Yesterday Mad Arrived

Day before that the Glenns arrived. A couple days before I was cooking dinner for Van and Phoebe here and about a week ago Rosena and I were eating at the few vegetarian restaurants in Paris. Well it seems like a week anyway it all has gone so fast. Yesterday was a blah day, the girls laid on our roof and then Mad and I walked downtown to find an australian bar but they were closed so we settled on the ole reliable- Highlander(my scottish bar) . I watched The Open and Mad read english tabloids and Saveur while we chatted with the funny, energetic Yvonne our little scottish bartender and sipped Budvars. In the middle of the golf we left, despite protests from our bored Yvonne but we promised we would come back, and searched for food. In this part of the latin district every store front is a restaurant from some part of the world. Blocks of french, italian, greek, chinese, indian, japanese, middle eastern, portugese, latin american, irish, whatever you want it is in these blocks somewhere. Its full of tourists and some of the restaurants are cheesy but i love it. In all the restaurant guide books there are no restaurants recommended here. If you look at a map there are dots all around paris representing good restaurants and a huge hole of plain streets for this part of town. if you didnt know paris and looked at this map you would think that the latin district was some kind of government district or industrial wasteland. not so. every other storefront has suckling pigs roasting on a spit or an over the top display of oysters, clams, langoustines, and some of the biggest crabs ive ever seen or a huge, disgusting looking chicken gyro thing that the sandwich makers have to step on a stool and use what looks like a stihl saw to cut or people on the streets cooking their own meat in fondues. a vegetarians nightmare neighborhood, and any foodie or wannabe would never ever admit to eating here. but i like all the options and the spectacle and the prices. so we found a chinese counter that wasnt busy and made our own 4 course meal with the first course being curry chicken soup, then an assortment of dumplings, then some kinda beef and veggies, then dessert was some of the dumplings that we liked the best. then we went back to the Highlander and they were on the 16th and ole sharkie had inevitably sank and Padraig cruised. the bbc announcer is the best in the bigs, nice- the anti-johnny miller, and made every moment dramatic even though it was some of the worst golf i have ever, ever seen. well except for my own of course.