H1N1 Conquest

H1N1 virus image from www.cdc.gov

I am someone who gets their flu shot every year. I have been for years- it's always been relatively simple to get them at work, since I have worked for large employers (and for a time, hospitals/major medical centers) who always have found it in their best interest to vaccinate their employees. The one year that my employer handed out FluMist (the nasal vaccine) I was even able to convince Rolf, a needle-phobe, to come in and get it too.

I did get my standard seasonal flu shot in October, right on schedule. But this year, of course, the big news is not the plain old flu, it's the Swine Flu, H1N1. Between WHO Pandemic status and the fact that flu vaccines take awhile to make, there has been the conflict between the urgings of major national and international authorities to get vaccinated, and the lack of available vaccine. In the US, supplies have been scarce. In France, home to one of the major pharmaceutical companies manufacturing the vaccine, supplies have been plentiful. But that, of course, did not insure that I could actually get it.

In France it is being distributed by the government in neighborhood based distribution centers. But you need to bring in the letter which documents your coverage by the French national health insurance, which I don't have (I'm covered by my US employer). I asked at work, and they had no plans to give out the H1N1 shots, because the government is giving them out. I asked my primary care doc here, and he did not have the vaccine, because the government was the only distribution point [although that has very recently changed]. Now, despite France being awash in vaccine, very few people here are getting it. Besides the usual (unfounded) rumors that the vaccine will give you other horrible problems, there was also a scare campaign that said that the pharmaceutical companies were behind the whole thing, just as a money making scheme. Conspiracy theories a-go-go.

In the mean time a number of friends got the Swine Flu, and it sounded pretty miserable. I really did not want to get sick. There is no need to get sick, when there is a vaccine for this virus.

I knew I would be traveling to the US in January. I asked if the occupational health center at the US work office had the vaccine- no. I called my primary care doc in the US, but they had already gone through the very limited supplies they had already.

In early January, the government of France declared that they had a huge surplus of vaccine and would start selling it to other countries. (Please, I'll be happy to pay for my shot...)

When I got to the US in late January, I had one final possibility: the CVS walk in clinic. I went, and 15 minutes later was vaccinated. They even took my insurance card and did not make me pay the $15 fee up front. It was such an uneventful occasion, despite the months of asking and 4000 mile journey that it took.

The next day, I got the second round of the Hepatitis A vaccine (the first was before my trip to Colombia last year, from the work occupational health clinic). It's official- I now have all of my shots.

Travel grinch

While Karen was in the States last week, I got to thinking about what a lousy traveler I am.

I've never really been a very enthusiastic traveler, something my parents recently commented on. It doesn't matter whether it's flying 12 h to Japan or driving 90 min to a race, the act of getting someplace is almost never enjoyable for me. And in the period on either side, the getting ready to go and the getting there, I'm usually even more uptight, grumpy, and irritable than normal. I'm a guy who likes to know what awaits him, likes knowing how to do things, and likes things to "go right." Traveling is all about not knowing what awaits, having to figure out how to do things, and most definitely stuff going wrong.

There was a period in our graduate school-postgraduate training lives where we didn't take a real vacation for 7 years. We'd occasionally manage to travel together to the other's conference or get a quick visit in to one set of parents or the other, but we didn't go anywhere outside of work just to travel or see the world. That long spell broke about a year after we moved to Philly, when we went to visit a fellow former prisoner postdoc from our U of TX days and his wife in their native New Zealand. If you're going to break a dry spell, may as well do it in style. It was both an awful and wonderful trip. Awful in getting there. Flights were interminable, connections were missed, luggage was lost, what a mess. But aside from a couple of days at the start with our friends in Wellington, we just had a car, a map, and a couple of weeks to get to Aukland for our return flight. And so we just set off to explore the South Island, quickly figuring out how to get information in each town, learning not to worry about hotel availability at that time of year, and having a slew of unexpected memorable experiences.

That unplanned traveling model worked for us the first trip we took to Italy, as well. After 10 days of riding with a group, we dumped our bikes at a hotel in Pisa, got on a (wrong) train south, and after a pretty eye-opening evening in Naples, rented a car and drove to the Amalfi coast with no reservations or plans. A few bewildering, frustrating hours later, including stopping at and then running away from a little Bates motel-like spot recommended by the only Italian we knew, we took a break to eat at a little road-side restaurant for lesson #1 of the trip, which is that when you're sitting at an outdoor table on the side of a cliff looking over the Mediterranean, you order the simple grilled fish and local wine and then shut the hell up and just listen to what the place is saying instead of trying to make the place match up with some preconceived ideas. We got back into the car, drove 30 min down the breathtaking cliff-side highway and stopped at an intriguing little white door that turned out to be a hotel cut into the cliff face, with balconies cantilevered out over the water, where we got a room for about a quarter of the normal rate since they'd just drained the pool and were only going to be open another week. The only thing more perfect than that hotel was the untopped pizza crust that served as the bread basket at one of the little family-run restaurants we ate at one night. 9 years later, I still dream of that bread at night.

And so we travel. And Karen puts up with my increased anxiety and grouchiness at the start and end of the trip, and plenty of times in the middle of the trip until food calms me down again. We never show up with an itinerary, and we sometimes haven't done enough advance reading to generate a list of things we want to see. I'm sure we miss some amazing sites and sights, but for us it's so often the chance encounters with somebody or something that we remember most from a trip that aside from reserving a room somewhere, we pretty much wing it. And so far, cross fingers, it works out. We have never traveled so much in our lives as we have this past year. And though I'm no better at it now than last February, I hope it continues. I had fantasies after the Japan trip of really getting off the beaten path. But I'm not sure I'll ever be take-it-as-it-comes enough to handle that kind of adventure.

