It's been too long since my last post, and a number of marvellous things have happened in the last three weeks.  

The highlight reel:

With my cooking class, I ate dinner at a three-michelin-star, ludicrously expensive restaurant, Pavillion Ledoyen, courtesy of the school.  This was intended to be a learning experience in our culinary education, and it certainly was, although not in the way that I thought.

For a meal that would have cost me about half my monthly rent, I have to say that the food was just good, rather than great, excellent, or life-changing.  It was classic fare - sea bream, gaspacho, lamb cooked sous-vide (separate courses), and it was done perfectly.  In France we would say 'rien à dire' - nothing to say, which means that something is perfectly done, no critique possible.  And yet that held true in the opposite sense, in that there was nothing exceptional to remark about it either.  All in all, it was a dinner with zero surprises, and had I been paying my own, actual (imaginary) money, I would have been disappointed.

One foodie gripe about the Michelin guide is that it demands that a restaurant's service and decor be of as high a quality as the food.  In a three star restaurants, this makes for a very dangerous phenomenon:  invisible servers.  Invisible servers are great because they don't interrupt your dinner conversations, and dangerous because they fill up your wine glass every 40 seconds without you ever (ever!) seeing, so that what looks like your second glass is actually your fifth.  They should have a little sign on the wall about that.

I got to go Berlin for the weekend!  Upon this second visit, Berlin remains my favorite European city.  (Okay, tied with Barcelona).  Tourist-friendly, loaded with history, unique, young, growing, and very different from the Europe's greatest hits, i.e. London, Brussels, Paris, and Madrid, which to my mind are strikingly similar.  But the true glory of Berlin, as unwittingly proclaimed by Kennedy, are the PASTRIES!   Coming straight from the self-proclaimed pastry capital of the universe, the German pasties blew me away: creative, delicious, and huge!  Give me a german jelly doughnut over a chocolate croissant any day.

So by now, you're thinking, I had a pretty good month.  It's true!  I was on a roll!  All until my fateful return from Berlin, when my despair at the tiny little pastries drove me to a desperate act:  I sliced my index finger with a chef's knife deeply enough to be sent immediately to the emergency room.  As if this weren't bad enough, my emergency room doctor was younger than me.  You know, you're cruising through your twenties, thinking everything is cool, you're just chilling, and then all of a sudden you meet full-on doctors who were born in the late eighties.  Scary.

So the past ten days has been a exercise in singlehandedness:  singlehanded hair washing, dishwashing, contact cleaning (ever tried that?  that's tough).  I get my stitches out on Friday . . .  which brings you up to date on my activities since my last post!  

More meditations on la vie française coming soon!