Anyway, I had a great night tonight. Maybe part of the problem is that I'm hopped up on adrenaline. And I guess in general if I've had a few drinks, it's because I've been hanging out with friends for a long time, so when I wake up, I'm thinking about all the great conversations I've had, and what a nice night it was. It was such a nice night tonight. I invited some people over for what I think I referred to as an "Un-Halloween, Fall, Guess-I'm-26-Now Party". The idea was that I've wanted to have people over for a while, partially to celebrate my birthday (which I couldn't really do the weekend of my birthday because I was running a marathon), and it finally came together this weekend, except that today (yesterday) happened to be Halloween, and I didn't particularly want to have a Halloween party. Halloween is fine and fun and all, but I'm lazy and didn't want to come up with a costume idea, and I didn't want to force other lazy people such as myself to feel lame for not having costumes either, so I decided to just go for it and have a party anyway and put "Un-Halloween" in the name.
The point of this story is supposed to be that I love my friends. We had a better turn-out than I expected, with something like 10 people here, and it just makes me think that we need to do it way more often. I love cooking, I love entertaining, I love having an excuse to go cheese shopping (especially when certain French-speaking graduate students indulge me and go cheese-shopping with me). And I think a good night was had by all. One of my frisbee compadres gets the prize for cutest costume idea, in my opinion - tin foil hat with tea bags hanging off of it. He was a tea partier. In a tin foil hat. Love it.
So yeah, cheese-shopping was interesting too. We have this cheese co-op in Berkeley called the Cheeseboard... yes, a cheese co-op. This is Berkeley, after all. It's collectively owned by all the people who work there and has been open for something like 30 years and is semi-famous, at least locally, as the place to get your cheese. They also have a pizza co-op affiliated with them, and people rave and rave about Cheeseboard pizza. I'll tell ya. It's fine. You know, I feel like it's mostly gimmick, with fresh, seasonal, interesting veggies and good cheese. If you want to call that good pizza, then yes, it's good. I mean, it is good. As a food. It's just not what I think of when I think of a pizza place. They make one kind of pizza per day, always vegetarian, and there's always a line all the way down the street. So you wait in line for 20 minutes or so and pick up your $20 pizza straight from the oven, which they just crank out constantly all day long. They post the day's toppings on their website; Saturday was apparently sweet potatoes, yukon potatoes, caramelized onions, mozzarella, gruyere, garlic olive oil, and fresh herbs. All delicious things, to be sure, but do we really need to put them on a pizza?
Anyway, aforementioned Francophone graduate student was rather easily convinced to go check out the Cheeseboard with me on Saturday, and it was pretty fun. I've had cheese from there several times, and I'd been to the pizza place, but I'd never actually been in the cheese shop. It was somewhat overwhelming. It's a huge cheese counter, and there's a HUGE blackboard with a list of all the kinds of cheese they have, but unfortunately that doesn't really help me. I mean, I know basic kinds of cheese, but I don't really know names of cheeses. Like if you tell me something is brie or gouda or tomme or whatever, I know basically what to expect, but if you give me the name of some monastery or farm or middle-of-nowhere village, disons que ça ne me dit pas grand chose.* So we walked in and sort of made our way around the cheese counter, just scoping out what all they had, and the cheesemongers were clearly completely ignoring us. I already felt kind of lost, and that wasn't helping me. Then I realized people were yelling out the names of playing cards - "10 of diamonds! ... Queen of hearts!" - and then I realized that there was a stack of cards at the counter, and that you had to take a card in order to be waited on. That's apparently their take-a-number system, as opposed to, mmm, numbers.
So once we figured it out, it was fine. They let you try anything and everything, so we kind of took our time trying different stuff and wound up with three very different cheeses; a soft, creamy, less-than-mild sheep's milk cheese, a harder cheese I can't quite remember now, and a surprisingly tasty gouda. I was eyeing the tomme de savoie because tomme was my first experience with real French cheese, way back when I first went to the French Alps in like 2001, and so I've always had a soft spot for tomme. So in French, "tomme" is pronounced basically like "tum", like Tums, or tummy. So I asked the lady if we could try some "tum", and she gave me one of the blankest stares I've ever seen in my life. So I tried again and went for the other extreme, trying to sound as American as possible, and she still had no idea what I was talking about. This is a minor problem when you know how to speak French. When you encounter French words in English, you don't know how to say them in English anymore (if you ever knew in the first place). It's also a problem when you're speaking French, because they borrow so many English words, and then you have the choice of saying them the way you would in English (in which case you feel like you're not trying at all and being like oh-look-at-me-I'm-such-a-cool-English-speaker), or saying them with a French accent (in which case you feel like a complete tool).
Anyway, after some pointing and some more variations on "tum", she went to get some tomme de savoie, and I turned to Florian, and I'm like, "Why was that so hard? How do we say that? How am I supposed to say that?" and of course he's laughing and going, "shit, don't look at me, you're the one who's supposed to be helping me with these things".
Okay, now I'm starting to get a little tired, which is good, because it's almost 5:30 and I've only slept about 3 hours. I'm going to try to go back to bed, and maybe my brain has cooled down enough that I can sleep now. Bonne nuit!**
* (Let's just say that doesn't really mean anything to me.)
** Good night!
4 comments:
wow @ the Cheeseboard cheese store- probably a good thing I didn't know about that when I was out there. I'm glad you had a party; I was wondering about your [un]Halloween. I LOVE the new blog scene and colors- pretty fancy. And I love YOU, too. The sleep/alcohol thing is pretty normal. You sleep pretty good for 3 hours and that's it. Fits real well with my job :) Hope your boys are all healthy and happy. Jimmy's is becoming quite the humper and it's disconcerting to him- LOL
Hi
The blog scene is gorgeous but the
black background? threw me. I thot
something was wrong with my com-
puter, I hope it prints ok so Grandpa can see it too. Your cheese thingy sounds good. Too bad
I'm one of a very few Americans who
don't like cheese. My solution to the no sleep thing - DON'T DRINK!
Just call me old fashioned. Grandma
haha, Grandma wrote thot. she's pretty rad.
Hahahahah I just read the part about how to say English words in French, and it made me laugh so hard because I have that problem in German too. Another exchanged student told me he learned that in Austria people are more likely to say English words with English pronunciation, whereas in Germany they're more likely to translate the word or say it with a German accent. Interesting.
I also had this experience yesterday: I went to buy more credit for my phone, the company's name is "Orange" and you can buy credit at grocery stores or whatever (meaning there's no way you can avoid saying the name of the company, which is usually what I try to do when I see an intimidating word). The hard part is that's how you spell the German word for orange, too, so I spent a good long while trying to decide if it was really German orange or English orange. After asking a couple of my friends, I went with English pronunciation, but when the cashier said it, she said it like you would in German. But later my Austrian friend told me that it should be pronounced like it would be in English and that the cashier was wrong. But she's Austrian... oh well, I guess you can't really go wrong here. Or maybe you just can't get it right?
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