If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
Ernest Hemingway
If you are lucky enough
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He got that right. Because I was such a young man, living and working in Paris in my early 20s. So today, when I read about Notre Dame burning or lockdowns restarting, a little piece of me cries.
Given the sanitation practices (or lack thereof) in a lot of Parisian restaurants, “movable feast” isn’t a uniformly positive thing…
… nor is an endorsement from Hemingway. (<snark> The Lost Generation should have either stayed lost or become the Lost Generation. </snark>)
My time in Paris was mid-20s, with my surname showing on my four-button jacket with the funky metal buttons and the bars on my shoulders. Which led to Problems for a variety of reasons, including that my abysmal French had a clear regional accent…
Ah, yes. Language is important there. I have an ear for them, and as I reached fluency they certainly appreciated it.
You just don’t have a true French stomach, C.
It must be a result of not challenging it with day old oysters or something like that.
It wasn’t my stomach at risk. I’ve “dined” at tribal feasts in Southwest Asia.
Some of my colleagues, however… including the guy from Rennes who ended up with, umm, multiorifice post-meal consequences (go ahead, think about the awful multilingual pun that I had to explain to him in yet another language because his English was so poor, my French was so poor, and we were speaking German as our common tongue)…