Fieval

Just to make sure that Evangie had a warm welcome in Paris, Fieval (I re-named Mickey to Feival for reasons you'll infer later) came out to play on her first full day. She had just arrived and we had just finished our bottle of Trader Joe's Peach sparkling wine =) So of course we were sufficiently buzzed to catch a mouse.

After leaving glue traps out for more than 3 weeks and catching nothing but my feet and my hat (it accidentally fell from my closet onto a glue trap. I was soo pissed. It took me an hour washing that hat before I got all the glue off). So clearly the traps were very effective.

How to Catch a French Mouse:

• First, finish a bottle of sparkling wine. The bubblies make it hit your system faster. Otherwise, I would suggest two bottles of a still wine. It's liquid courage.
  
• Have a partner in crime. Evangie was instrumental in the catching of the mouse. At first, the mouse was on one side of my bed and then scurried under my bed to the otherside and hit under the night stand. With my plastic cup in hand, at the count of three, Evangie lifted the night stand and there was Fieval. We had a bit of a standoff for a good minute.
• Make sure your plastic cup is big enough and strong enough. After our standoff, Fieval made the first move and bolted for the TV. Like a ninja, I ran off the bed and cupped him. He squeaked a bit but I don't think I hurt him so much as I freaked him out. But then I freaked out and I was holding the cup so hard, I almost crushed the cup so we had to double cup it.
  
• Have an "After-Plan". So this part was a wee bit of a problem for us. After cupping the mouse, that was as far as my planning went. At one point, we contemplated taping the cup to the hardwood floor but that was a horrible idea on my part. In the end, we put a piece of paper underneath the cup and carefully placed Fieval in a ziplock bag =) Needless to say, Fieval's not with his family anymore. I won't say where he is, but we definitely didn't kill him (that's be ridiculously mean and he was so darn cute!). But I'm sure he's doing just fine =) (Paris has more dogs than cats).
  

Flat in Paris

I finally have some good pictures of how it looks when the water heater is actually attached to the ceiling. Here are some pictures of inside the apartment and also the view from my French windows. I overlook some nice shops like Miss Sixty and Naf Naf and also a nice flower shop and boucherie (butcher shop). And my building is right over a café, called Café Montorgueil. Being next to the butcher shop and above a café has it’s ups and downs though. Sometimes my apartment ends up smelling like a giant meat factory…which now that I think about it, is probably why the Three Mousekateers are so in love with my place. This is my bed/couch. I added some cute early 1900 ad/poster things to my wall as decorations =) My favorite is the one on the bottom left that says Bievres de la Meuse.

This is the view if I stand at the farthest possible corner of my apartment. You can see my French windows overlooking the next building.

This is my bathroom without the water heater on the floor =)

That’s the view of my closet and the entrance door. And some more 1900’s posters.

And this is my kitchenette












This is the view when I look out my window to the right. If you look next to Naf Naf, there’s this ivy arch with a golden snail on top. That’s a famous restaurant that specializes only on escargot called L’Escargo, appropriately enough. I’ve been wanting to go there, especially now that I’ve tried escargot and kinda like it =)







That’s the view if I look directly below me. It’s a pretty flower shop but waaay too expensive for something that’ll die in a few days. The Asian practicality in me runs strong










This is a view of Rue Montorgueil if you’re standing on the street. It’s a popular street which is why tend to sleep with earplugs on. Sometimes it gets a wee bit loud but I like the liveliness of it =)









That’s the café that’s below me. The blue door is the entrance to my apartment =). When the café is packed, I have to squeeze through the patrons to get to my blue door. But the café workers are really nice. They’re Tunisian but fluent in every European language practically








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This is Eglise St. Eustache. Its this beautiful Renaissance style church that’s within a 2 minute walk from my apartment. I pass it every day on the way to and from the metro station. I wanted to attend a symphony there but they don’t hold the symphony’s at this church too often so all of the times are when I am out of town. I think I’ll end up seeing a symphony at another church, St. Chapelle that’s more of a medieval/gothic style instead). Alright, well gotta go cuz my ride's here! Talk to you soon!

