Puttin' on the Ritz

As many of you know, the French Lunch, clearly deserving of two capital letters and internationally famous for its leisurely pace, is nothing to sneeze at. It is something that is at once beautiful to withhold, precariously difficult to execute correctly, and entirely worth working all day long for.

On most days, Jess (of the aforementioned Spacecake experience) and I take an hour and a half or so and pick a petit bistro, eat like sloths—whilst dreading the return to the American “oh, no thanks I’ll just eat this granola bar at my desk” lunch break—and then waddle contentedly back down the street to the office. However, every once in awhile, the evil twin of the French Lunch, the French Franprix Run, rears its ugly head with mixed results.

Franprix, a Safeway or Shaws-esque type grocery chain, is home to a sad and convenient array of culinary mockeries. Comté cheese that squishes between your fingers (wrong, I tell you!) and prepacked cold chicken salad dare desperate lunchers to waste a few euros rather than die of starvation from the shelves. At most, one expects fluorescent lighting, antsy checkers, and cheap wine from any Franprix worth its salt.

I’ve never been exceptionally skilled at packing a lunch and toting it to work, so when Jess had some work to finish up at the office a few days ago and our midday date was canceled, I made a French Franprix Run (poor decisions are always influenced by lack of breakfast) to avoid eating my keyboard at my desk.

Twenty minutes later, I emerged with a small box of Ritz crackers, an overpriced carton of raspberries, and a bunch of bananas. Clearly the Nutrition Fairy didn’t make an influential stop at my childhood.

Despite this haggard sounding meal, my growling stomach had decided to settle for it. I trotted back to the office, and was immediately faced with my two colleagues, back from their lunches, sitting at their desks across from mine, silently working away in that determined French way of theirs. It was this moment that I realized just how loud the Ritz crackers in my hand were about to become.

After attempting to open the package as quickly and soundlessly as I could (obviously failing), I bit down on a Ritz. I think I can say, in good faith, that I have never eaten anything louder in my life. So, doing what many people faced with a deathly quiet room and particularly crunchy food items do, I stopped chewing and self-consciously let the cracker get soggy and silent and chewed as noiselessly as I could. Compounded with my overwhelming hunger, I had no choice.

Now, of course, we all think we are being incredibly sly when we do this. The reality is, unfortunately, that it is very obvious to everyone around you that you are trying to avoid an uncomfortable chewing situation by holding your food in your mouth like a squirrel stopped in the middle of the road, hoping not to be seen.

This means it took me about 3 hours to eat approximately 5.5 standard-sized Ritz crackers. Not only that, the overpriced raspberries were covered in mold and the bananas, upon reaching my desk, inhaled deeply and ripened suddenly to a depressing brown and spotty state. My lovely coworkers managed not to comment on my seemingly bizarre eating habits, and most likely created a pool to see how many I got down before I bolted out the door at six o’clock and stood outside, eating whole crackers and crunching like a maniac.

I have learned my lesson. In the afternoons since then, Jess and I have taken refuge under the downy wing of the French Lunch, and I hereby promise to reserve the French Franprix Run for the apocalypse. And maybe cheap wine.

No never means yes, except in France

Well, that was quick.

Crisp, smoky Paris with all its red and yellow leaves artistically scattered on the sidewalks has given way to rainy, chilly Paris, with the aforementioned leaves now acting as sludgy, hazardous land-mines waiting to clump on the bottom of your shoe and send you, flailing and awkwardly trying to right yourself, skidding to the ground in a very un-French manner.

This all means that flopping out of bed on any given morning to join the cramped Metro commuters journey into the real world is doubly as difficult, that lunch breaks are longer and cozier and that piping hot café crèmes are numerous throughout the day.

My umbrella—a flimsy, three euro contraption that would probably constantly break down in asthma attacks if it could breathe and backs down from a fight with a big bad rainstorm quicker than a schoolyard wimp faced with the 160 pound bully looking for lunch money—is not helping.

After powering through the first week of November in the Parisian workforce, I’ve learned two important things: First and most useful, the three no’s, one yes rule. Second, smoking can improve your life. Also, always say yes to coffee. So, three important things.

Really, the only thing you need to know about the smoking thing is that it buys you a break every 10 minutes, approximately. Take a phone call, take a smoke break. Write a paragraph, take a smoke break. I can’t help but be envious as I watch them effortlessly roll their cigs with one hand and stand outside, quietly pondering their next move.

So, in a warped, slightly manipulative sense of politeness, the French have an unspoken rule regarding the acceptance of small things; a coffee, a cookie, anything that in a normal red-blooded American setting would be wolfed down without a second thought. In following with this custom, the French usually refuse about three times, before giving in and accepting whatever it is you’re offering.

