Paris trip number 2

There is this musical artist named Andrew Bird. If you do not listen to his music, I would advise you to try it out because he is wonderful. About four years ago my dear friend Molly and I went to go see Andrew Bird at a small venue in Seattle, Wa. And let me just say that few musical events have been able to come even close to how moving this concert was.

With this being said, the girls and I decided to buy tickets to see his show in Paris. The venue was about ten times the size of the place where I saw him a few years ago and we were pretty far back which was very different from the front row position that Molly and I had before, but it was still so lovely. And I mean, seeing one of my favorite musicians in Paris; romantic? Yes. I would say so.

During our stay in Paris we were fortunate enough to be able to stay with our friend Borus again and experience his generous hospitality as well as his parents. As I stated in previous blogs, this home was perfectly, lovely. Honestly, if I ever have a home as cute as theirs I might just die of happiness. Here is an example of how darn cute it was, we walk into the house which has crates of chestnuts and apples, which they got from their house in the country, and inside the crate of apples was an beautiful old key. It looked straight out of a film, so I decided to be a huge creep and take a picture of their apples.

Borus’ Birthday was a few weeks ago, and two of his cousins have Birthdays that are fairly close, so while we were staying with them this past weekend there was a family gathering that we were invited to. I don’t want to be too over the top or anything, but it was the most perfect family gathering I have ever witnessed, straight out of a movie. First of all, we wake up and his mother and farther are cooking together. Many different dishes, all vegetarian too, and I would like to add that I do not think I have ever been at a dinner like this where I was able to eat all of the dishes. There was these delicious savory onion tarts, hummus with some sort of spice on top, and two totally different kinds of eggplant dip for the bread, steamed carrots and squash in some sort of sweet sauce, and quiches, some with tomatoes and goat cheese and another with basil and walnuts. Then after this course, we all at many kinds of cheeses and more bread, then after dinner we had homemade ice cream and cake. And all the while we drank lovely red wine and coke a cola (not mixed, separately).

Borus’ family was so welcoming and warm, even with the language barrier. Most of his family spoke very good English but most were not very confident with it. But the younger cousins and such were very chatty and friendly and wanted to ask us all sorts of questions about pop culture in the US. Then, there was the grandfather. Let me just say that this was apparently, a VERY French family, but the grandfather was even more so. He spoke no English at all and we were informed before he arrived that he does NOT like Americans and that he is a communist. We later find out that he is a socialist not a communist but he still doesn’t like Americans. However, he seemed to like us a lot. We think it was because we humored him and tried our best to communicate with him. He was the cutest old man with very good fashion sense. We quite liked him, and I think he was found of us as well.

You might think that this is the extent of this perfection, but no, after dinner we all sat around the piano and sang “Imagine” by the Beatles while Borus’ father played the piano. It was all quite lovely.