Shanghai Bob

I spent my first day in Paris at the Louvre, the second day walking to the Eiffel Tower and back, and the third day in the Musée d’Orsay looking at a special exhibition of masks.  On Wednesday I ate wild boar (sanglier — just like Asterix and Obelisk!) at a place called Aux Lyonnais, sitting next to two Japanese men over on business from Tokyo.  They couldn’t read the menu, so I helped.  They were afraid of the complicated a la carte items so stuck to the prix fixe menu, which required only binary decisions translated from French into Japanese (Cold cuts or soup?  Blood sausage or crayfish?).  Some of the offerings were a challenge to my Japanese vocabulary (What’s wild boar in Japanese?  I don’t know.)  I thought offering to help was a good way of letting them know their conversation was not as private as they might otherwise assume it should be with only a couple of gaijin nearby.

It was a good meal for a cold night, but not as good as the classic steak and fries I had at La Bourse ou la Vie (”Your Money or Your Life” — the French name is a pun on the restaurant’s location near the Bourse).  That was so good I went back again two days later.  I also made time for flan, lemon tarts, and “chocolate nuns”, a kind of snowman-shaped eclair.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 10:34 pm and is filed under paris, travel.