travel travel travel: franglais scrabble and mushy peas

         Life here is about to get really busy, so I just wanted to write a little update about last Wednesday-Friday. I'll post more about the weekend and this week as soon as I get time.

KICKING BACK IN CHAUNY

         It turns out that France’s memory is better than the US’s. That must come with being several hundred years older. As evidence of this, Armistice Day continues to be a national holiday here. This means I didn’t have to work last Thursday, so I took a little vacation up to Chauny, the small town where Elizabeth is living. Up until last week, I still hadn’t made it outside of the city and immediate suburbs. I had somehow forgotten about French countryside. For as much as people talk up Paris as a beautiful place, there's something about the fields and small towns outside the city. I could probably be content just riding around and looking at the country through a train window for the next 5 months.

         When I got in, Elizabeth and I went to a café for a late lunch. I was hungry so I splurged and got a full meal: a delectable pastry with a mushroom cream sauce as an appetizer, followed by a croque-monsieur (traditional French sandwich that is like a grilled cheese + ham) with a side salad, and 20cl of red wine. 20cl of wine should be about 1.5 glasses. Each time I’ve ordered this, I’ve gotten significantly more. It comes in a little carafe and I think they’re supposed to measure it out, but most people just fill it up. That’s what happened here, so Elizabeth and I shared so that I could avoid getting daytime sloshed. When we went up to pay at the end, my whole meal cost 10€. At first I thought they had forgotten to charge me for something, but then I realized that, no, this was just the difference in costs between Chauny and Paris. This realization was bittersweet.

         We were both exhausted for no real reason. The weather was rainy and bleak, so we used that as an excuse to take it easy indoors. Elizabeth has a free washer and dryer in her place, so she had suggested that I could do some laundry while I was there. I filled my entire travel backpack with dirty clothes. It was obscene. She was a very good sport.

          Outside of laundry we managed to get in lots of R & R. We woke up late on Thursday morning to the sound of horns from an Armistice Day parade outside. We enjoyed a late breakfast and settled into a game of scrabble. Her roommate had made (yes, made) a scrabble board with the French version of the letters. This meant that there were a million e’s and the k’s were worth 10 points! We played with a mix of languages, using whatever was most convenient. It is far too easy to rack up points when you’re making English words with the French letter values. Even more so when you’re allowing words like “swum” and “stepkids.” 

CHEERS

         Friday I hopped a train to London to visit Ms. Emma Bohmann. She met me at the St. Pancreas station (for the record: Emma and I both realize it’s St. Pancras and no we’re not going to start saying it “right”). I am a food oriented tourist. My first priority when visiting a new place is to try all the local specialties. England has a longstanding reputation for terrible food, but I was still determined to taste as much traditional English cuisine as possible. Our first order of business was to go to a pub to get a pint and some fish & chips. This came with “mushy peas.” These are big in England. They are what they sound like, peas that are mushed up a little. It surprised me to see anything advertised with the adjective “mushy.” It surprised me even more that they were good.

Here are my photos from the trip!

the stories are to be continued…