In foie gras heaven

One of my favorite things about traveling in France is all the foie gras.

You don’t have to be at a fancy restaurant to see it on the menu; it’s pretty commonplace. And it’s so much better in France than in the U.S., where it always seems to be fried or ruined in some other way.  In France, it’s sliced and put on the plate or on a salad. I think chefs in the U.S. cook it to cover up the fact that it’s not pristine. In France, it’s pristine. Perhaps they keep all the good foie in France and ship the crap to the U.S. (Just like the Japanese do with the best sushi fish. Ever hear of blue fin tuna? No? That’s because the Japanese sushi eaters want it all.)

Why do I love foie gras so much even though I know that some find its production morally repugnant? I love it because it’s a taste like no other. It’s like meat butter, or meat frosting. If meat could be chocolate, then it would be foie gras. It’s meat chocolate.

I order it whenever I see it on a menu, and by the time I leave France, I’ve had it so often that I’m glad to lay off it until the next time I return. I also do this with poke in Hawaii. I eat both until I can’t take it anymore.

So here’s to foie gras, uncooked and served the French way.

Paris, the City of Walking

Forget the City of Light business. Paris is the City for Walking. Michael and I are about 5 days into our 5 weeks in Paris and we have walked our feet off. It’s been great. The health app on my iPhone must wonder what the hell is going on. We’ve been logging 5, 6, 7-mile days.

This first bit of our trip has been a lot of orienting ourselves. It’s so great not to have to make it a forced march through one week of precious vacation. Instead, we get to take our time, do one or two things each day, relax, walk aimlessly if we wish, avoid the crowds (like the huge line that we see everyday outside St. Chapelle.) We’re also trying to save the attractions for  when our friends come, as they’ll no doubt want to see things like the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Versailles, etc.

Here’s what we’ve seen so far of our neighborhood. To the north is a busy/chaotic immigrant neighborhood, very diverse, filled with recently arrived Africans and barbers and little convenience stores. To the west is St. Michel, a street that I believe used to be a red light district. Even today, prostitutes all in black stand in doorways with cellphones in hand. The prostitutes looked older than I would have expected; looked like they’d been doing it a long time. And their all-black outfits with boobs on display looked like a uniform of sorts.  Rue St. Michel also has a lot of restaurants and it’s interesting how the respectable restaurants mingle with the “Sexy Shops” and peep shows also on the street. But it doesn’t feel dangerous or seedy. Everybody/thing seems to co-exist.

To the south of our apartment, is a neighborhood full of shops and restaurants that stretches to the River Seine. It’s great to be able to walk to the river, to the George Pompidou center, the Marais — even to the left bank and Luxembourg Gardens if we’re up for a long walk.

Yesterday we walked to the southeast of our apartment and soon found ourselves in a quiet, rich area. We walked to the Tuilleries Garden, where I’d never spent much time before. It’s the huge garden that progresses out of the Louvre and, it being a Sunday, it was filled with families and children and strolling Parisians and tourists. We sat there and read books. I think we’ll go back there today. It’s a lovely, sunny day in the upper 60s.

The view from the balcony of our apartment.

I feel very comfortable here and Michael is starting to feel so as well. I’m loving this living-in-Paris-thing so far!

 

Don’t read this

No, really, I’d prefer you don’t read this.

So why am I writing a blog that I don’t want anyone to read?  I guess I just want to write down what I’m experiencing during this remarkable time in my life. In fact, I’m compelled to write something down. I hadn’t intended to write during my break. “Are you going to write a book,” people asked me. “Nope,” I responded with certainty. A speech someday? Probably.

I like to speak and I always say yes if I’m available, but my typical speech about risk is a bit rusty. Though you could say that My Radical Sabbatical is actually the riskiest thing I’ve ever done, I need some new material.  So maybe this will all come together for a talk someday.

In the end, the main reason I’m writing all this down is that I’m positively compelled to. I’m a writer at heart and and my writing fingers are getting itchy. I can’t get things out of my head until I write them down, be them shopping lists OR people I want to reconnect with OR things I want to do next OR fun businesses I’d like to build.

I’ve seen so many new things and gained so many new perspectives during these last five months that I just need to get them out somewhere. So I’ll be dumping them into here, along with photos from my travels. If you’ve stumbled onto this, I don’t know how you got here, because you didn’t hear about this from me.

And if you’re reading this … Don’t

 

What’s this called, anyway?

A career break?

A Year of Yes?

Conscious career uncoupling?

There doesn’t seem to be a phrase for what I’ve been doing since Nov. 21, 2014, when I left my job as managing editor of the Chicago Tribune for a year of unfettered living.  It’s not exactly something most people do, can do or even want to do. And the looks on the faces of people who ask me what-exactly-I’m-doing range from horror to confusion to suspicion to envy.

My close friends, however, get knowing smiles on their faces. Because this sounds like something I’d do. I’ve always tended toward risky career moves, jobs seemingly over my head and roads less traveled. They also know that the crazy hamster wheel I’ve been on (for the last 13 years especially) isn’t actually sustainable for a human. I needed to step off at some point. I was lucky that I got to choose when I’d deplane. Not everybody does, and for that I’m grateful.

So the phrase I’ve settled on for now is My Radical Sabbatical. It’s a phrase that my friend, Alex White, came up with when I explained what I was doing. Leave it to a musician to come up with such a catchy phrase. So I use it a lot; it always gets a laugh.

It’s not a perfect description, of course. Usually, with a sabbatical, you eventually go back from whence you came. That won’t be happening in my case. I’ve left the Tribune, a place I worked for 25 years, and I couldn’t have asked for a better career there or a more positive departure.

I guess, in the end, I wanted to take a year of retirement early, when I’m young and healthy and can really enjoy it.

So far so good! This break has been exactly what I”d hoped. Full of adventure, spontaneity, learning and happiness– giddiness, if truth be told. It’s been so fabulous, that sometimes I call it my Radical Fab-batical. Maybe that’s what I’ll call it. …