I’ve heard it said that the American willingness to say yes upon the first round of this game is often shocking to our baguette-wielding allies. This has been in the back of my head for quite some time now, and naturally, my first week of interaction with my coworkers proved that even if I’m prepared for these rules, I will still trip over my feet and metaphorically make an ass of myself, wet-leaves-on-shoe style.

Case file #1: I return from my lunch break with a packet of Fig Newton-style cookies. Looking to be friendly and non-piggish, I cheerily offer them to my colleagues. Translated accurately, of course, with my language barriers intact.

Me: “Anyone want fig cookie?”

Coworker1: “Oh no, no, that’s okay, thanks.”

Coworker2: “I’m good, thanks though!”

(Here I remember the rule and think with a Yoda-style intuition, “Aaaahh yes, lying they are. Cookies they want…”)

Me: “You sure? (shake of the cookie package) Big deal it’s not. I can’t eat all!”

Coworker1: “No, no, I couldn’t.”

Coworker2: “I just ate, really.”

Me: "It's not serious. I have lots."

Coworker1: (hesitant) "Well....no, no."

Me: (third time’s the charm) “Have cookie…”

Coworkers1 and 2: “We’d love one!!”

Honestly. Same situation, in an American office:

“Anyone want a cookie?”

“Cookies? Oh hell yes.”

End of story.

This one takes the Spacecake

I am now about mid-way through my stay in the City of Lights, and while everything has of course been magnificent and enchanting and eye opening, it has also been…expensive. So, in lieu of dining out every few nights or attempting to be creatively gourmet in my small dorm room with its shabby communal kitchen, there’s been a lot of yogurt with muesli. And pasta. Loads of pasta. So much pasta that I might have to abstain from it for a few months upon my return.

This means that I’m pathetically short on any entertaining dining-with-the-Frenchies stories. All I’ve got is me, often in sweats, standing over the stove watching a) my water boil, or b) my instant falafel mix slowly cook. This one is usually followed by me packing up the falafel to take back the room and mindlessly dumping hot oil into the sink, scaring the crap out of anyone in the kitchen and guaranteeing tiny oil burns on my hands.

Part of the reason my wallet is currently feuding with me however, is a very good reason. Its name is Amsterdam. And we recently spent four lovely, lovely days and three hazy nights together.

Yes, yes, Amsterdam. Land of weed and hookers and waffles and happy Dutch people with clogs and bikes. We’d all be fooling ourselves if I said we paid good money for a three hour train ride with no intention of sampling the famous local ganja. Consider it our out-of-country way of supporting the legalization of Mary Jane in good ol’ California.

Now, being a recent college grad, I may have had a few magical brownies in my time. So when the five of us waltzed up to a tiny coffee shop near the Red Light District, where we had been sent by a friendly waitress for the best edibles in the city, I was feeling confident of my ability to handle myself.

Fast forward a few hours, and I am face down in my hot chocolate. Whipped cream has just spurted out of my nose and I can’t move I’m laughing so hard.

Let’s back up.

We landed ourselves a table at The Speakeasy, tucked in between a restaurant and a sex shop, right alongside the canal. One of the girls, Jess, approached the guy behind the bar, intent on buying us four slices of this so-called Spacecake business we'd heard so much about, wolfing it, and heading back out into the rain-slicked streets for some sight-seeing.

After asking for four slices, a look of pure incredulity set into this guys face.

“Four??” he asked, holding up four fingers and looking past Jess to make sure he had understood these crazy-eyed Americans correctly.

“Yes?” Jess replied, confused.

“Four.”

“Yes.”

“No. Three.”

This lovely man soon explained that we were nuts for thinking we could handle that much Spacecake. Because there were five of us, he sold us three slices of something that looked like my mother’s zucchini bread and a little slip of paper with instructions. We were only to take a fifth at a time, separated by 45 minutes, then 2 hours and then 3 hours.

We nonchalantly accepted his instructions and divided the first little slice into fifths with my i.d. card. No biggie. It tasted like a dry piece of cake, nothing very sweet or weed-y. We hopped off our stools and sailed off into the streets.

The first 45 minutes passed pretty innocuously. None of us felt particularly stoned, and the hour of the second piece came quickly. The second little fifth tasted like I had just bit into a marijuana plant. During this period of a few hours, we proceeded to take a large handful of pictures (that none of us really recall taking) and bought obscene amounts of waffles—frosted and otherwise.

Here's a picture I don't remember taking. That guy knows what we've been into.

We also saw a double rainbow. I am near positive that we were the picture of non-smoothness, as all five of us stood in the middle of the sidewalk, eyes skyward, gasping and smiling like the glassy-eyed idiots we were.

After the hot chocolate incident that soon followed, the day of the Spacecake ends. All I know is we finished those suckers, for better or worse. And that next time, I will only order one.