My most recent traveling has been on the roads just outside Paris, on the bike. When we moved here, we started riding the hamster track at Longchamp, and then I started getting out into the country to ride, using a route from here to get to the open spaces to the west, using a route learned from friends to ride in the Chevreuse valley, and taking regional trains to explore the countryside to the south and north. As much fun as that kind of riding is, 2 or more hours on bike or train just to get to and from the interesting riding just isn't practical on a daily basis.

Like more distant traveling, familiarity is a big help in finding routes. It's hard to take the dive to explore when you have no idea which towns are where and have a hard time understanding the complicated directions that asking for help enlists. In rural Italy, or even in the open countryside around Paris, it's easy to ask which direction town A is, because you're standing at an intersection with the next road 5 k down the way. Immediately outside Paris, it's hard to even know what town you should be asking for because they're packed in together with oddly shaped boundaries, and there are hundreds of possible roads, many of them 1-way in one direction for 2 or 3 blocks and then in the other direction for the next 3.

Thank goodness, then, for Google maps and especially street view. Since the French atlases are useless for this kind of thing, the reasonable accuracy of the online maps is incredibly helpful for finding unlikely arteries through suburbia, and it's easy to preview for traffic light density (French police take seriously the running of lights by cyclists) and potentially dangerous high-speed highways. Recognizing key traffic circles before you find yourself in one with no street signs to be seen is also a benefit of the street view capability.

The recent local exploring has been enormously satisfying on all accounts. Aside from making me feel like I've not completely given up on the bike, I've found some great rolling suburban and urban roads full of punchy ups and downs punctuated by cobbles and speed bumps that make riding on the road a little like mountain biking at Fair Hill or White Clay (man, I miss my mountain bike), terrain that's otherwise hard to hard to find in this area. I've learned to connect some beautiful areas just outside of Paris with twisty narrow low-traffic roads, making for good riding and just good learning about the area. And I've now got a bag full of 1.25 - 4 hour rides from my apartment door that I can choose from with a minimum of "getting to." I have aspirations of listing rides someplace here for future Paris-frustrated cyclists, since I've been unable to find any since moving here. Hopefully I'll find a mechanism to do that.

Best of all, unlike my other travel, the only times riding makes me grouchy is when the weather is nasty and I can't get out to explore more.

Ragu re-runs

A no-frills food post:

Uninspired to be creative this week, I pulled the frozen duck ragu out and stretched it out for 3 nights.

Fist up was duck lasagna. I made some chestnut pasta and alternated layers of duck ragu or béchamel enriched with just a little mascarpone. It was going to be 2 nights' worth, but I'd ridden and not eaten lunch, so screw it-- I made it twice as deep, and we ate the whole thing. I'd kind of hoped I'd get some of Karen's, but when I reached over for a little supplement, she growled and bared her teeth. Don't mess with Funny Girl's dinner!

Next was a more traditional use of ragu, with wide noodles. This time chocolate. I've struggled with getting the right proportion of cocoa in my chocolate pasta, and this one was (a lot) closer: a teaspoon of cocoa per 2 servings (2 eggs' worth of pasta). A little short, maybe, but better than the overkill of previous efforts. I still like the slight sweetness of the chestnut pasta with duck more than the slight bitterness of the cocoa, but Karen liked it.

I only had a little ragu left after splurging on the lasagna, so a stuffed pasta seemed the best way to stretch it. I had planned to go to the Italian coop here in town for some of their amazing ricotta, but after having to wash my bike after a wet ride today, I recalled seeing sweet potatoes at the local produce vendor. So it was a mad dash to get the potato cooked, get it pureed with mascarpone and butter (everything's better with mascarpone and butter) and turned into agnolotti in time for dinner. Served with some orange-peel-and-garlic-scented sauteed spinach, just because we've been a little light on greens this week. Not really Italian, but there're no real Italians here to report us.

OK, so these weren't leftovers. We had a little unexpected celebrating to do tonight, and I recalled we'd bought a dessert red wine at the on-the-boat salon des vins in Nov for our Thanksgiving dinner, specifically for the opera cakes (almond, chocolate, coffee) we'd intended to buy, but couldn't because they'd sold out. So with the one egg I had left, I faked a chocolate cake recipe made with ground roasted hazelnuts instead of flour, espresso instead of vanilla, and a boat-load of butter, cocoa, and good chocolate. I can pretty much put together any pasta at the last minute, but I don't bake nearly enough to have ratios and methods memorized. And so it was no surprise that whereas the 3 individual cakes looked beautiful coming out of the oven in their ramekins, once unmolded, they collapsed in the center. This runs in the family. When we lived in Austria many moons ago, the only cooking I remember of my mom's (aside from bringing home a chicken with the head most definitely attached) was the first chocolate cake she made that came out of the oven with 3 fist-sized indentations in it, the same as mine tonight. Like hers back then, these little cakes were delicious even if saggy, and more importantly, they served as a perfect excuse for a fabulous half-bottle of wine.

Barcelona

I've never been to Spain. But I kinda like the music.

OK. The first part isn't technically true. I spent about 4 hours in Spain in the early 1980s, a short train ride across the French border from St Jean de Luz one Sunday morning to find no way to change money, nothing open, no place to eat, and nobody interested in making exceptions for a 6' 4" 135 lb, perhaps smelly, American backpacker and his similarly undernourished and aromatic Austrian companion. So we wandered around an empty town for several hours until the first train bound for France carried us off (imagine that-- France was the friendly place. Ha!).

