lust and despair: contextually correct but outside of my vocabulary (le blog volume 2)

it's not every day you watch a dear friend get served a plate of grilled intestines. and it's not every friend who would manage to keep it together the way ss did when she was served said intestines. after wandering all over town looking for a restaurant that the guide book described as cheap ("pas cher") and friendly ("gentille") which turned out to be more like expensive and smokey we found ourselves at some kind of no-nonsense brasserie along the side of the road which was actually kind of nice except but for the fact that everyone was starring at us... and except of course for the intestines.

aside: is there an obviously american way of parking? how did they figure out that we were foreign before we even got out of the car?

anyway, our choices for lunch (handwritten onto slips of paper in the menu) were chicken, pork, and andouillete, and the exchange between us went something like:

ck: what kind of pork?
jo-na: i don't know. some kind of pork.
ck: but what does this other word mean?
jo-na: i don't know. something about how the pork is prepared.
ck: and the chicken?
jo-na: chicken... prepared in some fashion.
ck: (sigh) i guess i'll have the chicken.

ss: what's an-douil-lete?
jo-na: i don't know, but i think it might be gross.
ss: what does this word mean?
jo-na: grilled. you know, i'm not sure it's gross. isn't that what's in andouille sausage? maybe it isn't so bad. it's some kind of grilled meat that may or may not be gross.
ss: what do you think?
jo-na: go for it.

i can only imagine the laugh the kitchen guys had, but they brought us our plates of chicken, french fries, and what looked like a giant brat with straight faces. ss kept her game face on as she cut into her andouillete, releasing a smell so awful that ck discreetely inched herself down the table and i asked myself without internal sarcasm if there were toxic fumes coming from some nearby industrial facility.

it wasn't only that ss didn't cry, or sulk, or vomit. she dissected it a bit further, looked up, and announced: "i think this is intestines." she picked at it a little more and then tried a little bite. she made a funny face and was quiet for a little while. then she looked up at us again: "it tastes piggy in a way you wouldn't expect."

so ck and i ate our chicken and eventually the waiter came and took everything away and the cheese tray came and everything was back to normal. we had exacted our revenge on the most obvious table of starring people by sitting right down next to them so that they were forced to stop starring (apparently it's possible to silently call out small town europeans when their behavior is so eggregiously poor).

we spent the rest of they day examining various towns and churches, entertaining everyone with our adventures in french cuisine. apparently ss was right on the money, as the quality of andouillete is assessed by its degree of pigginess (as it gets better and more expensive it's less piggy). we continued to learn the lexicon of roman religious architecture, inspecting tympana, crypts, cloisters, and of course the famous capitals depicting important religious themes ("lust and despair", for example).

so i'm very proud of my friends for being such good frenchies, even if they do shriek with delight every time we pass a flock of sheep or someone says "merde."