*** Before we left, we had read that food in Paris restaurants was going to the dogs, that many places are now serving frozen meals and that quality has distinctly deteriorated. We were preparing ourselves for the worst. Yet again, we seem to be living in some “Parisian alternative universe”, the one that has nice waiters. (we’ve run into several more lovely waiters since I last wrote, and not a single  unpleasant one yet, but that’s for another blog entry.) Anyway, we’ve been on the lookout for frozen food possibilities in restaurants, and instead have found the reaction to the trend. For example, the nearby seafood place, Le Laumiere has a statement in its menu that all of its food is guaranteed to be made fresh, in house  (faites maison) and that they are members of an organization that regularly inspects them to make sure of the truth of the statement. In another little hole-in-the-wall place, the waiter’s first words to us were that nothing was frozen (congelé) and that we could watch the chef cooking our food though the window. A pastry shop window sign near us declares that all their pastries are made on site, and nothing “ordered from a catalog.” So there must be a bunch of frozen things out there, and many of the small businesses are trying to hold out against the pressure. 

 

***Speaking of small business and trends, many years ago Warren & I discovered Kusmi tea, when one of our house exchange hosts recommended it and gave us directions to its store. The store was hidden away in an alleyway off a courtyard. It was a long, sort of hallway with tea on each side in huge canisters. Out in the courtyard a guy was mixing teas in something that looked like a little cement mixer (and might have been.) My how times have changed! There are fashionable Kusmi stores all over Paris now, and their teas are in many of the higher end department and grocery stores. We’ve seen signs in several bistro saying that they serve only Kusmi teas. Ha! We knew them when! But we’re still drinking their excellent tea and grateful for it. (ed. note: I'm champing at the bit to start drinking my 2 Red Gazelles tea)

 

***On a much grimmer note, the effects of the Charlie Hebdo massacre are strongly in evidence. In our culturally diverse neighborhood, military personnel with automatic weapons are stationed around Jewish schools and synagogues. When we walk through areas that are perhaps predominantly Jewish, there are always groups of four or more soldiers visible, moving through the neighborhood, heavily armed. I say “perhaps predominantly” because there are so many ethnicities in the 19^th arrondissement, that we have not yet been able to identify which areas might be which. The streets are vibrant with colorful African and Mediterranean apparel, and there are many groups we can’t identify. The languages we hear on our local busses defy our recognition. About the only uncommon one is English.

 

***On the topic of Jewish relations in France, the French word for the Holocaust is the “Shoah.” France only recognized the part played by the Occupation Government – the so-called Vichy Government – 50 years later in the 1990s. The Occupation Government under the control of the Germans identified and deported nearly 75,000 Jews, almost all of whom died in the death camps. All over Paris, there are now plaques on schools, commemorating the children lost in the Shoah from those schools. There are several parks dedicated to the memory of those killed. France had the highest Jewish survival rate of any European country (~75%) but the number murdered is still almost beyond comprehension. As the massacre in the Jewish grocery store in January showed, the hatred is still alive and virulent, if perhaps from a different source this time.