Loire Valley

I guess there's not much more to say about the mice situation since I’ve caught ZERO mice so I’ll go into the Loire Valley =) Its a much happier story =) Pretty much, it was a last minute trip. My friend Oliver and I decided on Wednesday afternoon and left Thursday morning (October 25 -27). The original plan was to visit both the Loire Valley and then check out the Bordeaux region after but the Val de Loire was so beautiful that we ended up getting stuck there the entire weekend =)

So that morning, we met at the Gare to pick up the car from Europcar. Little did we know, that we'd be given a tank. This car was sooo huge that we could barely make it out of the parking lot. The antenna would always hit the ceiling bars when we drove by them. Needless to say, we changed the car. But when we finally got going, our first destination was Chateau Chambord =) Beautiful! Much better than Neuschwanstein in Bavaria since this chateau was actually used and on top of that, almost all the rooms were available to the public to see. The one in Bavaria was never finished and so I felt jipped when the tour ended after twenty minutes. The best part of the Chateau was the roof. They just went buckwild up there with chimneys and towers and whatnot.
In this picture you can see the view from the rooftop of Chateau Chambord. There's a beautiful lake (manmade I'm sure) that you can paddleboat in. I wanted to go but we ran out of time =)

We stayed in Tours the first night and it was a much larger city than the other cities that we had been passing by, such as Ambroise and Blois. This is a picture of the small towns around Tours and the Loire river.

But Tours had this one cute area called Place de Plumereau that had all the old-style buildings with the criss-crossed timber so it still had a "small-town" feel in that area. We ended up at a small jazz bar and were about 5 feet from the band! They were native to Tours and just do local gigs but I thought the lead singer was really good and she probably could have toured in the States and made tons of money.

The next day, we tried to go wine tasting but quickly realized that the local vignons were all on harvest so our only option was to go to this place called the Productuers de la caves in Vouvray where they had the wines from all local wineries and you could go wine tasting there =)

• Positive: Wine-tasting in France is free =) And the bottles are ridiculously cheap.
• Negative: They recommend that you only take 5-8 tastes MAX (and they're pretty insistent about that because of how you lose your taste with each new wine). This is compared to the 20+ tastes we get when we go wine tasting back in Cali (aaaahh…memories of Temecula) =)

I think we bought 5 bottles each =) It was a good day =) After, we decided to visit another chateau called Chateau Chenonceau. I didn't think that anything could beat Chateau Chambord but this did =) It's this giant castle thing that's built over a river and it's surrounded by these moats with drawbridges =) Then around the castle, besides the beautiful river and forest, they have two giant manicured gardens with fountains in the middle.

And just to top it off...there's a human labyrinth =) I didn't go in but I really really wanted to =) Even the "barn" area where the bathrooms were gorgeous.

So that night, we finished the day with a huge gastronomic experience. Not to make you guys all hungry but we started off by a complimentary course from the chef. It was a mix of egg and mayo and some kind of herb and it was deelicious =) Next, appetizers. For the main course, I had this =)

It's salmon wrapped in some kind of crispy thing over a pesto/cheese thingie with potatoes and a yummy mushroom cream sauce. Oliver had a regional plate that's specific to the Loire Valley area. We determined that it's a type of bird but I still don't know what it is.

Theeeen, it was the Cheese Plate. This waitress comes up with this rolling cart FULL of cheeses and slices a bit of each one and puts it on a plate. They had a mix of both the cow and goat cheese and I never knew that I liked goat cheese until I had some of the cheese on that plate =) It's not as strong as I always thought it was. In fact, the goat cheese on the plate were milder than one of the cow ones. By the time my dessert came (crème brulee), we were stuffed and I didn't have any room in my stomach. All the extra space was taken by the bottle of wine that we got too. I'm pretty sure Oliver unbuttoned when I wasn't looking. I was so full that I walked out of the restaurant rubbing my tummy and a random stranger walked by and commented that I must have had a great meal. Indeed. =)

The last day of our Loire Valley trip, we drove to this area called Monmousseau where they have their cellars (caves en Francais) built into the rock. Turns out, when they were building the chateaus in the medieval times, they dug the rock out of the area and left giant mined areas. They realized how these holes in the rock were the perfect temperature and humidity for storing wine and now they use it to produce their wines. What are the odds? At any given time, the Monmousseau caves hold about 4 million bottles.

