Bibliotheque

n. – library
Librarie
n. – bookstore
I was reading recently about a movie star’s son who is facing jail time for dealing drugs. His girlfriend is now also facing jail time for trying to smuggle drugs into him while under house arrest – foolish, perhaps - desperate, definitely. I drew a parallel from this to my effort to secure fresh orange juice this morning in the sense that not being able to get what I wanted started to make me feel like a junkie in need of a fix.

I’ve felt the same way when not able to access the internet immediately as we’ve all grown so accustomed to doing. It’s a bit pathetic to admit, but true. There is a similar feeling of desperation when something you love is discontinued. This happened once with a perfume of mine and I became so obsessed that I resorted to searching on Ebay where I was overjoyed to find seven bottles left at half the price. Of course, the scent had gone off because they had probably been sitting on a shelf somewhere for years so it was all for naught.

I love searching for things that are hard to find. A friend recently asked me to secure an obscure out of print French book for him, which I thought would be easy given that I was in Paris, the land of old book sellers. I’ve been asking around, but to no avail. I visited one particularly musty old bookstore in the Latin Quarter literally exploding with inventory. The owner sat behind a small desk underneath a spiral staircase that let to even more books. When I asked him about the book in question, he answered immediately that he didn’t have a copy as if he actually knew each and every one of the thousands of books he had in his possession. That impressed me to no end.

So patience and a little luck will see me through my search. This is the sort of winning combination that can also be applied to my continuing battle with service challenged eating spots. Today at lunch, we made the mistake of asking for a table outside. We were there first inside the restaurant, but our request needed to be directed to the waiter outside and by the time we got to him, another couple had made their way in front of us and secured the last table in the shade. We took the last one left in the sun, but it wasn’t long before I realized my arm was burning so when I saw two tables next to each other open up in the shade, I asked the waiter if we could move.

“Ca va futre un bordel pas possible!” he cried. “Bordel,” similar to bordello or whorehouse when literally translated, isn’t really a very polite expression. It’s more like shit storm. “Bazar” would be more appropriate to indicate something that’s a complete mess or in a total state of chaos. In any case, I didn’t see how moving to a shaded table could create "an impossible shit storm." He then proceeded to explain that they needed to keep those two tables open for a party of four – that is until another couple came along and sat down!

At this point, my husband pointed out there wasn’t really any point in making a fuss. We knew the answer would be something along the lines of “If you don’t like it, you can leave” and we were hungry. You see there’s very little recourse here for bad service since the tip is included in the bill. So we muddled through and spitefully kept the 60 cents of change we got back after paying. They make really good pizzas, but I will have to condition myself the next time I have a craving and find an alternative.