Various and sundry adventures

In the interest of not contaminating my post on Combray with less noble things like booze, I didn't mention the fact that Saturday was also an extremely important evening for another reason: I finally made it back to my favorite rum bar in the Butte-aux-Cailles! Yes!

The background to this story is that when I lived in the 13th last summer, I once met a friend in this neighborhood, which is known as a little commune in Paris that has kind of managed to maintain a quaint "village-like" feel. There's a main drag with all sorts of cute restaurants and bars, including a local farmers' cooperative restaurant that is supposedly one of the hottest tickets in the city. You have to make reservations well in advance, which I was never organized enough to do. That's definitely going to happen this year.

Anyway, Izzy and I were walking down the street last summer when we came across THIS window:



Oh yes, a whole row of imported rums from Martinique, all infused with different flavors, served in shot glasses but meant as more of a "dégustation" as the French would say (a tasting). A sipping rum, therefore. Once we saw this window, it was all over. We never went anywhere else. And we ended up sampling pretty much every flavor there is. Favorites include apple cinnamon, coconut, and vanilla. Fig is pretty tasty too. We were less thrilled with lime (tasted kind of like mouthwash, haha) and ginger (even though I adore ginger, it was too strong).

Anyway, I got a group together on Saturday night to hit up the rum bar. Jason and I struck up a conversation with two guys at the bar, one of whom was super fascinating--a guidance counselor for an elementary/middle school in the banlieues, who was telling us about the restructuring program in Paris designed to eliminate the divide between the inner and outer cities. All very interesting, and super controversial because it's coming from the top-down (Sarko is in charge, rather than the mayor of Paris). This conversation was going along just fine when the bar got quite crowded and we ended up having to spread out a bit to make room for more people. Jason and the interesting guy ended up in once place, and I ended up a little further down with the other guy, who seemed nice enough but less interested in talking about city politics.

So I'm chatting with Other Guy, who I quickly discover is only interested in one thing, namely getting me drunk and taking me home. I'm not an idiot, so I don't let him buy me any drinks. I wasn't particularly concerned, since I was there with a big group of people and also wasn't at all drunk so I wasn't about to let him drag me off. I'm trying to extricate myself from him when he leans in to say something (the music was getting progressively louder) and tried to lick my neck!

Needless to say, that was the dealbreaker on that one and I quickly went over to Jason and Interesting Guy, who were engaged in a philosophical discussion on what it's like to go back to Algeria (the guidance counselor was born in France of Algerian parents). Figures. Jason gets the philosopher, I get the neck licker.