I just returned home after my second trip to Paris, both visits about two decades apart, give or take. The first time when I landed there, accompanying my parents, I knew four things about France: they fought in the first and second world wars, they ate snails, they spoke French and they had the Eiffel tower and Mona Lisa. Paris was large, crowded and confusing, not aided by the fact that my parents (completely) and I (mostly) were vegetarians. Before going there I always wondered what people who ate snails looked like. I knew the answer before my second trip even began. They looked, well, like me.
Anyway, the week that I spent in Paris this time in the company of my wife, was something utterly diffrerent. It was a truly romantic getaway. We fell in love again and again. With the crepes, the wine, duck confit and various small patisseries. Some things had changed though. The Eiffel tower looked a lot smaller than I remembered it to be as a ten year old, as did the Mona Lisa (Small-ish in front of the other works housed under the same roof).
Having spent a week sampling various types of French food, I came to the conclusion that the French missed out on a business opportunity of staggering proportions. They could have become the preferred outsourcing partner for food of their neighbours from across the channel. Imagine some 60 million people eating three times a day at 3 Euros a meal. The math says it would have been nearly 200 billion euros a year. Even if you discount half of that due to the various Indian-Pakistani-Bangladeshi eating joints, there would still have been a potential 100 billion euros to be earned. That is definitely not a sum to be frowned at.
The English Channel is unique in that either side of it houses arguably the best and unarguably the worst food in the world. I can't fathom how that came about, especially given the intertwined history of both nations over the past thousand years or so. Had it happened early enough in history, the English would have been deprived of one of their most powerful colonising impulses and India might not have got railways till much later. Anyway...what was not meant to be..
My wife and I adopted a tourist procedure that was quite new to us - that of walking around, with no specific direction and only jottings in the margins of hotel notepaper to guide us. It was a most refreshing way of getting to know a city. The first day, we started early, had a huge breakfast and before ten were out in the streets of Montmartre, walking around, looking for a place to eat. The cafes were just opening. The chairs and tables were being set in the very Parisian way where everyone faces the street. I have seen this only in two towns - Paris and Ho Chi Minh City. Anyway, the cafes were opening and what should the first customers do but enjoy a glass of wine or beer. At ten in the morning. And none of them seemed to be in college, in fact far from it. It just didn't seem right for ten in the morning. But then, these things grow on you and by ten thirty I was sold, having my first glass of beer washed down with my first glass of wine of the day, since there was catching up to do.
As I said repeatedly, not too long ago, the food was awesome. Eating their food and looking at Parisians leads me to conclude that the inhabitants of the city do not eat there. Most people are thin. The food definitely does not in any way possible assist staying thin.
We know a French couple here. One day the daughter asked her mother for French food. She immersed her potatoes in cheese and said Voila! She said the secret to French food was to put lots of cheese in everything. One cannot remain thin eating that food. But Parisians are thin, which leads me to think that there must be layers to this mystery. Maybe the wine is a factor. So, presumably if one started to drink early in the morning and ate that divine food, one would not gain weight.
Maybe. Maybe not.
This brings me to the final element to the mystery. Toilets.
There is an acute scarcity of public toilets in Paris. Acute. There are street signs leading to the nearest public loo, in some cases from as far as a couple of kilometres away. And if this is a free public toilet, it is stated there in big bold letters. And if you are unlucky enough to have to pee and have not been able to find a free toilet, you might end up paying 2 euros for taking a leak. Two euros in the place I live is the equivalent of my lunch on a workday. To top it all, the people I found queuing up outside all these toilets were mostly foreigners. Which possibly means that the French have either decided to call toilets something else as a practical joke or that not taking a leak lets you stay thin.
Imagine what a diet that would be. Start your day with French wine. Eat four meals a day of French food. Do not take a leak and you have lost four kilos in a fortnight.
If my wife permits, I am keen to carry out this experiment. Downsize me! with French food.
Anyway, the week that I spent in Paris this time in the company of my wife, was something utterly diffrerent. It was a truly romantic getaway. We fell in love again and again. With the crepes, the wine, duck confit and various small patisseries. Some things had changed though. The Eiffel tower looked a lot smaller than I remembered it to be as a ten year old, as did the Mona Lisa (Small-ish in front of the other works housed under the same roof).
