far-flung. I was enjoying my pho—a savory broth soup with strips of beef, bean sprouts and thick noodles, topped off with lemon and mint—so much, I decided to pack up half and save it for lunch the next day.
I politely asked our smiley waiter if I could take it à emporter, to go. He gave me a quizzical look, and I half jokingly said, “Dans une doggie-bag!” giggling at my friend across from me. I had seen a French movie in the previous weeks and heard the term “doggie-bag,” thus it obviously was kosher to use in this setting. I felt very in-the-know.
Our table was situated along the edge of the open kitchen, so I casually turned to watch the waiter take my soup to the counter and look at it for a second, a small furrow forming in his brow. Before I knew what he could possibly be doing, he picked up a clear, plastic to-go bag, slipped it over the soup bowl and slopped the remaining pho into the bag before twisting it, tying it off and plunking it down in front of me on the table, wrapped in another plastic grocery bag.
All six of us stared at the sack of lukewarm noodles and bean sprouts sitting in front of me, like one of the fish in the bags you win at the fair, before erupting into laughter and getting up to leave before we attracted too much attention.
And that’s how I wound up wandering the rainy streets of Paris carrying a bag of Vietnamese soup.
