Austrian Friends in Paris!

After surviving OFII, I ran a few last errands and then, as I approached the Cité U in the early afternoon loaded with extra cooking supplies, I popped into the metro station to come across none other than my Austrian friends in line for extra metro tickets! It turns out that they’d copied down my phone number wrong and had just returned from lunch after not hearing back from the text message they thought they’d sent me.

Accompanied by my friends, three Austrian girls I met in a hostel in Prague last year in August (who I subsequently visited last Christmas season in Vienna), we returned home, dropped off all their stuff, and made a beeline for the heart of Paris tourism: the Eiffel Tower. I dropped my friends off that evening on the Champs Elysées right by the Arc de Triomphe. We met up later in the Place Saint Michel right by Notre Dame, grabbed some Amorino ice cream, and decided it was time to call it a night.

On Friday my friends spent the day in Versailles while I ran all over Paris trying to get some final pre-course errands done.

On Saturday, my friends headed in their own direction for the earlier part of the day while Koyel and I at last visited the Musée du Parfum Fragonard, a fancy perfume museum I’d been planning to visit for at least a year now. That evening, we had a grand feast. As my friends had been kind enough to cook lots of traditional Viennese and Austrian dishes for me when I visited them, it only seemed appropriate to return the favor. A handful of my other foreign friends now living in Paris gathered at my place for an American fall-harvest themed feast. Koyel, Declan, and I began cooking around 7pm and the last dish wasn’t finished until about 1 in the morning. We had cornbread, spiced apples, a nice salad with hazelnuts, clementines, and raisins, mashed potatoes, cooked carrots, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, a rabbit, and a pumpkin pie. For drinks, we started off with some of the chocolate spice tea my Austrian friends gave me, then some tasting of IBC rootbeer and cream soda, then a white wine, and finally a soft (2% alcoholic) cider and a bottle of red wine.

Yesterday, my friends were all too enthusiastic to go out to EuroDisney, so I spent the day in Paris proper bouncing around. That evening Koyel and I met up with Francesca, an MIT ’06 with whom I did track and field freshman year who’s now in her third year of a PhD in Paris. We chatted over drinks and then Koyel and I returned to the Cité U to finish off the left-over pumpkin pie with Declan and Xinhe (a Chinese girl in my doctoral program).

As today was my friends’ last day in Paris (for this visit), we decided to stay in the city center. We first headed into le Marais, the Jewish neighborhood on the Rive Droit, the Right Bank of the Seine, for falafel sandwiches from L’As du Falafel, the most famous falafel restaurant in Paris, which is absolutely delicious! From here, we did some window shopping as we walked toward the Ile-de-la-Cité to check out my absolute favorite church in Paris: l’Église Sainte-Chapelle. Time was running short, sadly, but we found time for one last stop at Amorino, the ice cream place that scoops the ice cream in the shape of flowers, before my friends had to head back to grab their things and prepare for their flight home.

I loved the chance to finally get to host guests in Paris, and these friends are so much fun. They’re fairly wacky and really sweet, a great combination. They even showed up here with a special blend of Indian Chai and Schokotrüffel (Chocolate truffle) looseleaf tea for me since they remembered how much I’d loved the Some Like It Hot spicy chocolate tea I’d found last December in Vienna. In case that wasn’t enough, they also arrived with an adorable, polka-dotted tea tin and a beautiful porcelain tea set for one in a butterfly pattern. Quite the chance meeting at that hostel in Prague last year, huh? It’s really great to already have a collection of friends scattered across Europe. As I’ve said, it makes this continent feel a lot smaller. (If only I knew a few more people in my new hometown...) Either way, it seems I’d best start considering just when I can afford to take my next trip to Vienna.