Batman and Crème Brûlée

Salut!

Double post again...

Sunday

Today was great. I woke up to violin music. Little French kids playing French songs on their little violins is SO CUTE!

I also discovered that they have a piano downstairs and one of my cousins is a piano prodigy. I would have brought sheet music with me if I had known they have a beautiful Yamaha.

Here is my cousin Tine playing piano and my cousin Ti singing to Skinny Love (the Birdy version not the Bon Iver one)

After lunch we hung out around the house. I joined the girls in doing my nails. For them, the nail is a canvas and they are true artists. I was more of the person who could barely hold a paintbrush, which is obvious in the following pictures:

My cousin's nails

Mine

I ended up ruining my nails two hours later by opening a very difficult bag of chips.
As the older girls were doing their nails, the younger kids were raking leaves; innocently, I thought. Turns out they were gathering leaves to LIGHT THEM ON FIRE!

Angelic smile

Pyros

To give our legs a rest from climbing the endless stairs of the Notre Dame yesterday, we went to the movies today. There are actually more movies shown in the VO, or Version Originale, than VF, or Version Francaise, which means a lot of the population is fluent in English I guess? We saw The Dark Knight Rises, Version Francaise, so my cousins could understand and because I have already seen it in the States. A total of ten of us went; the movie theater person looked horrified at the amount of kids.

Taking up the entire row and flashing the movie theater at the same time

Random Fact: They serve sweet popcorn instead of butter popcorn in theaters.

So I figured I would be able to understand most of the movie because I have watched it before, but they talked too fast for me. The person I could understand best was the villain Bane, who talked very clearly and slowly. Thanks Bane! Weirdly enough, this movie made me homesick for the first time. My cousins LOVED the movie. The older ones asked me about random plot points that they didn’t understand because they have not seen Batman Begins or The Dark Knight.

At home, we found a copy of Batman Begins and we watched it. They are now obsessed with Batman! I must find a copy of The Dark Knight for them.
So ended a wonderful day full of music, Batman, and French.

Monday

Went sightseeing and shopping on La rue de Rivoli, one of Paris’s most famous streets.

La Comédie-Française, the most celebrated theater in Paris

La Bourse, which is the site of the Wall Street Stock Exchange of Paris

A pretty building…

Street Artist

HUGE BUBBLES

I saw a very innocent looking store that said “DVD shop” and was about to go in to see if they had the Dark Knight when my cousin said “It’s not the kind of movies that you will be expecting." The shop should have been named something more conspicuous like this one:

While shopping, I got some scarves (almost every female here wears them, even though it’s summer) and these really interesting pants.

Here’s the design on the pants

The latest fashion craze in Paris: high heeled sneakers!

When we got a bit hungry, we went to a café to eat some dessert. Oh, mon dieu, c'était délicieux! We got crème brûlée and tarte de pomme (apple tart) with toffee ice cream. I am absolutely obsessed with crème brûlée now. It’s like flan cake but with a hard caramelized crust that you have to tap with a spoon to get to the soft, creamy, amazing custard underneath. La tarte de pomme was good too; it’s bit a different from the US in that there is more apple and less of the soupy cinnamony interior. And it was served with toffee ice cream, which was strange.

Tine and her crème brûlée

Ti with her crepe and me with my tarte de pomme

During the metro ride home, we gave ourselves fake mustaches

À demain!

This will be a double post for yesterday and today.

Friday

Watched some French soap operas on TV, along with some American shows that were translated into French, like My Wife and Kids (It's called Ma Famille d'Abord, or "My Family First" in France).

After lunch, we went to the mall. I bought some Harry Potter books in French, and it's been really helpful for learning new vocabulary. Interesting fact: Hogwarts in French is "Poudlard."

There was this amazing smell emanating from somewhere so I followed it downstairs. (Disclaimer: Okay so I don’t want this to become a food blog because I’m not the type of person who is obsessed with food or watches the Food Channel for fun, but the food here is just so delicious. Anyway, this is just a warning that there will be many food pictures soon.) I was disappointed to see that the smell was coming from a waffle shop; I was expecting some fancy French pastries. When I looked around, I realized people were just munching away on waffles…in the mall. C’est bizarre! My uncle persuaded me to order un gaufre au chocolat belge. It looked like this:

A phrase I will not be uttering anytime soon: L’eggo my eggo! This gaufre was ten times better. It was warm and fluffy and there was a crunchy, sweet aftertaste. And the chocolate here is just decadent; I want to swim in it. It makes Hershey’s taste like chalk!

Then I got a “Holiday Coco” smoothie which was basically a pina colada because it has pineapples, bananas, and coconut in it, but it was not like any other smoothie I have had in America. It was barely sweet. If the average sweetness for a smoothie in America is a 10, this was like a 4. I liked it though.

