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corey is visiting now. he and i were talking about the french taste in food. we were eating some thin sliced dried cured ham (jambon cru) along with baguette and cheese for a pre-dinner snack. [before making a quiche -- haha, get it out of your system.]

a while ago i'd tried to categorize french food as a love for dairy fat, thinking of the sauces, cheeses, cream-based dishes, and ice cream. but the ham fit into the same taste category, and like prosciutto, is as close to butter as you can make with meat. a common sandwich is ham (really more like raw bacon) and butter. so it's really a love of subtle-flavored fat. that's not a dig: subtle as opposed to thai, which is full of coconut milk fat but heavily spiced.

but all that fat needs a compliment, which it gets in coffee and chocolate. small amounts of strong bitter acids to cut through.

starches take the third spot in the holy trinity. everything is grounded by starch. bread and potatoes are revered here. bread everyone knows about. french fries, mashed, and au gratin get more attention than i'd ever thought to give them. french au gratin potatoes are much different than betty crocker: very light and subtle. lightness shows up unexpectedly in a lot of places in food here. it's easy to make heavy fat, and just as tiring to eat. but make it fly, and you've really got something.

as a thought experiment, i was imagining what all these flavors would look like visually. rivers of tans, both warm and cold, dividing and linking fields of light creamy earthy tones, subtly varied. and the occasional dark brown or red incision. that's basically the palette of our bare apartment, and what i see in lots of old architecture around here. another nail in the coffin of coincidence? spooky.

what is not a coincidence is that the three work not just in inextricable harmony on your tongue, but also in your digestive system. you'll notice fruits and veggies aren't mentioned. since i don't drink coffee, it throws off the recipe. nature doesn't work with nearly the same regularity, if you catch my drift. i've resorted to drinking a cup now and again and riding out the buzz. oof. really no excuse since we have a great farmer's market in town. on the todo list...

missy's been doing a little gardening lately. she bought a petite rose for 4€ and has been lovingly tending to it. it has a home in the space outside our windows where flowerboxes live. it's got a great view of the goings-on below.

all comic tropes come from somewhere, as all myths are based on truth. i took a lot of the humor i was raised on at face value, not having had the personal experience. i'll take their word for it that banana peels are slippery, guys carrying ladders are to be given a wide berth, and that french skunks are amorous.

but to lean out a third story window and look out onto a busy street, it's almost irresistable not to grab for the flowerpots.

miss and i saw the new wallace and grommit film last night. at a totally shady cinema. we saw the 10pm show, and i think there were four people in the building total, for the five screens they had. of the other two, one sold us our tickets, the other ran the projector and smoked.

being in a movie alone is always a little spooky. moreso if only half the light bulbs work, there's no music (not even a stray cricket to break the xray blanket silence), and the walls are sticky as well as the floors. and for some reason we still whispered to each other before it started. perhaps fear.

movie trailers are audiovisual fast food burgers. we both understood the overdubbed harry potter and narnia trailers just perfectly. it's not the kind of thing you notice when it's in your own language, that the VO is speaking third grade english. i'd complain about being pandered to, but i was thrilled to understand someone speaking f r e n c h.

i'd checked out the theatre ahead of time and i was pretty sure it was going to be in english. we had fingers crossed, but i was wrong. interestingly, a lot of the shots with signs, newspapers, buttons, had it in french. they must have shot a couple versions of the backgrounds at the same time. anyway, it would have been obvious to anyone watching that we weren't native french speakers. i was killing myself at all the slapstick and visual humor but timidly chuckling ten seconds late, if at all, to anything verbal. i'm happy to have even gotten one language joke.

i really liked the movie. some excellent inventive visual gags and some good stock ones executed well. also, a good amount of cuteness. 100 bunnies on screen at a time? it worked with sheep, it works with rabbits. i think they were using some new construction materials occasionally too. i don't remember fuzzy hair in an aardman piece before. the voice acting wasn't great, but you don't have to worry about that. the english talent listed in the credits looks pretty top notch. i wonder if it would have enjoyed it less if it were in english. it's so easy to love something you're straining to understand.

we're currently staying in the cheap hotel in town since the nicer one missy set up for us ran out of space after our reservation period ended. i guess we thought we'd have a place by now.

the Etap, as it's called, is almost the same price, but, well, i'll let missy complain properly about it. when we mention to anyone in avignon that we're there, they immediately express sympathy for us, if that gives you any idea. at least it has the BBC World channel on the tv. this is just enough english to not go crazy and just repetitive enough to force us to the french channels for real entertainment and proper cultural absorbtion.

but they also have this sign by the elevator that lists all the emergency numbers, should anything untowards happen during our stay. i love the poetry of how it reads:

incident. accident. incendie. évacuation.

describes in four mellifluous words the plotline of any really great evening.

miss takes a well-deserved break from walking to enjoy a pastis at a café. we've been here two days in a row at about 3:30. it's been the same waiter each time. we wonder if we're going to become regulars. just in case, i make a note to remember the price of two pastis: 3.80€. it's an anise liquor from Marseille, heavily watered down. very refreshing.

it's a nice square. there is a big old church (ho hum), an artist supply store (maybe i should try sketching again), Pizza Rapido (yet to try), and two doors down is The Koala Bar. we can't go in there because missy used the restroom without buying anything once and got yelled at. it's ok, the place is bright pink with curvy plastic things everywhere and constant europop. if portland's Tube bar is the man, the Koala is the woman. they would have a torrid disaffected relationship.

also is a homeless guy on crutches. he was here yesterday too. he has a game: he stumbles around, overtly disabled, until a pretty girl walks by. then he drops his crutches in her path. one time in ten, she helps him. actually, those aren't bad odds. for a moment i'm jealous.

(i apologize if any java hacker gets the joke caption. some things, no matter how hard we try, are stuck in our brains.)

looks like i forgot the digital camera. so we're stuck with the lousy one built into my new cell phone. glad i splurged and got it. expect more blurry grainy out of focus entries in the future!

this one i had to take since it references the play on words in the blog subheadline. aix-en-provence is a little town near here. i've been looking for an excuse to replace it with "alx" since long before i got here. yeah, clever. i know.