It is true that, despite realizing that my unpleasant experience there was my own fault (expecting things to be open on Sunday? Not knowing a single word of Spanish? C'mon...), I've never been back. And it's almost true that I've never even been all that tempted to go back. Something about not liking hot, or even warm, climates much and figuring that Italy fulfilled my Mediterranean culture interest.

But things change, and the case for going to Spain at some point had been building for a few years. With a 2-week block of vacation for Karen over the holidays, some cheap flights available, and cold dark dreary days fully enveloping Paris of late, we decided to go to Barcelona for 5 days just before Christmas. The 5th major city outside France we've visited since moving to Paris, it might just have been the most fun. Hard to compare with Tokyo, where we spent more time, and which was more fascinatingly foreign.

Since a month has passed since we were there, this'll just be a list of stuff we liked, making it easier for all of us.

1.) Architecture. It's hard to go to Barcelona and not get caught up with Gaudi. Not impossible, mind you: my mom remarked before we went and after we got back that it doesn't take long to get over that stuff. I can see her point. A lot of it is a little over the top and can actually get a bit monotonous. And all of the technical issues, like making the arches a slightly different shape so there would be perfectly balanced forces in compression, don't seem to my non-engineering mind to be terribly significant. It's not like the cathedrals built in the 1100s with the old arches have come crashing down unpredictably. But even in the most distractingly embellished buildings, there are moments of pure aesthetic elegance, curves and meeting of curved planes that are both breathtaking and serene at the same time. I absolutely loved the cathedral, a non-Gothic take on a Gothic form. The font is different in Gaudi's cathedral, but the text is the same-- it's telling the exact same stories with the same level of ornamentation and over-the-top presentation as the cathedrals of the middle ages. I dug it.

And there's plenty else aside from Gaudi. The colorful 19th century Eixample neighborhoods, the beautifully austere Romanesque Sant Pau del Camp, the twisty streets of the gothic quarter, and the 15th century hospital de la Santa Creu offer very different experiences of space and place. I've commented before on the pros and cons of Haussmann's Paris. There's a harmony and elegance, but there's also a bit of stifling sameness. Barcelona didn't suffer from that at all.

Casa Mila, a Gaudi apartment building.

Casa Battlo, an even gaudier Gaudi building.

The passion facade, by Catalan sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs, on the Sagrada Familia cathedral is powerful and bleak.

The interior light in the unfinished cathedral is magical, and the stained glass, which doesn't photograph well with my crappy cell phone, was like jewels.

Gaudi's peaks culminate in colorful plant motifs, which seem pretty whimsical...

... but are they really any sillier than the giant marble cows (said to be among the finest gothic animal sculpture around-- not sure how much competition there is for that honor) atop the 12th century cathedral in Laon, France? 

The courtyard of the Hospital de la Santa Creu feels like an Italian villa...

... and Sant Pau's cloister is one of the most intimate and blissfully peaceful places I've ever been.

Sant Pau del Camp's simplicity reflects in part its role as a defensive structure, built outside the city's walls.

You're not allowed to hang your laundry outside in Paris. I like it-- it gives the sense that a place is lived in.

2.) Food. You can run the gamut in Barcelona, from the simplest snack foods (egg-and-potato omelets/tortillas) to the most cutting edge cooking technology. I loved the fish in romesco sauce I had one night, the stews of white beans or chickpeas, and the dishes that mixed fish and meat. But our favorite meal of the trip was lunch at Casa Lucio, a modest little place that does "standard" tapas at the bar up front and more inventive fare in the dining room in the back. Not having reserved, we got a couple of stools at the tapas bar and tried to communicate with the owner, who asked the other folks in the bar to help with some English. With a Catalan patron's help, we explained my shellfish allergy and that we were game for anything else. The owner pulled a little slip of paper out of the cash drawer that simply read "Trust me," and then mimed that we just needed to tell him when we've had enough. The parade of plates was amazing, marinated fish and vegetables, outstanding sausages, croquettes of Iberian ham, and one of the best cheeses I've ever had in my life. There was earnest pride and respect in the progression of the meal, and it was the kind of perfect simplicity I should be aspiring to in the kitchen. It was a truly memorable meal, both for the food and the intimate cultural experience. This, ultimately, is why I travel.

One of seemingly thousands of comfortable neighborhood wine-and-tapas bars, this one Bar Mut in the Exaimple, where we had a very good lunch our first, and only sunny, day in Barcelona.

La Bouqueria, the big and busy food market off of the Ramblas, wasn't such a novelty coming from Paris or even Philly. But local eating habits were on display in the dozens of stalls selling Iberian hams and the lamb's heads in this butcher case.

A little ways down the aisle was this cooler of small wild game. Now that's what I want at my butcher shop. Thoughtful of them to line the bottom of the cooler with red, rather than white, paper...

A small sampling of the treats at Casa Lucio's tapas bar, where we had a trip-defining lunch.

3.) Wine. You've got to wash all that good food down with something, and the Spanish wine washes down pretty well. In a world where vineyards of indigenous grapes are being replanted with French grapes to make generically international wines, it was really easy to find good Spanish wines made from the traditional Spanish grapes at reasonable prices, whether in the wine bars before dinner or at the table.

4.) Art. Though the museum capitol of Spain is Madrid, there's still plenty to see in Barcelona. The highlight for us was the Fundacio Joan Miro, both for the broad collection of Miro's own moving work and for the outstanding temporary exhibition of Frantisek Kupka's paintings and drawings. Our time-to-museum-saturation is usually fairly short, but we spent forever there.

It was raining, so I didn't stop to write down the name of the artist who created this sculpture outside the Fundacio Joan Miro.

A Kupka painting, the picture downloaded from the Fundacio Joan Miro's website, since I was about the only person in the museum complying with the no-indoor-photography request.

