We’re nearing the end. Only four more days in Paris means only four more days with my host family, four more days of endless second-hand smoke, and four more days of eating baguette to my heart’s content. I’m not Parisian, but over the past two weeks, I have felt more and more like I have grown into the city, like I blend in with the city, and like I belong in the city, except for the times I am at a café, order a cup of water, and still get “Pardon?” as a reply. But besides this, I am beginning to experience that sense of routine only citizens of Paris should feel. When I squeeze onto a metro train at the very last second before the doors shut during the morning rush hour, I feel it. When I return from work and have my own keys to enter an apartment, I feel it. When I walk along the Seine River, see Notre Dame on the other side, and perceive it not as a world famous icon but simply as an element of my surroundings, I feel it. It’s mundane, but at the same time, it’s not something I have a lot more days of. And with all the things I know I am going to miss in mind – the ice cream, the parks, the sound of midnight café chatter hushing me to bed every night – I can’t wait to be back here sometime down the road.
But that’s enough melancholy for now. After another Tuesday at the Hotel de Banville, I am, per usual, exhausted and in dire need of respite, which is strange because of none of what I do at the hotel is particularly strenuous or demanding. Today, I helped do a final brush-up of the hotel’s new room service menu, to be introduced this week. There were quite a few things that needed to be altered before any guest laid their eyes on it. The English version, for instance, claimed that one could order a “Chocolate Cake with Melting Heart”, a result of the lack of a direct translation of “Moelleux au chocolat”. I didn’t really know what it was either, but after five minutes of me entering different types of cakes as guesses into Google Images until Emmanuelle, the director of the hotel, nodded yes, we were able to conclude that the item was simply a French variation of lava cake. I felt a sense of excitement as “Moelleux au chocolat” was typed into the English version as “Lava Cake” after being agreed upon by everybody in the room, which was only three including me, but it was an accomplishment nonetheless.
And then I got ran over by a bus; a big intimidating boss came over an hour or so later and made the executive decision that it would be simpler to just use “Chocolate Cake” instead of the more accurate “Lava Cake”. It was like the president had vetoed the legislation, and this time, there was no way to override it. I could tell he didn’t trust putting “Lava Cake” into the menu. It sounded obscure to him, as if I had haphazardly made up the name on the spot, right then and there. And so “Lava Cake” was erased in favor of the big man’s proposition, and the sense of complacency I had gained was lost.
But that’s not to say none of my fixes made the final cut. I noticed that at the bottom of the menu, Emmanuelle had bunched together “Ice Cream” and “Sorbet” as one entry, followed by “Choose 3 scoops” and a list of thirteen or so different flavors. Originally, the two desserts were listed separately. I was confused as to why they got bunched together. I also knew that different flavors were offered for ice cream than for sorbets, and in fact, there was no overlap, so it seemed silly to me that they were all listed in one go. All I could imagine in my head at that point was a customer trying to order a strawberry sorbet, and then being told that that flavor was only offered for ice cream. Tragic. And so, I recommended that the ice cream and sorbets be detached from each other and listed separately, with their own individual flavors, and that is the way it is going to be. Hooray! All my years of French had culminated in a customer now happily able to order ice cream or sorbet without confusion as to which flavors are offered with what. It was a life-changing moment for me.
Sarcasm doesn’t work on the Internet, I guess. Neither does writing about something as trivial as a room service menu. If you’ve made it this far, I don’t what to say, but you have a long attention span.
I had a really good tiramisu at lunch today.
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