Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Monday, Sept. 25, 2006 - 12:38 p.m.

You may think, one day when you are living in Paris and have access to Velveeta cheese sauce and are still high on the memory of Tostito chips and queso, that doctoring up said Velveeta cheese sauce with a variety of things from your tiny and poorly stocked kitchen in order to recreate the wonder of queso is a really good idea. So you will throw all manner of things into said cheese sauce, including (but not limited to) a selection of Herbs de Provence and garlic & herb cream chese.

Do NOT do this.

You can get away with diced tomatoes. You can even get away with a small amount of cream of potato soup, dreadful as that soup may be on its own. But you can NOT, under any circumstances whatsoever, get away with french herbs and cream cheese.

Trust me on this. Because if there is one thing you do not want to dip the remainder of your corn chips into, it is an uber-rich, french-flavored version of almost nacho dip made with herbs de Provence and garlic-flavored cream cheese, no matter how yummy those things are on their own or how wonderful a contribution they might make to other, actually french (or even italian) dishes. Because nacho cheese?

NO. Just, NO.

I went to the market at Clignancourt yesterday, which is more or less a flea market, pretty much exactly like a flea market anywhere else would be, albeit mostly comprised of Eurotrash clothing and CD's. I wanted a new bag, because my backpack bag is wearing thin. For 20 euro - roughly $25 - I got 3 pretty cool bags, even if 2 of the three are in a batik-y tiedyed pattern with embroidery and tiny little round mirrors. The other is a blue and pink affair that has a sort of quilty, cutout applique across the front. NONE of them are the kind of bag I usually carry, which is either a small black leather shoulder bag or my lightblue nylon sac that has two thin black straps of nylon cord and is worn as a backpack. But when my camera and Paris map book is in there, along with my emergency language book, just in case I need to ask if there's camping nearby (Y a-t-il camping pres d'ici?) and stuff, it weighs a ton and really hurts my shoulders where the straps cut into the soft spots just at the inside. Two of the new bags have nice, wide straps. The strap on the blue and pink one is actually 4" wide. It's a tad too wide, but whatever. The brown tiedye has lovely 2" wide straps. And the third is actually another backpack, but it's straps are about 3/4" wide and it's just cool. :) I took pictures to show you guys, but I've been editing others and frankly have been too lazy to upload them to the external hard drive. But when I do, I'll post 'em for you guys. :)

The weather is being all wonky again. Please cross your fingers I have plenty of blue sky days left for pictures. When it's completely overcast, it's horrible. The light is grey and drowns all the colors while the sky is this horrible mass of white or light grey in all my images. Have you ever taken a picture of someone standing against a brightly-lit white background? All you can see is the frigging background. It sucks. :( None of my gargoyle pictures came out from the tower at Notre Dame except this and one other.

I had to hold my camera out over the battlement and lean over as far as the height of the wall and the big metal fence would let me. All the other gargoyles (which are mostly grotesques) are at eye level or actually higher, so there's not really a way to photograph them without sky behind them. If that sky is a mass of diffuse but very bright, grey-white, you're pretty much out of luck.

So I got that and one other pourspout. Alas. Also, I would like to note for the record, that if you climb up to the top of a 700+ year old building and carve your name into it at any point, you're a friggin' tool, and I might consider very seriously pushing your ass off of it, so you should probably rethink that asinine bit of bullshit.

Then again, maybe that's what the big metal fence is for.

Peace out,
Katie

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