Dorm Food

The foyer/dorm where we're staying provides breakfast and dinner Monday through Friday, which is great because food is expensive...well, everything is expensive...because of the exchange rate. However, the food...

For breakfast, we get coffee, tea, fake milk (hot and cold), baugettes, butter, jam, nutella, and honey. The fabulous thing is the nuns buy the baugettes fresh every morning! The first morning, I must've eaten a whole baugette by myself. It was warm, the butter was yummy, plus I had to have some nutella, some jam, some butter... But this is the same breakfast we get every morning and now after 10 days of the same breakfast, I have to force myself to eat the baugette so that I won't starve through the 3 hours of class I have each morning. I could wake up early to go to a bakery...but with all the late nights, that hasn't happened yet.

For dinner, we get an appetizer, a main course, a vegetable, a cheese course, and dessert. Each morning, the sister-chef posts the menu. Like the dorms at home, it always sounds so good. One evening's menu read: Asparagus, Turkey a l'Oriental, Salade, Cheese, and Yogurt with fruits. I was so excited about the asparagus (something green that is not lettuce!) The turkey a l'Oriental sounded sketch but turkey is good...even if it's slathered with sweet sour sauce or whatever it may turn out to be. And yogurt and fruits...yay! Well, that night at dinner, when the first course arrived, the spears that we were served were not green and spry like I anticipated. Instead, they were sickly pale and limp. Of course...white, canned asparagus. Flashbacks of food sorting at the food bank came to mind. I always wondered who ate all those canned food we sorted. And the turkey... looked nothing like turkey, tasted nothing like turkey, and no sweet sour sauce, to boot. We got skewers of very tough, unidentifiable meat and we were ALL trying to figure out what was "oriental" about it. And the yogurt with fruits...I was imagining yogurt with cut fruit, or whole fruit... turns out it's fruit-flavored yogurt. So, dinners are always adventures where we try to reconcile what we're pushing around our plates with what is posted on the menu.

After our very first dinner, I wanted to cry, thinking, "I'm in Paris and I'm eating crap at which I usually wouldn't give a second glance at home." Am I really in the culinary capital of the world? What's worse is everyone around me proclaiming that dinner was so good. The courses were so good. The profs even brought the sister-chef into the dining room where we clapped and gave her a standing ovation. I was really confused. Are these people honestly saying that the pork that was cooked to death, then rehydrated, then broiled and forgotten, then reconstituted with sauce, was good? Really? What is wrong with me? Jet lag? This same thing happened night after night for a week.

It was not until this past weekend, in the safe confines of St. Malo, far away from the Foyer and the nuns, that the truth came out. It took one person asking, "what was up with that pork the other night?" to get the ball rolling on the barrage of opinions on the food. Phew, I've not lost it after all. So you can imagine our excitement at Fresh Choice/Casino (see previous post).

How very, very sad.