Having spent a week sampling various types of French food, I came to the conclusion that the French missed out on a business opportunity of staggering proportions. They could have become the preferred outsourcing partner for food of their neighbours from across the channel. Imagine some 60 million people eating three times a day at 3 Euros a meal. The math says it would have been nearly 200 billion euros a year. Even if you discount half of that due to the various Indian-Pakistani-Bangladeshi eating joints, there would still have been a potential 100 billion euros to be earned. That is definitely not a sum to be frowned at.
The English Channel is unique in that either side of it houses arguably the best and unarguably the worst food in the world. I can't fathom how that came about, especially given the intertwined history of both nations over the past thousand years or so. Had it happened early enough in history, the English would have been deprived of one of their most powerful colonising impulses and India might not have got railways till much later. Anyway...what was not meant to be..
My wife and I adopted a tourist procedure that was quite new to us - that of walking around, with no specific direction and only jottings in the margins of hotel notepaper to guide us. It was a most refreshing way of getting to know a city. The first day, we started early, had a huge breakfast and before ten were out in the streets of Montmartre, walking around, looking for a place to eat. The cafes were just opening. The chairs and tables were being set in the very Parisian way where everyone faces the street. I have seen this only in two towns - Paris and Ho Chi Minh City. Anyway, the cafes were opening and what should the first customers do but enjoy a glass of wine or beer. At ten in the morning. And none of them seemed to be in college, in fact far from it. It just didn't seem right for ten in the morning. But then, these things grow on you and by ten thirty I was sold, having my first glass of beer washed down with my first glass of wine of the day, since there was catching up to do.
We liked the trial of the first day so much that we repeated it every day from then on. Basically me and my wife were eating at intervals of (what now seems be) every twenty minutes. Copious amounts of food. We walked the streets, saw a good place (often the result of laborious research by my wife followed by a less strenuous search for it on the map by me), sat down and ate. We repeated this about five times each day. Considering we were in Paris for about five days, we must have had, by a conservative estimate, about twenty meals. When we didn't eat a meal, we would stop at a patisserie and order something by the simple method of pointing at it in the display cabinet. We ate all sorts of things that we didn't know the names of, but which were all uniformly divine. Well, some more divine than others, but then when one is in the realm of divinity, relative divinity is just petty quibbling.
And if I failed to mention it earlier, or if my previous remarks were in any way unclear, the food was wonderful. Even as I write, the word 'wonderful' doesn't quite seem to convey the 'wonder' that the food was full of.
The people were friendly and helpful and generally well dressed. And thin.
That leads me to the main mystery that we unearthed on our trip to Paris. How can French people eat the food that is served in the country and stay thin? It seems impossible. I have a theory. And it involves the wine and the non-peeing.
As I said repeatedly, not too long ago, the food was awesome. Eating their food and looking at Parisians leads me to conclude that the inhabitants of the city do not eat there. Most people are thin. The food definitely does not in any way possible assist staying thin.
We know a French couple here. One day the daughter asked her mother for French food. She immersed her potatoes in cheese and said Voila! She said the secret to French food was to put lots of cheese in everything. One cannot remain thin eating that food. But Parisians are thin, which leads me to think that there must be layers to this mystery. Maybe the wine is a factor. So, presumably if one started to drink early in the morning and ate that divine food, one would not gain weight.
Maybe. Maybe not.
This brings me to the final element to the mystery. Toilets.
There is an acute scarcity of public toilets in Paris. Acute. There are street signs leading to the nearest public loo, in some cases from as far as a couple of kilometres away. And if this is a free public toilet, it is stated there in big bold letters. And if you are unlucky enough to have to pee and have not been able to find a free toilet, you might end up paying 2 euros for taking a leak. Two euros in the place I live is the equivalent of my lunch on a workday. To top it all, the people I found queuing up outside all these toilets were mostly foreigners. Which possibly means that the French have either decided to call toilets something else as a practical joke or that not taking a leak lets you stay thin.
Imagine what a diet that would be. Start your day with French wine. Eat four meals a day of French food. Do not take a leak and you have lost four kilos in a fortnight.
If my wife permits, I am keen to carry out this experiment. Downsize me! with French food.
No comments:
Post a Comment