Even in Frogland there is no escaping the clown.
Ask an innocent question of the man from Alsace and you end up having MacDo for lunch.
"Lionel, do you think there's a flower shop in Harlem?"
"Oui, Gila, je pense qu'il y a un march� pas loin du MacDo au centre d'Aubervilliers"
Really, I'm insulting Harlem with the comparison but to our little lunch gang, the viscuous puddles and gently stirring trash piles are worse than any Harlem myth.
Point being, I'm having dinner with my cousins tonight. When I called and begged H�l�ne to tell me what I could bring, she said "oh, I don't know, why don't you bring a bouquet or something, you're so difficult!"
Hence the flower hunt at noon, since flower shops in my neighbourhood aren't open until the sun comes up at least, and I have to be on the metro by then.
And the stores will be closed again 'ere I leave my poste.
So, either this lunchtime gang of Alsacien and Italienne, Bretonne and Surfer and Canadienne is really a cult, or...
They really are insanely sweet.
I'm thinking cult.
Tuesday when I announced that since I'd arrived late from appartment hunting that I would be sandwiching at my desk instead, they all scampered out and sacrificed their sensibilities for sandwiches at the "classe-croute" (like Subway, pure shite though less shite because even French people won't eat cardboard) and dragged me off to the conference room to poison ourselves en masse.
Today, we made the pilgrimmage to Aubervilliers Centre, so that I could buy my bouquet at the march�, and they trundled along out of some sadistic need...
So we ate at MacDonald's.
On purpose.
Now if you can understand how foreign this concept is to me... You can imagine how foreign it is for a handful of adult french yuppies to choose to eat shite-in-a-wrapper (not to be confused with craponastick) rather than gourmet-pizza-pasta-random-meat-in-sauce that we've been having every day since the dawn of time-immemorial-otherwise-known-as-my-first-day-on-the-job.
I bought them all des marguerites.
No, no, you don't understand it's because they're all allergic and I was trying to punish them for giving me indigestion.
Really.
Certainly wasn't because of a certain tear in my eye or anything like that. ;)