Suck It, Cesson!

Last night the Baguette Winner and I went to another handball game: Paris St-Germain vs Cesson-Rennes. Based on my dubious translating of the programme, this was the last game of some sort of round-robin competition. PSG ended up coming second to Dunkerque, who I can only assume are big jerks.

The game began in a disappointing fashion – our two favourite players, Luc Abalo and Samuel Honrubia (left and right wing, respectively), were out, presumably with injury. PSG didn’t miss a beat, with their two replacement wings (Jeffrey M’Tima and Fahrudin Melic) each scoring six goals in the game.

-       Mercifully, we did not have to hear “TNT” after every single goal, as at the last game. The team introductions were conducted over an AC/DC backdrop, but that was all we were forced to endure.

-       This was shaping up to be another pantsing, with the Parisians going up 10-2 after 15 minutes. Cesson-Rennes finished the first half with a flurry, and just after halftime it was only a four-goal game. While PSG ended up winning by 7, it was a hard-fought victory, and the result was not guaranteed until the final few minutes.

-       Unlike the previous game we attended, the PSG players actually seemed willing to compete. Perhaps this was due to them being down two starters (they also relied on back-up pivot Robert Gunnarsson more heavily than usual starter Igor Vori), but they defended stoutly and chased down loose balls with gusto. This was a far better example of competitive handball.

-       This had, easily, the best ambiance of any handball game I’ve ever been to. They even had proper NBA-style player intros!

Well, that photo did it no justice whatsoever, but in the right corner, you can see the beginning of PYROTECHNICS! For someone used to playing handball in far-flung gyms with three spectators, this was rather thrilling.

There won’t be too many more handball games in the near future, unfortunately. It’s a winter sport, after all. So this sports post will have to do until the FIBA World Cup in Spain (September!).

Rabbit Hunting Season

The Baguette Winner is still out of town. She is a vegetarian. As she is out of town, I made the executive decision to cook rabbit, or lapin. The nearby Casino supermarket sold me five quarter rabbits for €4, which was the smallest pre-packaged amount I could find. [Pre-packaged is important, as it means that I do not have to attempt to communicate my request to an actual human].

It didn’t occur to me to Google a recipe for this, so I was forced to rely on attempting to recreate the only rabbit-based meal I’ve ever sampled: rabbit stew. We have a tiny kitchen, relatively understocked in terms of sauces, spices, etc, so my chosen technique involved filling a pot with everything that seemed loosely stew-applicable. This meant an onion, tons of garlic, a couple of carrots and some stock , then some lentils and lemon juice  and a splash of beer later in the piece. At the end, I wacked in some spinach and a little toasted bread, and voila (getting better at French!).

The end result was not bad. Too salty – probably didn’t need sea salt on top of a stock cube – and there were a lot of bones. But overall a pleasant experience. Quite a lot like skinless chicken wings (the skin was removed).  A smarter chef would’ve taken to the leg/thigh cutlets with a knife first, to break them down a bit. But mistakes are all part of the fun!

The novelty was certainly worth it. Duck is next on the menu, as it is abundant at most supermarkets (although not especially cheap). I’m sure you can’t wait!

Mission Improbable

The Baguette Winner is out of town. I know absolutely nobody else in Paris - well, except “Adele”, the waitress at our nearby café Les Anemones - and by ‘know’, I mean she recognises me as the guy who speaks English at her - which means I am staying in, enjoying cheap bottles of Stella Artois, and watching Mission Impossible. As has become custom, I have made note of my thoughts:

-       Emilio Estevez is in this film. That’s how you know this movie was made in the Nineties.

-       Kristin Scott Thomas is in this film, and is not speaking French. This is further evidence that this film was made in the Nineties. I happen to like Kristin Scott Thomas, as she made her film debut in a Prince movie.

-       Jon Voight instructs the crack team of carefully selected specialists that they will meet back at “4am. That’s 0400.” This team can’t be all that elite.

-       Tom Cruise just performed an internet search. I am delighted to report that he does this using an acceptably low (and therefore realistic) number of keystrokes. One of the great grievances in popular culture is the depiction of computer use in late 90s - early 2000s film and television. An ‘internet search’, apparently, typically involved wild mashing of keys and virtually no use of a mouse, which resembles no internet search I’ve ever performed. Kudos to the Mission Impossible team.

