A Saturday Well Spent

Man from the French tropics selling his region's pineapples

Today was incredibly busy. Alyssa's host family suggested that we go to the Salon International de l'agriculture, which is a huge event in Paris that only comes around once every couple years. Missy, Grace, Alyssa, and I met there around noon and it was absolutely packed. Alyssa and Grace said that their host families both kept saying "it's so French. All Parisians have gone at least a couple times." It's held at an enormous expo center and it's pretty much a giant agricultural fair (more interesting than it sounds, I promise). There were different things in each of the eight pavilions, all centered around French agriculture. We spent the majority of our time in the food pavilion. It was broken up into regions of France; you could walk around to stands in each region, sampling the products that are grown and produced there. I don't think I've ever been surrounded by so much wine, cheese, meat, and pastries. At the Corsica region (Corsica is a French Mediterranean island between the French/Spanish border and Italy), I sampled some delicious caramel apple jam which I ended up purchasing a larger size of. We also went into the wildlife pavilion, where they had horses, cows, pigs, cats, dog shows, and plenty of  "I <3 my (insert dog breed)" shirts to go around. Grace's host family mentioned that the wildlife pavilion is exotic for a lot of Parisians. Since many of them don't have cars, they don't really go anywhere but big cities and don't get a chance to see farm animals. After 10 minutes in the farm animal pavilion, us Michiganders had seen enough.

I then left the Agricultural Fair to meet up with Patrick, Chris, and Zoe to do a Dérive (pronounced day-reev) for our Paris by Site class, which is a fancy, scholarly name for a scavenger hunt. Each group designed a dérive then gave it to the professor, who redistributed them so that we complete a dérive made by our classmates. A dérive can look something like this:

Patrick, Zoe, and Chris got hungry on our dérive

1. Start at the Eiffel Tower and walk north

2. Keep walking until you see dog poo and immediately turn right (that was actually one of the steps on the dérive we had to do)

3. Find the nearest bus stop and take the next bus for 5 stops. Get off and turn right on the third street you see with the letter R

 Get the picture? It's pretty much designed to get you lost in the city so that you discover things and go places you wouldn't have otherwise gone. Neither the creator nor the participants know where it will truly lead. Our dérive had 14 steps and we had a good time completing it. We started off at Arc de Triomphe and, two hours later, ended up on Île de la Cité, the small island that Notre Dame sits on.

Chris and I were planning on meeting Peyton and Brandon at a fashion show, since it's Fashion Week in Paris (Peyton and Brandon saw Katy Perry at a show earlier today). We ultimately decided that we didn't want to go and stick out, since we were in clothes that were probably too casual for a fashion show. I headed home after that and had a good Skype session with the Kristie and Laura, the Dista Sistas.

 All of that agriculturing, dériving, and Skyping got me pretty hungry so I met up with Grace, Peyton, and Brandon at a restaurant near the Bastille. I got French Onion Soup (which they just call onion soup) and it was delectable. On my way home, I stopped in an ice cream shop and got the deliciously fancy creation you see here. The two flavors were vanilla bourbon and butter salted caramel (butter salted caramel seems to pop up everywhere I go. I think it's "in" right now). I had no idea that I got to pick two flavors and that they shaped it like a flower, so that was the cherry on top of a wonderful Saturday. Sometimes, it's the little things in life that can really brighten your day and make you forget all about how badly your feet hurt from walking :)

Affectueusement,
Katie