Paris Werewolves

An ice breaking ferry, Port of Helsinki We went to Helsinki with only three Finnish words between us: terve (hello), anteeksi (excuse me) and kiitos (thank you). This did not matter in the slightest because every Finn we encountered was proficient in English to a degree that made me question whether it was an official language (it is not; those would be Finnish and Swedish). The accent of a French person speaking English typically sounds like they did their best late in life to learn a very dissimilar language, with a different syntax and a presumed indifference to pronunciation. I can understand their English about as well as they can understand my French, so we can at least take care of business at the marché or  boulangerie . Finns speaking English sounded like they had moved to US in grade school, became organically fluent, but still retained enough of an accent to make an American wonder where their parents came from. The first Finnish stranger we encountered in a coffee s...

La Crêperie des Lutins, Saint-Malo, Bretagne Maybe it's Bretagne's Celtic heritage, but La Crêperie des Lutins ("the elves' creperie") seemed to have a strong American Halloween motif going. There's the pumpkin sign hanging above the door, with an elf dressed as a pirate. We know that it's a pirate costume because, of course, Saint-Malo had no pirates, just corsairs . Inside the restaurant was a mural of fairies, elves and other forest spirits, and small figurines of pointy-hatted witches were sprinkled throughout the place. In spite of all this kitsch, it was a good place to eat, with bowls of locally made cider and crispy galettes (savory crêpes stuffed with ingredients such as cheese, ham, onions and mushrooms; basically omelettes wrapped in wafer-thin buckwheat pancakes instead of eggs). This was pretty much the menu of 90% of the restaurants inside the walls of Intra-Muros, Saint-Malo's old town. But visitors to Bretagne expect crêpes, cider, oyst...

Though I would never consider myself a gourmand, I'm by no means a fussy eater. But traveling in Europe and living in France reminds me that the typical American palate is actually pretty narrow--particularly where animal protein is concerned. Basically, Americans eat mostly cows, chickens, pigs, sheep and some fish and seafood. And with few exceptions such as tripe, caviar, and chopped liver, they mostly eat the muscles rather than the internal organs. These exceptions are important. How else would we know the boundaries if no one ever crossed them? But in the US, crossing those boundaries means doing some work to seek out the delicacies in specialty stores, rather than expecting to find them on any given menu or front-and-center in a typical chain supermarket. A whole store for snails. The difference in France's cuisine is in both the breadth of common ingredients and their ready availability. Snails, rabbit and blood sausage ( boudin noir ) can be had in the US, but they rar...

We don't consciously seek out places that look like Castle Dracula. Well, actually we do. And compared to places like the Cathar castles in Queribus and Peyrpeteuse that we visited down south years ago, Strasbourg's cathedral really delivered. Château de Quéribus, Cucugnan Château de Peyrepetuse, Rouffiac-des-Corbières But that was not why we took a side trip to Strasbourg, in the Grand-Est region (formerly Alsace), just across the Rhine River from Germany. We had hoped to visit the famous Christkindelsmärik (Christmas Market) last winter, but got organized too late to get an affordable hotel room. So we contented ourselves with a post-May Day trip, principally to enjoy the Alsatian architecture and cuisine. Of which we got plenty of both. We stayed in a 16th century, half-timbered building that was the site of a continuously operating apothecary (later, pharmacy) from 1298 until 2000 (La Pharmacie du Cerf). The ground floor now houses an ice cream shop--which is probably a the...

One of France's mighty rivers--represented in Horse form, Place de Terraux. Lyon bills itself as France's culinary capital--most restaurants per capita, most Michelin stars in France (excepting Paris itself), serving traditional fare such as saucisse lyonnaise and quenelles de brochet Nantu (baked pike dumplings in a creamy langoustine sauce). And without exception, the food quality and dining experiences were outstanding. The city had a harder time putting its best foot forward, though. We got off the high-speed rail at Gare Part-Dieu to quite a bit of street desperation--not quite East Oakland and nowhere near as desperate as downtown LA, but a bit surprising compared to most other places we've been in France so far. The Croix Rousse neighborhood, the historic center of the silk-making trade that was the source of Lyon's wealth for centuries, was covered in bad graffiti--and by bad, I mean random scrawlings, nothing that even attempted guerrilla art or murals and not ...