-       Wikipedia informs me that the team that Tom Cruise’s character is/was a member of is the IMF, the “Impossible Missions Force”. That’s a little fatalistic. Why can’t it be the “Improbable Missions Force”? Or something more optimistic. Perhaps the “Missions Which Are Destined To Succeed Force”? If you think positive thoughts, good things will happen. [That last sentence is the premise behind The Secret, just FYI. I’ve just saved you time and money. You’re welcome.]

-       Ving Rhames plays the computer nerd Luther Stickell. This is the very antithesis of type-casting.

-       The famous “Tom Cruise hanging from the ceiling scene” (or Sporty Spice, if your only reference point in life is Spice World): It really is a good scene. Of course, surely they could have imagined that the foreign guy might get tired of holding Tom Cruise, but no harm done. They also could have waited until the CIA vault guy goes for lunch, so that he doesn’t keep intruding (as opposed to making him sick for about 5 minutes, which seemed like a strange plan). They could have just made him so sick that he had to go home… But these are minor details.

-       The whole peeling-your-face-off-to-reveal-you-are-someone-else thing is also pretty great, if totally unbelievable.

-       Even more unbelievable is the scene where A HELICOPTER FLIES THROUGH A TUNNEL TO KEEP UP WITH A HIGH-SPEED TRAIN! 

-       After the aforementioned helicopter/train scene, Tom Cruise and Ving Rhames meet up at a café for a beer, and discuss something-or-other. In the background, almost imperceptively quiet, you can hear Dreams by The Cranberries. This is both pleasant, because it’s a nice enough song, but also strangely jarring, as the rest of the soundtrack is action-movie-esque.  

      And it’s not just that it was a hit song at the time; Dreams is from 1992, and Mission Impossible is from 1996. Now, if Dreams was featured in the soundtracks to Aladdin, Home Alone II, Beethoven or The Mighty Ducks, it’d make a lot more sense.

And with that Emilio Estevez full-circle callback, I will end this post.

Bad Public TV Channels

I write this post with no wi-fi access. This means I’m stuck relying on cellphone 3G like your average Amish blogger. Worse than your average Amish, I’m watching domestic television. Which means I’m switching between Marley & Me and Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Home Cooking.

I’ve learned the following things:

-      Gordon Ramsay has a large family that laughs and high-fives a lot. His wife is also a 9, at worst.

-      Marley is a poorly behaved dog. I hope he doesn’t come between Owen Wilson and Rachel from Friends.

-      When Gordon Ramsay isn’t cooking, he’s doing curls.

-      Owen Wilson was really good at movies for awhile there.

-      Gordon Ramsay’s kid (“Jack”) asks good questions and seems to be enjoying cooking with his father. He’s probably going to get bullied for this at school.

-      Alan Arkin won an Oscar a few years ago. He seems to play the same character in every film. This means he’s either incredibly unlucky not to win an Oscar every year, or incredibly lucky to have won one at all.

-      Gordon Ramsay just pulled some milky-white cheese out of a plastic tub. He called it some name that was not “mozzarella”. It looks like mozzarella. Is it mozzarella? Clearly, he expects that I know the answer to this.
Jamie would’ve said ‘you can use mozzarella, if you want,’ and I would’ve smiled, because we both know I’m using Edam (if I have cheese at all (dairy prices, and what not)).

-      Marley wants to watch Owen and Rachel having sex. Owen is not ok with this. Rachel is.    He wants to take Marley into the next room. She argues that Marley won’t know what he’s seeing, anyway, so why can’t he stay? She seems to have thought this through. I was distracted by this.

 -     Gordon Ramsay and his large family all collapse together on one of those corner couches where everyone is close together because that’s how angles work. They playfight and laugh heartily, and thank god the cameras were there to catch it because it’s really organic and genuine.

-      Owen and Rachel are having a baby. Owen was not excited by this, but then Rachel said he had to be, so they are still having a baby and now he is excited about it. Marley doesn’t speak English.

-      Rachel was hotter when she wasn’t always frowning.

-      An advertisement for Edward Scissorhands was just on. I’m starting to think Tim Burton has been tricking us for way longer than we thought. Now, when he makes Dark Shadows, people say things like ‘yeah, but his old stuff like Edward Scissorhands was great.’ Hm…

-      Johnny Depp is dangerously close to pulling an Owen Wilson.

-      Owen Wilson just said some line in a way that was charming when he was Hansel, but isn’t in this movie. I don’t even know what his character’s name is in Marley & Me. I doubt it’s “Hansel”. That would confuse the viewer, I suspect.

