Happiness in a bar

Ohhhh joy.

Seeing this candy bar in the supermarket made me giddy on two levels. First, the obvious: it's white chocolate and it has SPECULOOS - my breakfast, lunch and dinner of choice! And second, the not so obvious: in Tagalog, "galak" means "extreme happiness." Nestlé, you went out of your way to speak my two tongues, I thank you. But, that's not the only thing that gave me galak this week.

I also got my French recipe/spellbook from Amazon earlier than expected; and even with the little wrinkle on the cover it was not as battered as I thought. (I placed an order for a "comme neuf" or "like new" book so it was half price and I prepared myself for the worst.) Isn't it lovely? I was shocked to realize I could understand most of it, save for the occasional word even H hasn't heard of. C'est drôle, quoi.

Last Tuesday we walked up and down Paris to catch the Fête de la Musique performances, and we crawled back to bed at two in the morning. We were treated to a myriad of melodic styles - jazz, club, medieval, punk. A friend was with a group of Pinoys who gave Parisians a dose of Manila sound in the most unlikely of places: the archaic thoroughfare in front of a gothic church in the Marais district. Around sunset (about ten p.m.) we wound up at the canal Saint Martin, hungry and waiting for some friends who were coming from Republique. While waiting for our crepe sarrasins, H and I danced to the samba music coming from a steel drum orchestra along the banks. A few minutes later we made our way through four drunken street rave parties and I had to wear my helmet to avoid the flinging fists at Point Ephemere. (To great comedic effect.)

The following day, we saw Paris through the eyes of the impressionists at a free exhibit at Hotel de Ville, or City Hall. Paintings from Musee D'Orsay were on loan for the occasion and we saw the evolution of the city in dreamlike pastels. My favorite were the Henri-Toulouse Lautrec drawings dripping with sex, drawn as they were by a man who had moved into a maison close - a prostitution house.

From Ibiblio.org

Moviegoing is an expensive pastime here, so I was full of galak when I found out that one of the perks of summer was Fête du Cinema. We've been to eight movies so far (and two more this coming Thursday), the first at full price and then the rest at three euros a ticket. For some divine reason, the three movies we saw on the first day were about writers, the power of the written word and writing in beautiful, romantic Paris.

Relax, see a movie... or eight.

Limitless, about a novelist turning to drugs to get over debilitating writer's block; Midnight in Paris, about an insecure writer thinking of moving to Paris, but Paris in the rain in the 1920s; and Omar m'a Tuer, about a non-French speaking foreigner wrongfully convicted of murder and saved by the publication of a writer's independent investigation; and then there was The Hangover 2, which was about nothing, really, but I could totally relate about Bangkok. It's crazy and it could be scary, but they also have galak in bars.