So that was the end of the trip. Unfortunately, we had to go back after that and little did I know at the time, that it was the eve of the war with the 3 Blind Mice.

Mickey Update

Oooh soo many things to update you on! I'll admit it...I've been a really crappy blogger lately (especially considering that my last blog was almost a month ago). Things have been super busy and contrary to everyone's belief (both at HEC and at USC), I actually do study sometimes =) At least that's what I have to tell my mom =) Which reminds me...

To my mother:

Am I keeping myself warm? Yes, as much as I possibly can. It is friggin freezing here right now but I've been assured by my Parisian classmates that this is as bad as it gets. I got a bad cold about a month ago and it took me a week and a half to get over it but I think I know the drill now: Bundle like no tomorrow until you look like the boy from A Christmas Story.

What the heck do I do all day? Study.

Am I spending too much money? No. Seriously...when it comes to clothes, I've barely gone shopping except the last couple days to buy 2 jackets, a hat and lots and lots of socks (it's cool here to wear socks with high heels...I'm bringing that back to the States btw). But these are all more tied to the first question of Am I Staying Warm =) I'll admit, I am spending lots of money on food though. Tons. And it's sooo worth it. My friend, Takako, who has this amazing Japanese tourist book on all the best restaurants to go to (it's called Eating Alone in Paris...really romantic). Anyway, every single place we've gone to in that book has been the best meal of my life. I'm not sure if it was in the book but last weekI went to Belleville to a restaurant called l'Estaminet and had escargots and os a moille (sp?) for appetizers. Snails and bone marrow =) It was my first time eating escarcot (that's the picture of my first bite) and its deeeelicious!

Mousekateers: Alright, now that that's taken care of, here's the official Mickey Update. So last weekend, I had a last-minute excursion to the Loire Valley =) I'll have a section later on that ridiculously awesome trip but basically, I came back from the Val de Loire on a high and I was typing away on an email with my girlfriends when a mouse literally comes walking (not running, not scurrying...walking) right by my feet. I almost threw up. It was sooo ugly! Don't get me wrong...I usually think rodents are cute, which is probably why our apartment in Berkeley had 27 hamsters and a chinchilla at one point (hahah remember that Minh? =)) but the Parisian mice here are uuuuuugly. On top of that, I couldn't believe that Mickey would have the gall to actually come out when he knows that his place is in his little hole. After seeing him, I spent 20 minutes searching for him to no avail and then another hour on a cleaning rampage. I don't get it...there's absolutely NO food in the apartment so I figured, he's probably just here cuz it's warm since I turned on the heater. So I go to bed. Then I wake up in the middle of the night to sounds and see that Mickey AND HIS FRIEND are underneath my table. I got up and one of them scurried toward my closet and the other scurried to the kitchenette. So now I'm annoyed. Clearly they're not here for any food and they're just here to play and it's really getting on my nerves that he brought a friend. I seriously contemplated getting traps the entire day the next day but that night there was nothing. In fact, they didn't come out again for another 2 days. I almost forget about the traps and even think that we could coexist again. Then...Pearl Harbor happens.

Its the night before my Luxury Marketing presentation and I wake up to noises (again) and this time, I see THREE mice. Not one, not two, but three friggin mice, playing IN my boots. And that's how the war began. You don't mess with a girl's shoes. After my presentation, I went straight to the store and looked for mouse traps. I know, I know, Megan will probably kill me but in my defense, they started it. And in wars, you can't play nice. I ended up buying 2 big glue traps (for 12 friggin euros...so expensive) and with the help of the cafe people downstairs, I made some more "home-made" glue traps using the rat glue and cardboard coasters. Then, I waited. And waited and waited and waited. It's been 5 friggin days and I've caught ZERO mice and instead, on Thursday, I caught myself when I stepped in my own glue trap. These Parisian mice are ridiculously smart...either that or ridiculously small. Cuz I know that they're still running around my apartment because I can see that some of the glue traps have moved. Either they are so small that they are not getting stuck with the glue in the glue traps or they are so smart that they know to jump over them. I can't figure it out. Sigh.