At this point, I went upstairs to make tea (I don’t like tea). I then saw that there was anything else to do, and so I did that.

Note: This post was written before leaving for France.  

Down Goes Dijon

Tonight the Baguette-Winner took me to see some French pro handball. It was a delightful exercise.

A few thoughts on Paris St-Germain vs Dijon:

-     There were probably about 1000 people there. Considering this game featured some of the greatest handball players on the planet (admittedly, they all played for one team, PSG), it was strange to be in a crowd smaller than the average Wellington Saints game.

-     Daniel Narcisse is the starting centre for PSG, and is very good at the handball. He is followed on Twitter by Ronny Turiaf, which will be interesting to fans of weirdo NBA players.

-     AD/DC’s global ubiquity was made brutally clear. After every single goal, we were treated to “TNT, I’m dynamite…” There were a lot of goals. AC/DC will always be overrated.

-     PSG were clearly the better team, and it felt as though both teams knew this before the opening whistle. PSG looked lazy and disinterested (Mikkel Hansen, especially), and Dijon really struggled to score for long stretches.

-     A lazy and disinterested PSG team is still capable of some pretty amazing handball. Their two starting wings, Luc Abalo and Samuel Honrubia (new favourite player, FYI), were sharp and fluid, and pivot Igor Vori was utterly unstoppable on attack. Even while barely breaking a sweat, they handily dispatched the Mustard Boys.

-     The cheap seats clearly have the most fun. We were right at centre-court, in essentially the front row, and it was far too dignified for my liking. Of course, the view was pretty great (we were too close, if anything), but all the action seemed to be coming in the back row behind the goal (ie, worst seats in the house). There were a lot of flags flying, and a lot of young children cheering. A mental note has been made to at least consider those seats in future.

The game was in the 13^th Arrondissement, right on the edge of central Paris. For dinner, the two of us found a charming little Vietnamese restaurant. I was hugely relieved to find that Vietnamese food in Paris is essentially the same as Vietnamese food in Wellington (and Vietnam, for that matter). This is in stark contrast to the abomination that French consider to be Chinese food. The only Chinese restaurants which we have stumbled across (and regrettably eaten at, in one case) have involved cold, pre-prepared plates of various gelatinous goop. These are then selected by the customer and promptly microwaved for 2 minutes by the proprietor. Awful.

The Vietnamese was pretty much as I had hoped (pretty good), fresh, and very cheap. The Baguette-Winner says there are a few Vietnamese places near us in the 11^th, so we will be sure to try some of those.

Overall, we had a splendid time on our Friday night excursion. There are very few handball games coming up (getting towards the end of the season), so we are going to have to wait awhile for part 2…

WE DID IT!

Started from the bottom (of the world), now we here! Dreadful song = dreadful intro. Deal with it. I now live in Paris - the 11^th Arrondissement to be precise – which, as you know, is somewhere between Republique and Bastille. Somewhere between Notre Dame and Père Lachaise cemetery:

Père Lachaise cemetery

Notre Dame - truly bizarre mascot, by the way.

I'm here because my girlfriend got a fancy job in Paris. Before applying for the job (sometime last year), she asked me whether I would move here if she got it. She also assured me that it was a long shot. Well, I told her that, 'sure', she should go ahead and apply, 'but don't be too upset if you don't get it...' I then patted her on the head, and she went back to her colouring-in. I promptly forgot about this outlandish proposition.

Smash cut to February 2014. I got a phone call from a rather breathless girlfriend, telling me that she had just been offered the job, and can we still move to Paris? It is now May, and I live in Paris. We have a nice little apartment with wood floors and an all-white couch, perfect for spilling red wine on. We have a white table, white shelving and white walls. To combat all that white, we have begun a feature wall:

It's a work in progress. 

I have already explained that my girlfriend has a job. I do not have a job. This makes said girlfriend the bread winner, or the baguette winner, if you will. [Technically, she would be the 'pain' winner, but that just doesn't look right. We'll stick with baguette winner.]

The baguette winner works a lot. This leaves me with rather a lot of time on my hands. For now, I have been filling this time with trips to markets, re-re-re-watching Arrested Development and The Simpsons, and by getting lost. I have also been tending to the garden:

Eventually, I'll need to find a job. For now, it's enough to simply amble around Paris, garbling the language and riding the silly French bikes (there will be more on this, I'm sure). 

Bonne journée et au revoir.