5.) Shopping. We don't spend much time shopping, generally, but something about Barcelona drew us in, and we had a lot of luck finding stores with a good combination of style, fit, and price. It didn't hurt that it rained almost constantly after our first day.

5.) People. I heard a number of (presumably non-Catalan) people in Barcelona make cracks about the impersonal and prickly Catalans, but we were impressed by how graciously hospitable people were.

6.) Vibe. Though the feel and prosperity of the city change depending on where you are, the central part of town has an energy and movement that's charming and compelling. Maybe that reflected our mood more than the city itself, but we had a sense of moving and looking forward. I suspect some of it's the whimsy and exuberance in some of the architecture and art in public spaces. I think I've said before that Paris, like Philly, has a bit of a yesterday-centric culture about it, even beyond the preservation of their histories. Barcelona felt optimistic, somehow.

Even the giant crustaceans in Barcelona are optimistic. You can't see it in this picture, but this menacing creature along the recently updated waterfront wears a goofy smiley face.

The very few negatives of the trip were the kinds of things one runs into anywhere-- a hotel that, while cool looking and nicely appointed, was lacking sound proofing and design common sense (are clangy metal shelves and minibar cubicle doors a good idea in a minimally soundproofed place? Not so much.), a hugely overpriced meal at Cinc Sentis that, although stunningly plated, fell well short of its mark both in service and taste (a chef needs to use more than 3 of the 5 tastes at that level-- where on earth was acid or bitter?, expensive wine pairings need to highlight the unique flavors of both the food and wine rather than pile the same gustatory experience on your tongue course after course, and with 48 h notice on allergies, the management needs to be more flexible in a tasting menu), and my umbrella was stolen from a store umbrella rack. Spain still has a reputation for petty theft, and it doesn't get any more petty than my 7-euro-buck folding umbrella. A tiny dose of bad luck. C'est comme ça.

I'd have put the mediocre coffee on the negative list, but it was still better enough than what you get in Paris that I think I have to put that on the win side, along with 95% of the rest of our Barcelona experience.

Goodbye, Barcelona. We'll probably be back.

Safer Skies?

I flew to Philadelphia and back this week for work, the first time I've flown since the Christmas day foiled bomber. I wasn't sure what sort of new security measures would be in place, having seen news stories of now only one carry-on, or not being able to touch your personal belongings during the flight. None of that was enforced on my flights. In Paris there were more rounds of the "did you pack your own bags?" questioning, and they searched a number of "randomly" selected people for manual searches of carry-on bags which delayed our take-off, but that was about it.

On the way back to Paris on Friday, when I finally found the Delta counter (Delta took over the Air France route between Paris and Philadelphia. Not a good thing), the rep asked me if I had already checked in. No, I didn't remember to do the advance check in on-line, so had not checked in at all. But we have you checked in with three bags? No, really no. So he checked me and my 2 bags (only one on the way over, the 2nd mostly bike stuff!) and that was that.

While I was still trying to settle into my seat on the plane, another woman came up and said she had 2A, my seat. No, 2A is definitely my seat. She got the flight attendant, who looked at my boarding pass and her boarding pass. Both said 2A, and both had my name on it. I don't know what the other woman's name really was, but mine is unusual enough that hers definitely was not identical.

They shuffled her to another seat (or maybe off the plane?) and asked for my bag claim checks to make sure the bags were labeled correctly, and the flight attendant apologized to me: "that doesn't usually happen on international flights."

So- the rep at check in did not get the right name from her passport, and checked her in under my name. Then the how many checks through security did not pick up that her boarding pass and passport did not match? But if I bring a bottle of anything greater than 3 oz. I'm a security risk? Please.

Reasons to live in Paris, entry 2

Sugar...

Or more specifically, Daddy brand sugar, which dominates the store shelves here. I realize it's childish, but I chuckle every time I see that pink bag.

And as if that weren't enough, trying to find the company's website through a 'net search for your blog post provides at least an afternoon's worth of entertainment, as any combination of France, Daddy, and sugar brings up the most interesting sites.

Cyclocross in France: Roubaix World Cup

A couple of weekends ago, we completed our 2009/2010 cyclocross spectating season by taking the train up to Roubaix to watch the 8th race in the World Cup series.

The city of Roubaix hosts the finish of the spring classic Paris-Roubaix bike race, which is contested over a bunch of now-carefully-preserved-and-valued super-crappy cobbled roads in northern France. It hosts the finish way more accurately than Paris hosts the start. For the last 40 years or so, it has started in Compiégne, which would be like saying a race from Allentown, PA starts in Philly. Regardless, the Roubaix velodrome is iconic in the bike racing world, a place where the few tough and crazy riders who survive the race finish. And the 'cross race is held in and around the velodrome, which was at least part of the reason we went up.

The Roubaix velodrome. The technical part of the course uses the sliver of steep hillside from where the spectators are standing to the street.

The velodrome and sports park isn't a particularly big place, and they run the race entirely on the grounds. At first glance, aside from the use of the velodrome surface for part of the lap, the course doesn't look much different from my club's Whirlybird course back home, winding around a bunch of playing fields, using the track-and-field sand pits, and eeking out just a little bit of elevation gain on the berms around the fields. But the sliver of land between the velodrome itself and the street provided some technical challenges, including a steep set of stairs (tricky because the front of the stair is wood but the step itself was just soil, which in the mud made for some precariously uneven footing), a couple of tricky off-camber switchbacks, and 2 steep downhills that ended in very short run-out sharp right-hand turns (or, failing the negotiation of the turns, ended in a head-on collision with a solid wall, thoughtfully covered with very thick padding). The first descent was harrowing enough that on the first lap of the pro women's warm-up, there got to be quite a gaggle of riders looking, laughing nervously, and waiting for somebody to dare to push the front wheel over the edge.

