A quick
comment about last weekend: If ever a lame marching band smiled slyly just
before a performance, the one that played “Get Lucky” in front of Trump and
Macron at the Bastille Day parade did.
This modern art project is perhaps a comment on the city's motto: "Tossed but never sunk"?
And now back
to food news. It’s hard to
believe, but the past seven days included a ham-cheese-béchamel pastry, duck
kababs, unlimited pastis (one of those licorice-flavored alcohols), some eggs I
flipped with technical precision, and real hot chocolate (a mug of cream +
three chocolate bars). Fear not—these
delicacies did not distract from fermented and aged milk products: the rucksack
was graced by six kinds of cheese before they slipped down my gullet.
breaking grammar news: I guess it’s not
really any different than in English (“to make happy/sad/etc.”), but the
operative word of expression in French is rendre,
“to render.” Perhaps the
association in my mind is with rendering fat into soap, or some other very
tangible, physical process. Things
got much sillier when our professor asked where he would party this
weekend. He was horrified by the
outdated suggestion of la discothèque. But none of us knew the amazing phrase the French use for “nightclub,”
the term created either by forthright lesbians or thirteen year-old boys
clumsily employing double entendre.
La boîte
de nuit is literally “the box of night,” or colloquially “night-box,” and
the cool kids just say they’ll meet up at la
boîte. Maybe our minds were in the gutter, but
this all-too-apt name set off quite a bit of laughter.
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