I’m such a (wine) nerd
Friday : Meet up with people at some super-happ’nin’ bar in east-central Paris. Walk in solo, making the rounds pretending not to look for my friends as I scout the crowd for my friends. Every once and while stopping to listen to the music. Head bob. Head bob. Move on, continue the search. Send text. Oh, they’re outside. Hide my beer inside the bar so no French hipster kids try to date rape me or just up and gank my beer. Find my friends. Make our way back into the club. These guys are playing. By the way, if they continue to make music like this, they’re gonna blow up. It’s such good music to listen to in a small bar setting with random psychedelic visuals and lights being played. After the band stops playing we leave and go grab some more drinks at a tiny hole-in-the-wall bar with Iggy Pop pictures and other random 50-80s black and white, framed photos everywhere. We drink something called a “destroyer”, apparently it’s british, maybe bgebs has heard of it. It’s a shot of gin in a glass then topped off with beer. Fragrant, potent and delicious.
Saturday : Wake up slightly hung over, chug water, make breakfast. Meet landlady to go open up a bank account so I can finally finish this on-going saga that is me trying to get internet in my place so I don’t have to keep leaving and going into McDonald’s all shady like, sitting next to peoples’ trash so the workers maybe will think that I bought something and not look at me like the shady, free-loading, internet-dependent American I am. That goes off without a hitch. Go back home, make lunch, prepare to take on the Salon de Vin, the independent winemakers of France meet up in different parts of France to taste their wines out to the public in hopes of selling a case or few hundred. For 4 euros we got a glass and an earfull from 10 - 15 slightly jaded French winemakers. I only had a couple of hours, and only so much sobriety, some wines are just too good to spit, to make my way through these massive rooms with, literally, hundreds of booths of French winemakers pouring samples of their wines! It was seriously heaven, as overwhelming as it was. Leave. Go meet with my boss (woot!) and my American co-worker for a brainstorming session about American Night. It’s a theme night for Sunday at the bar I work at. Drink an espresso and work out some ideas. Head home, after stopping to take a few touristy pics by the Arc de Triomphe. I like Parisian monuments because they’re so…vivid and surrounded by so much space. Their elegant construction and refined materials make them look like toys, which makes you feel like an ant crawling around a log. I kind of like that feeling. Anywho, head back home, do some shopping make some dinner, do some dishes. Leave to go hang out with a lot of the same kids + others from the night before. Good crew, they always seem to know where the hippest happenings are. Good luck for me, I guess. The tag-along token American. Pre-game, drink some delicious and nicely priced Cava, by Freixenet. I did a case study on the company for a Business Administration class but never found they’re wine until now. Pretty good, great packaging. Proceed to make our way to northern Paris, kinda sketch town, but you got to live a little when you want to find good parties. And this certainly was one…it was in a circus tent, in the middle of a park area with a lot of unnecessary asphalt. Either way, this was by far one of the coolest parties I’ve been to. Mostly because it was in a circus tent, mostly because it had such good lighting, but mostly because there was cheese, bread and baked goods to share (not laced with anything, that I know of yet…) The music was good, the dancing was fun. Someone brought a Heineken minikeg. I had to show some French guy the American nose-grease trick to remove unwanted foam from an overly frothy beer. He was nice, he works in the hotel industry. I mentioned I work in the wine industry and he smirked. His friend was there who is the Paris distributor of first-growth Bordeaux, specifically Château Pétrus, I believe. I almost shat a brick. The distrubutor’s only 30 and he seems like a pretty cool dude. We mentioned something about grabbing lunch this week. He said Japanese. We’ll see what happens. It could have been the baked goods talking.
