Le Gout de la Ville

Marie invited me to a lecture at the Architecture Museum called The Taste of the City. I wasn't sure if it would be in French or in English, but I knew that listening to a man talk about the sensuality of food for an hour would make me hungry, so dinner was in order beforehand. Our tummies rumbled as we walked to a shwarma place with a neon man cutting meat from the rotisserie. We settled in for some good grub and headed out.

My French is improving pretty quickly, but apparently not fast enough to attend lectures on Gastronomy and city life. So as I sit there, eyes closed not to doze but rather to focus on the language, I wasn't too upset to realize the shwarma we had for dinner wasn't sitting well. I spent the rest of the lecture dans les toilettes. I would have liked to have heard more, and I was doing reasonably well, but there always seemed to a few key points I was missing. For example, "We all are aware of the effects of blah." Blah was a word he frequently used, at least according to my wetware translation device. It wasn't the most stimulating of lectures, especially since he read directly from his paper, including the words "Introduction" and "Conclusion." Painful.