The first descent on the lap is a pretty intimidating sight when you're the first to roll up to it...

It was tackled a lot of different ways during the day, riding, running, and plenty of hybrid technique. This is the U23 race.

The second descent is longer and steeper, but the run-out is longer, and the approach is less sketchy than the first. Still, even the leaders in the pro race ran it as often as they rode it.

The atmosphere at Roubaix was really different from the other races we've been at. First, the crowds were smaller. It was still plenty packed in the techy section behind the velodrome, but the rest of the course allowed pretty easy moving around. The crowd was still mostly Belgian, but unlike the races in Flanders, I could hear at least a little French wherever we stood. There were tons of French riders in the younger races, 11 in the U23 race alone. These guys haven't been racing much 'cross, since there are only 2 French riders in the top 36 World Cup standings for the season, so they apparently gave every kid in town a bike and told them to show up on Sunday.

In addition to this pajama-wearing oompah band, there was a drum corp at Roubaix. Overall, there was more silliness and a more relaxed vibe.

There was only 1 beer cart, and no real beer tents, which may explain why there were fewer specatators. The food vendors, much to my surprise, were still Belgian, something I figured the French wouldn't stand for. But France doesn't have a big street-food tradition, and maybe they figured the Belgians who would come to watch the race didn't want (or deserve) French food. Interacting with the vendors at Roubaix was completely different than at the races in Belgium. In Belgium, it's Dutch or English with them, and though they're nice about it (a lot nicer than the French are, certainly), it's clear that by speaking English you're definitely foreign. In Roubaix, I spoke to them in French, which just seemed like the the natural thing to do in France, which it turns out they didn't like or do very well, but they couldn't really complain, being in France and all. It was a strangely empowering series of interactions, perhaps the first time since we've been in France that I felt like I actually lived here. That I was the "native." I almost wished I'd had a beret.

Some things, like curry ketchup, you don't need to taste to know not to eat. But being slower than the average guy, I exercised some regrettable judgement and tried it on my frites.

And in fact, there was a bit of that feeling all day in Roubaix. In contrast to Barcelona, Brussels, Vienna, Stockholm, Tokyo, etc-- or Paris, for Pete's sake-- places we've been over this past crazy year that were decidedly foreign, Roubaix felt very familiar. An industrial city of a bit less than 100,000 people that's lost most of its shine, made mostly of red brick row houses that weren't distinctly Flemmish or Norman or Alsatian, it could have been any smallish-to-midsize PA city: Lancaster, York, Allentown. Hell, it could have been Racine or Kenosha, WI. It felt oddly like home.

The Roubaix train station is handsome and in excellent repair, though there aren't many trains through here anymore.

Roubaix's streets remind of home.

It wasn't all like familiar, though. The Grand Place (hotel de ville) on our walk from the train station to the velodrome was a striking, and very European, sight.

It also felt like perfect spectating weather, with sunny skies on race day. We'd done our 34-degree-and-rain spectating in December, so we were happy for the difference a little sun makes when standing around all day (and it really was all day, because they did UCI officials training between the U23 and women's races, an extra 90 min of just standing around). Like most of the races we've seen this year, the course was crazy-muddy, since it had rained all week. Those steep downhills were as gnarly as I've seen, with even most of the pro men running them, and it was just a long, brutal slog through the flatter sections of the course. It looked like a painful day on the bike, for sure.

Safety Jogger work boots is a major sponsor for many of the 'cross series. As Karen has said, it ain't a cross race without the inflatable boot.

However, the more logical sponsor would seem to be Wellies, because the deep mud has made for messy and treacherous walking all season long.

One guy who isn't getting dirty is Sven Nys. In this promo in Roubaix, pictures of muddy Niels Albert, Lars Boom, and friends, and a sparklingly clean Sven Nys, have been photoshopped together. There's no shortage of pictures of Nys in the mud, so the use of this one is perplexing.

With the various European national championships having run the week before, there was a lot of commentating over the loudspeakers about who was in what jersey. It would be a big day for the Czech champions, with Katerina Nash taking the women's race, the most notable moments of which were the missing Katie Compton (they called her repeatedly at the start line, but she didn't race due to leg cramps) and seeing Dutch national champion Daphny Van den Brand touch wheels with Nash on an early lap and crash hard on the velodrome concrete. Van den Brand got back up and though well-bloodied, held her position to take the overall lead in the World Cup.

Czech sensation Zdenek Stybar won the men's race convincingly, and World Champion and crybaby Niels Albert, who had until that race been leading the World Cup, had a tough day of it and finished well back in 8th place. sniffed after the race that with the broken ribs he suffered the week before, it wasn't possible to "defend my chances in a fair way." Having suffered through some busted ribcage myself in the past 12 months, his toughness is not in question in my book-- I can't imagine the pain of piloting a bike around the slop like that on freshly broken ribs. Chapeau, monsieur! Maybe there's something that happens in the translation from Dutch, but he just can't seem to help but whine in his interviews. There must have been something in the air, though, as even the normally stiff-lipped Sven Nys groused that day, saying that whereas the Czech champion had the luxury of training in Majorca the previous week, he, as the Belgian champion, had Obligations including an early-week race and a team event. Poor Svenny. It's such a burden to be so good.

Daphny Van den Brand got back up a couple of moments after her hard fall, but somebody apparently forgot to tell the emergency crew, who struggled to get the yellow backboard, stationed up at the top of the 2 treacherous descents, down to the velodrome through the thick mud, but not arriving until at least 5 min after she left the velodrome.

