bonne annee!

sundays are fun days in paris. yesterday i woke up and decided to check out the bird market on the ile de la cite (one of the islands on the seine in the center of paris). most days its a flower market, and i hope to check that out sometime...but for today, it was oiseaux! i was expecting some exotic things, it was mostly just parakeets and canaries but they were very cute (lots of charlies):

afterwards i met up with a couple of brownies to celebrate the chinese new year in chinatown. just so you know, dim sum is just as good in france!

i was pretty psyched because we came across a bakery that was selling durian-flavored items. durian is this exotic fruit that i heard of while reading "the fruit hunters" by adam leith gollner. here is a nytimes quote that quotes him: "..[gollner] describes one variety of the stinking durian fruit as tasting like “undercooked peanut butter-mint omelets in body-odor sauce.” ok so thats just one variety i guess. i decided i had to buy something. so i bought a durian/coconut-filled brioche to try it out. eeeek. pretty overwhelming. then i saw the real thing at a grocery store:

when we were at this grocery story, as we were leaving we heard a man saying "attention, le petard!! attention!!!" at first i didn't know what he was talking about. then i noticed he was waving a lighted match around - he had just lit a whole string of firecrackers that was right in front of the store! we ran back inside but it was still dreadfully loud and fume-y inside. people were lighting firecrackers all day and walking down the street was like entering a battlefield. one second a kid a throws a firecracker at your feet. the next some yells "bonne annee!" and sprays you all over with silly string.

durian, dim sum, deathly firecrackers...what else is there at the chinese new year? OH YES, DRAGONS!

as alice says, kids speaking french...its brilliant. amazingly adorable. "papa, il arriiiiiiive! il est juste la bas!!!"

my dad mentioned that he sensed a "food sub-theme" to my blog. i would like to acknowledge that that's definitely going to be the case, since i love food and so do french people. also i would add that i think there is also a "food sub-theme" to france as a whole. in our cooking class on saturday (taught by maryse, the sister of our program director), maryse mentioned that she wanted to think of another title instead of "cooking class" because she tries to teach much more than that. maybe "life class"? "france class"?

pictures of that meal to come...plus eiffel tower with melissa...

also - its snowing? what what???