Royale with Cheese

To paraphrase Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction, it's the little things, or the things that are just a little bit different, that remind you that you're living in a different country. You don't think of home or get homesick when you see the Eiffel Tower (unless your home is the Paris casino in Las Vegas); it's too Parisian and too transporting. For Ashley and me both, it never fails to transport, no matter from what angle or distance we view it or what mood we're in. And I'm willing to bet that it never will, no matter how long we stay. But then there are smaller things that draw you in with their resemblance to things from home. They raise your expectation of the familiar, but then they turn out not to be those things, dashing that expectation and leaving you feeling like a stranger in a strange land. Or sometimes they just leave you laughing.

I had two of these encounters with the almost-but-not-quite in short succession as we walked down the rue de Charonne two Saturdays ago. The first was a restaurant called Chez Paul. It made me think of the erstwhile Chicago resto that had cameos in The Blues Brothers ("I want to buy your women!") and Ferris Bueller's Day Off ("Snooty?" "Snotty."). That made me think of going to Chicago with my parents when I was young (they would point out Chez Paul when we would pass by it), and how I know that city so much better than the one I now call home.

The second, not 400 meters (a quarter of a mile or so) down the rue (road), was another eatery, this one called Morry's Bagels & Toasts. It made me think our favorite NYC bagelry, the great Murray's Bagels. Here, I had to laugh out loud at the similarity of the two names -- figuring it was no coincidence -- and at the name itself in front of me: Morry's Bagels & Toasts. I don't know how the toasts at Murray's compare to Morry's, but I'm guessing not well, since the former doesn't tout them in its name the way the latter does. But then again, I don't think I've ever seen an American restaurant tout its "toast." Let alone its "toasts," which is a noun I've never seen before, even if makes grammatical sense to a non-native English speaker. No word either on who has the better loxes and whitefishes.

I didn't take any photos of either place, and even if I had, I'm not sure how I could transfer them from my iPhone, since I ended my contract with AT&T and can't get the WiFi on the device to work. So I did a Google image search for "toast Eiffel," figuring something fun would pop up. And sure enough, it did. If you click on the link, you'll be taken to the page for a product in an online store that lets you imprint the image of the Eiffel Tower on toast. The name for this item? Un tampon, which as regular readers of our blog will remember is the French word that I knew to mean "stamp" and that I suggested Ashley try using when she went to purchase postage for the first time, but which we now know means not that kind of stamp. (Yes, we have a French dictionary and a French phrasebook. No, we don't often consult them.)

French toast, anyone?

-- MBB