A guy who seems to be having a rough time for much of this season is American Jonathan Page. A good technical rider, it seemed like every time up this run/ride up at the soccer fields, somebody was running into him. On this lap, it's Ondrej Bambula (#28) with his shoulder in Page's ear.

Watching these races in person is a totally different experience than watching on TV. I know this, because I watched the TV coverage of it (on Belgian internet: neither of the French World Cup races this season were broadcast on French TV) that night when we got back to Paris. Unless you're lucky enough to be standing where the race is made or lost, as we were at Diegem when Nys broke his derailleur hanger at the top of the stairs, you really have no idea how things got the way they did in the race. But there's so much else you just don't get to see on TV. Like the Mongolians.

There's been a contingent of Mongolians racing in December and January, and since I figure that just about every other nation racing has representation in the crowd, and even the announcers keep calling them Chinese (I don't think Boldbaatar or Myagmarsuren are traditional Chinese names), I focus my cheering efforts on the Mongolians. Fortunately, this doesn't much interfere with cheering for the leaders, because the Mongolian fellas are pretty quickly off the back. Though the only time you see them on TV is when they're being lapped (usually just past mid-way through the race), they embody a lot of what I admire in bike racing: they ride hard and with dedication, but not without a little sense of humor about their situation, they're always taking chances and trying to conquer the lines and technical challenges (at Roubaix, with a little encouragement from our group at the soccer field run-up they managed to ride the run-up more often than most of the other guys in the pro race), and they're good sports, always getting clear out of the way of the front of the race as it laps them and, unlike a lot of the tools who get lapped and then try to draft the guys who caught them (which in my book just endangers the guys at the front of the race-- if you had those skills, you wouldn't have just gotten lapped...), they leave a gap before soldiering on.

Mongolian U23 team member Baasenkhuu Myagmarsura pushing through the slop.

I came to decide at Roubaix that they're a little like Power Rangers, with powers that can be summoned (briefly) on command. In the U23 race, one of the Mongolian fellows (Naran Kangarid) was struggling with one of the zillions of French riders (Dmitri Corriette) pretty far back in the race for several laps. With a couple to go, Kangarid absolutely lit it on the velodrome, as if he'd just been saving energy for the previous 30 min, and just toasted the French guy, eventually finishing a lap up on him. It was amazing. I thought I heard him shout, "Mongolian powers, activate!" when he kicked, but I could be wrong. Anyway, they were fun to watch and cheer, and I sincerely wish the team the best. I hope that when I get back to racing, I can do it with as much class and good nature as they do.

Winter odds and ends

It's darned near February, already, and that means we're quickly closing in on a year in France.

Which also means I'm quickly closing in on needing to renew my carte de sejour. Since she came into the country gainfully enough employed that it seemed unlikely she'd sponge off of the social services here, Karen's carte de sejour is good for two years. Since I was just freeloading off of somebody gainfully enough employed that it seemed unlikely she'd sponge off of the social services here, I'm on a leash just half as long as hers. I'm not complaining, mind you. Heck, if I were Karen, I'd make me reapply for freeloading off of her every year, too.

Life in France requires a lot of photos. When we made our original applications for residency permits, I think we needed 13 of them, just a couple short of one for every most-wanted list in the country. It was a royal pain in the butt getting those photos in Philly. Even though we live within walking distance of the customs house, with a passport-and-other-official-documents photography service across the street, it took a long time and cost a small fortune to get the photos. The whole picture process was also pretty grim, since all of the photos have to be unsmiling. I'm not sure whether that's so that any official protector of la France won't be tempted to think that a terrorist couldn't possibly lurk behind a charming grin, or whether it's an acknowledgement that virtually any occasion in which your residency permit would be requested will not be a fun one and thus the unsmiling picture will be an easier comparison to the real thing. Either way, mirth is strictly interdit.

But in one of the rare efficiencies in France, since life here requires a lot of photos, there are a lot of places to quickly get them made cheaply. Photo booths that produce document-appropriate photos can be found in many of the metro and train stations, among other places. My carte de sejour renewal required 4 new photos, and the booths give 5 for 5 euro-bucks. You pull the curtain closed, sit on the little stool, adjusting its height so your eyes fall on the line in the video screen, put in your 5 euros, stop smiling, and shoot. You even get up to 3 shots at it before you have to commit. Pick up your pictures (outside the booth-- that took a couple of moments to figure out). It's a snap.

Or at least it would be if you're not 6'4" tall. Even with the stool in its lowest position, my eyes were well above the line, so I had to additionally slide forward off the stool to get my head low enough, bending awkwardly at the neck, my knees pressed into the opposite wall of the booth. Any passersby seeing a glimpse of my near-horizontal body under the curtain would probably have wondered which official document I needed that position for, but I suspect they'd doubt that such a document existed. This is France.

Anyway, I got my pictures, and apparently they were good enough, because I've gotten word that my new carte de sejour is ready. I can't pick it up, of course, because there's still a month left on the old one. I have to go in, pay the residency tax, give them my old residency card, then go get the new one. The only problem is that the old one expires on a Monday, but the office that gives the new ones out isn't open on Mondays, so I'll go 24 h or more without valid documentation. Though I've been assured that this will not be problem, $20 says that when I show up on Tuesday to get the new card, there'll be some crisis around the fact that the one I'm giving back isn't valid, anymore. There's probably another ($20) tax for that.

Would you let this guy into your country? Me neither.

