Le Salon de l'Agriculture

I can't believe I forgot to write about the Salon de l'Agriculture in my last post - a key part of last week. The Salon is basically the classy French version of a state fair, at a massive convention center on the outskirts of Paris. The best part are the food pavilions, where vendors from every corner of France, including overseas departments and far-flung francophone islands like Tahiti, have free samples and lots of produce for sale. I had foie gras, saucissons, chocolates, and about 40 kinds of cheese. Our favorite booth was a fromagier (cheese man) who had designed a game of smelling 6 cheese aromas out of jars and then tasting waters with hints of salty, bitter, sweet, etc. Based on our preferences, he then selected a cheese for each of us that supposedly contained the flavors that we did not identify during the test: for me, a Pouligny Saint-Pierre. The idea of the game was that you didn't need a cheese with flavors that were already easy for you to discern. I'm a big proponent of goat products, but even I had a hard time believing a goat could produce something so wonderful. The low point, on the other hand, was my naive consumption of pimento-flavored jelly -- I think from the Réunion pavilion, although that devil jam incapacitated me so badly that it really might've been anywhere...

We also went to see the animal pavilion, where for some reason there were a lot of booths selling those tacky wolf shirts that you find at chintzy fake American Indian stores. We watched a couple on horseback trot around to some Celine Dion songs and then headed to the cat display area. This picture really cannot express the size of the cat that I discovered: largest fluffy domestic kitty I have EVER SEEN.

I have done an enormous number of things this week, since Oren is visiting (and staying here with my host family!): I've finally gotten around to doing the classic Paris stuff that it's easy to put off or avoid for fear of being 'too touristy'. But I'll get to that at the end of the week... For now, here are two pictures taken tonight on our way home, crossing the Seine from the Assemblée Nationale to Concorde.