I had the best meal of my life last weekend in Paris. We went to this "trendy" restaurant down by the Centre Pompidou called "OZO." Sweet decorations, low lights, hip music and a table in the corner behind a curtain! We all felt very fancy. The restaurant was full and it took a while for someone to come take our order, but that was ok because it took a long time to decide what we were going to have. The way they served the food was very interesting. You had 3 steps to go though. 1. Pick your meat! chicken, duck, beef, ostrich, salmon, squid, lotte and another fishy type. 2. Pick how to cook it! 6 different spice mixes or 3 different sauces. 3. Pick 2-4 sides! 5 cold ones and 4 hot ones! The wait for our food was not very long at all, considering how busy they were.

My dinner was one of those dinners where you just sigh with contentment while you eat. We ordered a bottle of wine to split between the four of us, but I honestly forgot about it, I was too busy enjoying my dinner to drink the wine!

So starting at the meat and moving clock-wise. Faux filet de boeuf cuit saignant avec une sauce bleu, salade, mâche avec des aubergines marinée et glace des cêpes, crème des patates douces avec des baies rouges, flan de carottes, poireaux et bébé asperges, pommes de terres écrasés. Translation: beef sirloin cooked medium rare with bleu cheese sauce with mushrooms and nuts and raisins, salad, lamb's lettuce with marinated eggplant and MUSHROOM ICECREAM ON TOP!!!! yum. Puréed sweet potatoes with red pepper corns, carrot, leek and baby asparagus tarty thing, mashed potatoes. 

followed by dessert. A fruit gazpacho with mangoes, raspberries and cinnamon served with homemade yogurt. oh. food. coma. 

It was one of those meals that you didn't want to eat because you wanted it to never end. I ate so slowly, not wanting it to be gone! 

Also while in Paris I went to see this. Christian Boltanski at le Grand Palais. I highly reccomend looking at the site, i think it comes in english too. Because its hard to describe exactly what it was. The past 3 years le Grand Palais has invited an artist to create a special exhibit made specially for the space. This year was Boltanski and what he created was amazing. We went on Sunday night, and I'm glad we went at night, i feel like the experience wouldn't have been the same. The Grand Palais is this BEAUTIFUL old building with a glass roof. so all the light comes in. 

You walk into the space and directly in front of you is a wall that spans on either side of you. It is a tall wall, made out of rusted metal boxes with numbers on them. But before you even see the wall, you hear the noise. A chorus of heart-beats. This noise that surrounds you and is inside of you. And on top of those noises you hear this mechanic whirrrrrrrr. Once you get around the corner you realize what it is. 

In the very back you can see the wall you walk around. Then you are greeted by this. A mountain of clothes. The whirrr whirr is a crane which is continuously grabbing clothes, lifting them up, and letting them fall. But before you get to the mountain of clothes, there are 69 neat little squares, all made up of coats on the ground spread out before you and to your sides. Each square of coats has four posts all around it with cables between them which connect in the middle to hold a light over the center of each square. And for each square there is a speaker and out of that speaker comes a different heart beat. As you walk among the squares, the sound of the heart beats surrounds you and fills you as a mix. But if you pause at a square for long enough, you can pick out that specific heart beat. Then you continue walking on again and that heart beat gets blurred by all the rest. Its hard to describe exactly what I felt or thought about during this time here, but I had goose-bumps the entire time and just felt very quiet. Except for the part when we walked up to the mezzanine to get a better look at the pile of clothes and walking back down the elegant stairs I pretended that I was a princess at a ball. it was hard not to.

Check out those royal stairs! 

Another thing about this was it was cold. No heat. you could see your breath. In addition to the exhibition, the artist had another part to it. Les archives du coeur. The heart archives. He is in the process of collecting recordings of heart beats. We "donated" our heart beats to his collection. Our heart beats will be put in a "library" of heart beats that will be kept on Teshima, a japanese island where anyone can go to the library, look up my name, and listen to 20 seconds of my heart beat. And it will be there "forever." kind of neat.