On the way home, just a few doors from our apartment building, I noticed a dog being walked by a woman. Now, our neighborhood is lousy with tiny, decrepit, ill-tempered dogs being walked, or sometimes dragged since the dogs have so little mass that their stubbornness is easily overcome, by small, decrepit, ill-tempered old ladies. So the sight of a matchy dog-and-woman pair is hardly a novelty. But in this case, the dog was an Afghan hound, seemingly 3-feet tall with its Parisian-like upright carriage, impossibly skinny underneath its cascade of long blonde hair, with a darker long pointy face. It would have been striking just about anywhere, but especially in Paris, where I've never seen a dog a quarter that size, it was no less remarkable than a Bengal tiger. And, quelle surprise, the middle-aged woman attached to it was tall, skinny, and blond, with a face dominated by a long nose (I'm just stating facts, here, folks-- Lord knows I'm in no position to mock big noses).

An Afghan hound.

Picture from: http://www.breederretriever.com/photopost/showphoto.php/photo/174

The dog looked to be contemplating an evacuation in one of the tree wells along the street outside our building, and the woman was tugging on its leash, no doubt to encourage it to crap on the sidewalk, instead. Even as skinny as it was, this dog was way too big to simply drag where she wanted it, and so she was really pulling hard, and it occurred to me that she might just break its skinny long neck. Which is when I noticed that the dog was outfitted with what seemed to be some kind of brace, the whole length of its neck, that the leash disappeared into. I guess if you're a committed leash yanker, it's only responsible to put your dog in a neck brace.

But as I got closer, I realized that, in fact, the dog wasn't wearing a brace, but rather a scarf. Oo-la-la. Welcome to Paris.

Just ducky

My refrigerator smells of feet.

And not like feet that see a lot of scrubbing in the shower or are lavishly washed in the fashion of old with olive oil or wine. More like one might expect the feet of Oscar Madison to smell, if one thought about those kinds of things-- until now, I'd have counted myself (firmly) in the camp that doesn't. Oddly, this (the smell, not thinking about Oscar Madison's feet) doesn't really bother me.

I'm in bachelor mode this week, since Karen is traveling for work. And so I'm doing the things that bachelors do: going to bed late (the guy upstairs has been dragging a 100-lb stone around his bare wood floors for 30 min each night at about 00.30, so there's little point in trying to get any sleep before he's finished), riding my bike over new routes, and eating leftovers.

Fortunately, having cooked for company last weekend, there's plenty to choose from. I've got something of culinary ADHD, and so the dinner wound up being 9 courses long, 7 of them duck. There is definitely such a thing as too much of a good thing, and it's a lesson I learn (and then ignore) over and over, kind of like the lesson that one should not experiment on one's guests. I mean culinarily. Well, actually, I guess performing any experiments on guests would be uncool, and even illegal, but in this case, I mean that it's perhaps unwise feeding them first attempts at physically realizing food ideas that seemed really great at 1 o'clock in the morning after the stone-dragging upstairs has finished. Thankfully, our guests were polite and gracious and complained not at all about the excess or experimenting.

I've maybe mentioned before how much I love duck. Everything's usable: bones and feet (stock), skin (confit), legs (ragu, confit), breast, neck (stuffed), liver (ragu, neck stuffing), heart and gizzard (ravioli fillings, neck fillings, etc). I like to take the duck off the bone as a single big piece, good practice for using the whole skin to wrap fillings and such. It's also just fun.

I decided to make duck prosciutto for the first time. I don't have a recipe, but how hard can it be? Salt (and season) duck overnight, wash off salt, hang duck until it has lost about 30% of its pre-hanging weight. Salting darkened the meat (salted and rinsed on right, raw counterpart on left).

They say the flavors of the great hams are derived from the air they dry in, the sea air or other flavors of nature imparting flavor to the fat and meat. Our duck dried in the rare av Henri Martin air, a mixture of smog (the air quality in Paris over the 8 days it hung was among the worst since we've been here, according to the papers) and ubiquitous cigarette smoke. I drew the line at the funky stinky mold on the rolling wooden shutters-- we had the door cracked open during the day all week to keep the temp around the duck a little low, but at night when that shutter was down, the door was sealed tight.

Ready for eating-- now dark and decidedly prosciutto-y smelling, a bundle of salty ducky goodness. For the dinner, we served sliced with a timbale made of roasted turnips hiding a just-warm egg yolk.

That was followed by a star anise-infused duck consomme with little mushroom and white bean raviolis. The consomme was killer, the raviolis weren't quite the right flavor (originally they were going to be stuffed with the roasted turnip and the timbale was going to be parsnip, but these things keep changing).

Stuffed duck neck is a French classic, basically using the neck skin as a sausage wrapper. I'd hoped to have 2 necks, but the less-bright of my butchers slit one of them down its length (the one at the back in the pic), so I had to get every bit out of the other one. Thankfully, Karen loved doing sutures in surgery rotation, and she stitched up the head end (rather than my tying it) and stitched the body end so it would hold the stuffing of duck meat, sausage, wild rice cooked in giblet stock, and roasted hazelnuts. Can't believe I didn't get a picture of it stuffed and poached (it was a perfect cylinder, not at all creepy like this). For dinner it was fried until crispy and dark on the outside, sliced, and served with Bordelaise and deeply browned brussels sprouts.

I have yet to have a good duck confit in France. I know-- it seems wrong. Especially since it's easy to make. But every one I've had here have been tough and tasteless. So I made my own. Salt and season (I'm partial to ground fresh herbs, black pepper, and a little quatre epices) like this overnight, before rinsing off seasoning and drying.

Melt a whole crapload of duck fat that you've rendered from the duck skin you've been collecting.