Roommate

So the fun never ends in 43 Rue Montorgueil =) Last night I had to stay up late to finish a paper for my Growth and Strategic Management class. Maybe its never happened before or maybe I just have heard it but I started to hear noises coming from my tiny little "kitchenette". There's this "shelf" area in the back where you can put extra bags and whatnot. Really it's just a giant hole that I can't really see into because it's at an odd angle but I could hear scratching and chewing coming from the hole. Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's a mouse. My new little roommate. I've named him Mickey for the time being. I'm just really hoping it's not a rat. I spent an hour last night at 3 am, trying to find him but as soon as I get close, the chewing stops. I can't see anything from the angle and I'm too scared to reach my hand in so I guess me and Mickey will just have to learn to live in peace for now. He just better stop playing in the middle of the night cuz it's friggin annoying.

Water Heater Pictures

This was the cause of the entire electricity mess. The round thing is my water heater in the bathroom. It just fell from the ceiling. I took this on the day it happened. It smelled sooo bad though. I guess its not like in the US where they tell you to clean out the calcium deposits from your water heater once a year. I don't think anyone has ever cleaned this water heater out in its entire lifetime. My apartment still smells "minerally" from the water heater. I've been spraying lots of Kenzo.










This is a picture of the wall and how the plumbing just got torn away. Unfortunately these are the only pictures I have of the apartment so far so it paints a pretty dismal picture of my place but I swear it's not =) I'll take After pictures soon after I clean my place up.

Fashion Party

Here are pics from the Fashion Party tonight. I can't really sleep so I'll be posting some more pics hopefully =) So I'm not even sure who the designer is for this party but it was at this place called Le 66 on 66 Champs Elysees. Maybe that is the designer. Who knows. Anyways, they were all about the fur and all their stuff was trop cher pour moi. This is me and Johanna messing with their accessories =) The night started out as a complete MESS though! So, originally we were supposed to meet our friend Lasana at the place but he had tons of school work and couldnt make it so Johanna and I decided to go anyway and meet at the Hand by our places (it's this giant statue of a head and a hand by the Eglise Eustache...I'm sure some of you know what I'm refering too). So right before I left, I decided to feed Lolita so that she wouldn't be hungry all night. I walked out of my apartment with the keys to my neighbors apartment and shut the door....without MY keys. I almost started crying. I couldn't believe that after not having electricity for two weeks, I'd lock myself out. All I had on was a Tshirt and jeans and my slippers cuz I was going to feed the cat and come back to get ready. So I ran upstairs to the cat apartment, got online on the freaky lady's computer and found my landlord's phone number. Ran to a random apartment below until someone answered and borrowed someone's cell phone to call my landlord. He said he'd rush over in 30 minutes. I ran back upstairs to the cat apartment, fed the cat and grabbed one of the jackets from my neighbor and ran outside through the streets of Paris with my slippers and a way oversized jacket to try to find Johanna and tell her about my mess. People were looking at me and all I could say was "Je sais" (I know). Anyway, I find Johanna by the Hand and we decide to get dinner (baguette and cheese) and have it by the stairwell while we wait for Jacques (my landlord). He ended up beating me and when we got up the stairs to meet him, he's freaking out about how his key's not working and that we're going to need to call the locksmith and that in Paris, they don't work this late at night. I start panicking and thinking that this entire apartment hates me but Johanna's super calm. My landlord runs downstairs so that he could get better reception to call the locksmith and the lady that lives across opens her door and asks "quelle est le probleme?". Johanna calmly asks if she has a bit of olive oil and we dab it on my landlords key and voila. We got in.

Luckily I keep a bottle of wine in my place so we were able to finish our dinner with some Bordeaux =) Anyway, here are more pics.

Maybe the abominable snowman look really is in. The fur was out of control. They had this jacket in 2 other colors =)

















100% Participation. We have this running joke with the peace sign. You'll be seeing that alot in other pics =) Anyway, the fashion party was actually pretty packed. They had free drinks from Cointreau, makeup artists from Calvin Klein and hair dressors from Mod's Hair Paris. We tried to get our hair done by the line was so long we couldn't get in. So we got our makeup done instead =)












That's Johanna about to get her makeup done.













This is us after our Calvin Klein makeovers =) We randomly met another HEC student and hung with him for a bit at a bar called Le Berkeley! (Go Bears!) Alright, I'm gonna see if I can upload some more pics =) Talk to you soon!