That evening, I went jogging with my eldest cousin who is 16. First lesson learned: ALWAYS BRING THE CAMERA! I regret not taking it. She showed me the town center of Sartrouville, her school, the Seine river, which stretches to Paris, and the bridge from where people have jumped into the river (and now I want to too!).

For dinner we had les pâtes, or pasta. I usually hate pasta, but along with the trend of delicious food in France, this was amazing! It tasted so fresh and light.

I have also learned to be careful about what I say that I like. My uncle asked me if I liked beer and I said yes nonchalantly, and he bought me a whole crate of this (hopefully the rest of my family doesn’t think I’m an alcoholic):

Saturday

Today I woke up to my little cousins playing with the water guns that my family sent them. I don’t know if my aunt and uncle are splendid parents or all French kids behave like this, but this was the most polite water gun playing I have ever seen. The kids without the water gun would put up their hands, and the kid holding the water gun would ONLY shoot water at the hands…nowhere else on the body! And they would take turns doing this! And when they accidentally got some water on the side of the house, they ran into the kitchen, got paper towels, and wiped down the building…WHAT??

I also played some version of tag with the kids, but every time someone tagged someone else, they had to shout “rouge,” “blanc,” or “bleu,” which is because of the French flag colors I assume. How patriotic! The kids also pulled out some song books and started singing in French. The only thing cuter than hearing kids jabber in French is them singing in it. Why are French kids so awesome??
They also really liked the fake tattoos that I brought from the States for them.

Mes jolies cousines Ti et Tine

Everyone showing off their tattoos

BOO!

J’adore ce chat. Whenever it sees me, it comes running up to me and butts its head against my hand. Very friendly for a cat, especially a French one.

We all ate le déjeuner (lunch) together today. The French make everything look pretty!

American/Vietnamese influences?

Then I went to Paris with my cousins Ti and Tine (those are their nicknames; my nickname at home is Tin. Yeah, I don’t know either). We went to the Notre Dame, le Pantheon, the Luxembourg Gardens, and general sightseeing.

A pretty alley in Paris

The Notre Dame

Gorgeous detail

I had way too much fun taking pictures where they appear like the gargoyles are looking over the city. Here is just one:

Where Quasimodo rang the bell!

Is this guy a Disney Princess or are birds in France not afraid of people?

This street is full of librairies (bookstores)...my heaven!

le Pantheon...looks like a mixture of the Congress Building and the Supreme Court

MUFFINS. I got the raspberry one on the left. The white things on top of the muffins are pure sugar crystals. How do Americans not have this?

le Jardin du Luxembourg

Square trees!!

A drunk man passed out in the middle of the street. After we left him, we saw a fistfight between two motorcyclists. Oh, Paris!

And finally, un escargot that was wandering through the house

Bonne Nuit!

Le premier jour

Bonjour! (Most cliché way of starting a French travel blog, check!)
I am currently in Satrouville, France, which is about 30 minutes away from Paris, visiting my relatives for the next three weeks.

Sunrise when I landed in Paris (6:30 AM here, 12:30 AM in the states):

After my 7 hour flight, we stopped by a pâtisserie for breakfast, where my aunt bought une baguette, les croissants, et pain au chocolat. So French! My mom warned me that people in France stick the baguettes under their armpits so I shouldn’t eat any but this one was wrapped in a nice hygienic bag. After I took a jet-laggy nap, we went to the mall pour faire du shopping. The month of juillet is known for les soldes (sales) in France, so the next few days will probably consist of us going shopping before les soldes are over.

After you bite into a pain au chocolat, this is what heaven looks like:

I feel like I am living in the French version of Full House. There are 15 people including me under the same roof. There are the grandparents (the grandmother is my grandma’s sister), then the daughter (my mom’s favorite cousin) and her husband and their three kids, and then the son (my mom’s other cousin) and his wife and their five kids. Honestly I do not remember all these kids’ names…they have nicknames and “real” Vietnamese names and I think French names too.

So far I like the eldest cousins of each family the best, probably because they aren’t afraid to speak to me. But I just bribed the rest of the kids with gifts from les États-Unis so we’ll see what happens tomorrow. It is so freaking cute to hear the little kids speaking in rapid French. I am practicing my French with them and they are practicing their English with me, and when we all get confused we switch to Vietnamese. Or Spanish.

Today (Yesterday?) was one of my cousin’s birthdays. We had gâteau au chocolat, which I thought was a brownie cake at first, but it is much, much better.

Les cousins et gâteau au chocolat (WHY AM I SO DARK):

Well I hope you liked this first blog post! If we are close enough friends and you have a smart phone, download Voxer so that we can walkie-talkie/text internationally. My most faithful voxing buddy so far is my 8 year old American cousin. Shout out to Mandy!