Jason and Robyn

This post is long overdue because my close friends Jason and Robyn Roemer visited for Thanksgiving and, in spite of their mild mannered appearance, we had a full week of drinking, eating, and bullshitting about everything under the sun. That's why I love them though; we always do too much of each of these. Usually Robyn grows tired of Jason and me or has to work or something like that but this time, she was all in. Here they are when they got off the plane at Charles de Gaulle.
As has been my tradition, I take all of my guests to Paradies(not a typo, at least on my part), the best crepe stand in Paris. Kristina, Christin and Zsuzsi came along for the culinary delights also. Sadly, we ate inside above the kitchen which increased the price and made it hard for us not to smell the grilled onions being prepared in advance. Still, as always, Paradies was good and the company was great.
Here they are at La Place Vendome engaging in a rare public display of affection. Robyn does not care for them, which means Jason is SOL. I love them, but since I have been living out of the country basically for the 6 months without Sheridan, they are not frequent. Common almost everywhere else, they seem to be shunned in the U.S. Now that Sheridan is here, we are practicing.
We walked all over the city and here, instead of paying the outrageous sum of 120 euros to see Leonard Cohen in concert, we just went by to see if LC would come out and perform for free. Seriously, 120 euro? I love Leonard Cohen but that's just crazy talk.
Here is the increasingly disappointing Champs Elysees at night dressed up for the holidays.

These are all pictures from an exposition at the Pompidou Center: who knew chairs could be so interesting? To obtain a seat in this Ron Arad chair Jason is sitting in here I had to menace a small child; not that I minded.
Leaving the Corsican restaurant where we ate Thanksgiving Dinner. It was fantastic. Did you know that they serve wolf in France?
We left the restaurant and come back around my house. We decided to stop at le 50 for a drink. I had passed by there several times and always wanted to go in but never felt quite comfortable enough. Armed with Jason and Robyn, I entered. We sat there, listened to Jeff Buckley, talked to the owner/barman and drank three more bottles of wine before close. Then we came home and had a few more. Unsurprisingly, we got into an argument about somethings I didn't quite know were controversial. The picture shows Jason reposing just before the debate got serious. I mean, who doesn't want to hike the Appalachians? Anyway, what's Thanksgiving without too much booze and a rousing, ugly, personal debate in which too much personal information is shared among friends?

The next day we went to the Catacombs. Basically, the space was created when a French leader wanted to build some new monuments. They dug up all materials from here and the empty space sat there for a while. Then, a bunch of people died from some sort of plague like malady and it turned out that they didn't have enough space in the cemeteries to bury all of the newly deceased french citizens. So, they dug 'em up and moved them to the Catacombs. Now we have this great tourist site with the bones of 6 million people.
When Jason saw this he literally recoiled with fear. I thought that was just a figure of speech but now I have seen it.


As mentioned, mostly we ate great food and drank too much good wine. The last night was no different. We sent to the Bistro St. Marthe in the 10th where I live, an arrondissement that gets a bad rap in my book and had a fantastic meal for a decent price. Even though I am opposed to eating meat, I have to admit that Jason's lamb looked pretty good.
Here's dessert, something I am definitively not opposed to. One quick thing about the quality restaurants in Paris. I am pretty sure you could go into any restaurant and get a high quality meal for a decent price. I know for a fact that you can't do that in St. Louis, even though I think there are some good ones. Here, though, I think explications about the quality of food and wine is just plain higher and there are tons of restaurants. If they don't provide quality food, they would certainly go out of business. A corollary to this is the grocery store. I shop primarily at ED, which is a low end discount store. Even there though, the quality is higher than at Schnucks is in general and the prices are low. A 2 euro bottle of wine from ED is reliably good (granted I am no wine expert), the cheese is excellent, and the bread is good.
Jason and Robyn about to leave---why can't he open his eyes?
There we go!
And they are off.

I had a fantastic time and this post doesn't do justice to how I feel about their visit. To have two good friends drop their work (they are gainfully employed, unlike myself) and come to visit me for a week is one thing. To be easy to travel with, smart, funny, patient with my tiny studio and flexible with my class schedule is another. We ate like kings and drank like upper class fishes. It was great and I loved every minute of it.