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I
decided to play hookey last week, which coincided with an invitation
to the Jardin de la Reine at Versailles for a spring picnic. The weather
has been on-and-off in Paris, as it usually is, and no matter what the
skies were planning on doing, I figured it’d be nice to escape the
city for a few hours. And who could pass up a picnic in the gardens
of Versailles? Not me. Fortunately we woke up to a glorious day in
Paris, and because no one wants to be cooped up indoors when there’s sun,
and wine, out there, I left early so I could walk around and get a
much-needed dose of Vitamin D.
On a
side note, many years ago when I went to pastry school outside of Paris,
we were staying in a rather grim little city with no decent
places to eat to speak of. To make it worse, we were housed in a zone industrielle,
the part of the city far from the town center that was small
factories and office building, that become completely deserted
at night. There was one chain restaurant within walking distance, a
glowing blue-lit palace next to the highway exit that led into the office
park, and that was it. We were all pretty tired after classes all day and
had nowhere to go but that chain restaurant, which we quickly tired of.
 (The
televisions in the hotel only got three channels – this was before WiFi, and
one was a soft-core rose
tv channel, as they say in France, and there were only so
many times we could watch a story about a young couple that comes
home and finds the babysitter, who had arrived with a low-cut blouse and
schoolmarm glasses, asleep on the couch with her glasses fallen off,
and her blouse partially unbuttoned, revealing a lacy camisole. I
won’t mention what happens next, but “rose”
tv always cuts away to the next scene, before anything good happens, and
resumes after all the action took place. So not only were we hungry, we
were also a very frustrated lot.)
Finally,
some new students showed up who had a car (!) and we were so excited when
they offered to take us to a nearby city, which happened to be
Versailles, for dinner. We ended up eating in a Chinese restaurant
because we were all students, on student budgets – and we were eating
French pastries all day, and craving something completely the opposite.
It wasn’t very good, but I always associate Versailles now with blasé
(although entirely appreciated) Chinese food.
Not
sure why I had to tell that story, perhaps because it’s been sitting on
my mind for the past eighteen years. And rose tv seems to have
disappeared from late-night French television, but rosé is more popular
than ever and we kicked off the picnic with glasses of Perrier-Jouet 2006
Champagne. Because for most of us, we had work waiting for us back at
home, we took it easy on the wine drinking. But it was hard to resist an
icy cold glass of bubbly on such a magnificent day, wandering around the
gardens of Versailles, served with such panache.
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