Cover duck legs completely with the melted fat, cook really slowly (~180 degrees-- don't let it get above 200 or it'll toughen) for 8-12 hours. Cool in the fat, store for up to a couple of weeks. Yeah, right, like it'll last more than a day or two. For the dinner, we served crisped confit on top of confit'd (in sugar, not fat) orange slices with a celeriac and mustard seed salad.

Duck ragu is one of my favorites. This time I did it with black olives and served with chestnut pappardelle. We were eating this before the dinner, had it at the dinner, and have some left over, and wish we had more.

I had this idea a few weeks ago for poached duck breast (and of course later learned I was nowhere near the first). Duck breast is so often all about the skin, but I love the flavor of rare duck, so I thought I'd lightly cure it in salt and citrus peel and poach it in olive oil. Not so good-- the semi-cured duck just didn't do it (I thought it might be like a duck gravlax, but I was way wrong). So I poached the other one uncured in olive oil and served it with turnips "Anna" and crisped skin. The duck and skin were good, and the turnips tasted good but never got that crispy awesomeness that potatoes anna get. Back to the drawing board. Karen suggested crispy polenta as an accompaniment. Smart girl.

For the dinner, I poached the breast in clarified butter (may as well go big...) and served with garlicky turnip greens, crisped polenta with a bit of mushroom reduction, and mostardas of quince and parsnip. Like everything else, it could still use tweaking, but it was a step in the right direction.

The last duck course was a Chinese-spiced duck breast, pan-seared and served with squash, baby bok-choy, and a mildly hot but too-sweet Chinese-style loose sauce. Way too 1980s. Oh well.

I've been playing with encapsulation/spherification and other science-in-the-kitchen stuff lately. I made some coffee caviar to use in an opera-like dessert (classically chocolate, almond, and coffee): a chocolate-almond tuille filled with chocolate-coffee mousse with coffee caviar on top. I'm not a dessert guy, but it was fun to make. And the coffee caviar were a genuinely good idea (though I'm sure if I look, I can learn I'm not the first).

The coffee noodles, however, were a terrible idea. Though they looked kinda like soy-soaked bean thread noodles, they looked a lot more like nasty worms. Fortunately, I had the good sense not to even try to find a use for them in any way.

But the leftovers aren't perhaps what one would expect. We ate everything of the dishes from the dinner. What was left was the back-up stuff. You see, you never know what you're going to actually find and not find at the markets here, especially in winter. Two weeks ago, I had the most amazing broccoli rabe from one of my produce vendors, but the day before the dinner, they had none. So instead, I bought some good-looking long radicchio, even though it isn't green (it's still bitter, which was the point). And I bought a bunch of turnips to roast for a timbale, and nobody has them with the greens attached, except for the guy at the stand 2 down from the guy who had the good radicchio (who was around the corner from the guy I bought the other turnips from), which I hadn't noticed on my first pass, because they were stuffed way at the back under the cascade of lettuces. So I now had extra turnips *and* the extra radicchio. It was like that 5 times over-- which of the French sausages is going to be the flavor I want in the stuffed duck neck? Dunno, better cover my bases and buy several. Add in trips to both the Indian and Chinese/Vietnamese grocers for weird stuff, and I always came home with more than I expected (hey look-- dried jujube! Never had it, but I need a big bag of it, I'm sure).

According to Wikipedia, "The jujube's sweet smell is said to make teenagers fall in love, and as a result, in the Himalaya and Karakoram regions, men take a stem of sweet-smelling jujube flowers with them or put it on their hats to attract women." (I guess that would be, attract young women. Good for them.)

The haul from the ethnic markets. In addition to the ethnic goods, they're great places to get the stuff from home you can't find easily here, such as baking powder and corn syrup.

Anyway, I had a lot of greens/reds, sausages, and other random things to use up. which has made for a weird week of eating so far.

Leftovers for lunch: north African-spiced chickpea stew with lots of vegetables and a bit of duck confit.

Leftovers for dinner: rabbit-and-polenta agnolotti with radicchio, duck prosciutto, and walnuts.

But none of that really explains the foot odor in the fridge. It wasn't the leftover wine (many French red wines are élevé en fûts de chêne, or as we surmised on our arrival last winter, "made with the feet of eleven dogs" (no telling where that 3rd dog's 4th foot went)), because we had no wine left over, despite starting with more than a bottle a person. I'm probably only still alive because our wiser-than-us guests turned down the offer of cognac after dinner, and I'd be really grateful if I'd stop feeling the effects of the night's excess before March. No, my refrigerator smells of feet because although I was content to serve the 7 duck courses and then dessert, Karen insisted that we do a cheese course, "because this is France." She's right, of course, this is France, for better and for worse, and a cheese course and the good cheese vendors here are definitely among the betterest things of France. So she went out and bought 3 delicious stinky French cheeses, less and less of which are still in there.

By the time she gets home, there might only be the lingering funk.

Keeping up with business

One of the ubiquitous features of the corporate conference room is the Polycom. Although they may have fancy names like Soundstation 2, everyone calls them by the company name, Polycom.

When I moved to Paris, the office I was squatting in had its own Polycom- most of our meetings are with other parts of the global team and hence teleconferences, so my office becomes the de facto conference room when 2 or 3 of us from Paris join the global conversation. When the office's real occupant returned to Paris (she had been squatting in my Collegeville office for 4 months!) I got moved to another lesser office, on a different floor, and without a Polycom. The normal telephone in conference call mode does not work nearly as well. I asked for a Polycom, but there was no IT budget by that point last year, so the telephone it was.

Now that it's January, ie, a new year, I asked again. In French they are referred to as "pizzas". So this morning, the pizza delivery guy showed up and voila, I have my own pizza.

Life is good.