Category: An American in Paris

So, this isn’t the greatest shot in the world, but I won’t apologize, since I took it on a tram with my cell phone.

I’ve noticed this place for the last year or so when I’ve been taking the tram — I’ve never been by here on foot.

The name is obviously a play on Facebook, and I think it’s a restaurant, the ‘boof’ standing in for ‘bouffe’, which is sort of like ‘chow’ or ‘grub’ in French slang.

I’m not sure I would name my restaurant after an online play on words… (but I did blog about it…).

Today on my way to the metro station I saw a crowd of people outside a “House of Hoops” store. They sell sports shoes. It was between 8 and 8:30 am, and there weren’t crowds outside any of the other shops around.

So, I guessing here, but was this a French “Black Friday” knock-on effect? The store is basically a Foot Locker store. Do they have Black Friday sales in all their stores, regardless of country? It seems weird to me, since Black Friday is tied to Thanksgiving in my mind, and obviously that’s not a big thing here in France (though I did get more “Joyeux Thanksgiving”s than I expected yesterday). But there was a big crowd…

I wish I had been able to get a picture, but I was a bit self-conscious about taking one at the time…

Here’re the real two great tastes that go great together — I got peanut-butter crèpes with coffee in bed for breakfast today.

Most Parisians try to escape Paris during the summer, but many can’t. The city makes an effort to make it a bit vacation-like for us poor souls trapped here.

Every year they ship in tons of sand and put it next to the river Siene and call it Paris-Plage (the Paris beach).

… but what should I think when I see a restaurant with this name?

I was a bit surprised to walk into the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris one days and find, along with a bunch of brochures and other stuff you might expect to find at the entrance to a French astronomy department, the instruction for the 2009 US 1040 tax form.

That’s a scale-model of the Planck satellite in the background.

I got far too excited when I saw this in the bakery near my apartment. At first I didn’t realize what the little sign said. As I started sounding it out… scoo…bee…doo, I realized that these are the Parisian equivalent of Scooby snacks!

One thing I really missed when I was first here was Cream of Wheat. I had been looking for it for a long time, and just couldn’t find it.

It turns out it was right in front of me, in the mini supermarket in my own building. The problem, first of all, is that they don’t call it Cream of Wheat — it’s Semoule. And secondly, the packaging is totally different. The pair left me without my favorite breakfast for years.