Moo

In france, cows are considered pretty. Here, filet mignon actually refers to pork, not steak - because pigs are "cute" (mignon), cows are pretty.

I'm really excited to see some pretty cows on sunday, during this giant major agriculture festival - a big deal here! Apparently, France is the 2nd largest agricultural exporter in the world, after the US. I'm excited. There'll be 4500 animals there!

• 650 chèvres, boucs, moutons, béliers, brebis! (Sheep and goat category)
• 610 lapins! (bunnies)
• 600 vaches, taureaux (cow category)!
• 100 chevaux, poneys, ânes (PONY CATEGORY)!
• 60 porcs (pigs)!

and so on... Hoping I'll get to sample some cheeses and butters.... mmmmmmm

In other fun and exciting news, the other day, President Medvedev was on an official visit to France. Because our classroom is across the river from the Notre Dame, we heard the "special type" of official sirens as pointed out by our prof, ("I'm a Parisian, I know really well the normal sirens of police") so after class my russian friend Vikka and I went to hang out by the barricaded site to see what all the commotion was all about.

Being in Paris, though, the only real commotion of the excited and energetic variety belonged to my friend, who sporadically would yell things like, "RUSSIA FOREVER!!!" with a heavy accent, to which the Gendarmerie responded with amorous smirks. Everyone else was very calmly, quietly, and patiently watching behind the metal grates, just waiting to see what would happen. I'm pretty sure most of them didn't know what was happening anyway, but as I said to my friend, even when he did show up, they'd probably continue patiently waiting for the exciting thing to happen, because Medvedev is generally pretty unimpressive-looking; I don't think I'd recognize him on the street.

The two of them are quite cute together though, Medvedev, ironically, the root of the name meaning 'bear,' and Sarkozy, known around these regions as "le petit nicholas," in reference to Le Petit Prince...

Nonetheless, of course, he had a 20-car motorcade minimum. He jumped out and into the 'dame the second the limo stopped, and that was the end of a 45 minute wait.

Fortunately we capped off all the anticlimactic excitement with a Bertillon icecream (orange and liquor in chocolate for me) down by the river side on the sunny but somewhat chilly day, and followed that with a nice hot irish coffee with thick thick cream on top, cigarettes, and dinner a few hours later (same cafe). Mmmm.

(Still don't have a functional camera, but it looks like this minus the leaves. The stone wall on the right is the seine way down below. I'm capturing what I can with my phone's camera which really didn't do the super intense full rainbow over the seine by the "Pont Neuf" justice the other week... so google imaging or doodling it is).