Oh pho he didn't

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.

Packing and unpacking

Well.

It was definitely not my intention to let almost two whole months go by without so much as a measly “overheard in the produce section” post, I promise. It was quite the sweaty, summer blitz at The Shipyard, and almost every shift, something Balls-in-Your-Coffee-worthy would indeed happen to me, or near me, but after every shift I would slump lazily into my couch and promptly fall asleep, forgetting all about it. And then, after a few months of dragging myself out of bed at 4 am and learning to ignore my feeble alarm clock, I found myself packing up my apartment into cardboard boxes snatched from our morning frozen shipments and flying back across the country to California for some much needed R&R.

Now that August is finally dovetailing into autumn, there’s something you should know: as of next week, Balls in Your Coffee is going international. For the next few months, I will be digging around in a much, much bigger culinary scene: Paris, baby. I can’t help but snort a little laugh every time I see Testicules dans Votre Café­–it somehow looks dirtier en français, doesn’t it?

I’ve been digging around in my brain for Shipyard yarns this past week, but the looming promise of baguettes, coq au vin, €3 house wines and never-ending opportunities for me to make an ass out of myself (and become that tiresome foreign shopper I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at and feel sorry for at the same time) has completely dominated my brain space. Because so much of life across the pond is consumed by the art of…well, consuming, I figure most experiences over there are fair game for you to read about here, so I’ve decided to pack you all up in my carry-on and take you along.

So there it is, in front of you. Hopefully now I can sort through my memories of exploding wine boxes, working the sample station and the drama of employee section communication logs that makes an episode of Gossip Girl look tame in comparison. And I promised you a scientific study.

It seems I have my work cut out for me. If only my bags would pack themselves.

A matter of word choice

From a customer today who was looking to find individual servings of iced tea, but found only our quart and gallon sizes:

Flustered tea-drinker: "I looked over by the tea and I only saw the big jugs you guys have. That's it? No smaller sizes?"

Me: "Yes. That's it...just the big jugs."

FTD: "Yeah, I don't really need the big jugs right now."

Me: "Fair enough. Sorry to disappoint."

Full moons at ten this morning

Summer has officially settled over Boston with a heavy, muggy, thunderstormy sigh, and while it first inspires five-minute cooling breaks hiding in The Shipyard’s walk-in freezer, it also inspires a carefree sense of warm-weather abandon in the city’s residents. Case in point: early this morning, two tiny, blond-haired, blue-eyed, Dennis the Menace lookalike boys strolled past the front windows of the store with their nannies as I stood at my register. Some classic rock song that makes the rounds at bar mitzvahs and weddings everywhere was playing softly overhead and I absentmindedly bopped along, quietly tapping my fingers and watching the T trundle by while I waited for another customer. Suddenly, I realized that two Dennis the Menace butts were staring right back at me.

Just yesterday, I watched some teenager plant ubiquitous flowers around each of the trees near our store, sweating furiously as he planted those damn pansies in earnest for his seven bucks an hour. Today, I was watching two little boys pee all over them.

The nannies were surreptitiously glancing up and down the street like that camper who just spread a layer of toothpaste all over the camp toilet seats, and I realized that they were the ones who had suggested this venue for the boys to take a leak. Cars were whizzing by, pedestrians were maneuvering around them, and the whole bizarre thing seemed to last for an eternity.

Fast forward about a billion minutes, and I’m helping two pruny and fuzzy sweater-wrapped (in this heat!) grandmothers use the credit card touch screen while I bag slimy packets of smoked salmon and almond biscotti. They’re giggling away and chattering to each other, completely oblivious to this display in the window, ten feet to their right. Out of the corner of my eye, I note that the boys have now hiked up their mini cargo pants and the group has strolled right into the store. Clearly our bathroom ambiance doesn’t hold a candle to the great outdoors. I’m still hoping it was some kind of political statement about city maintenance in the not-so-humble suburb where The Shipyard makes its home.

Housekeeping: All you folks out there who are jonesin’ for a good scientific study on this site, to elevate this collection of tales to a medical/world-saving/most prestigious of the prestigious research journal level, your time has come. I will soon be unveiling an analysis of—wait for it—the categories of shopper, distinguished by their behavior at the register. (A very highfalutin' study paid for by your tax dollars and insistance on organic brown rice bread, naturally.) Are you a self-bagger? God, Allah and Chuck Norris bless you, I should give you all the Bed, Bath & Beyond coupons I just received in the mail. Daydreamer? Fine, I sympathize, but please wake the hell up for two minutes and press "no" for cash-back. If, however, you like watching your 32,437 items pile into an amusing likeness of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and then adore following my every movement with a bemused twinkle in your eye as I bag every last bit of it, you may not want to tune in next week.