DJ Does Paris

...so to speak.

Well, I'm a bit behind on my blog entries, so I don't have the time to crack jokes at his expense and/or make ribald insinuations--much as I'd like to. Sorry, DJ, I'll make it up to you soon. In the meanwhile, here's the Reader's Digest version of Wednesday:

DJ--a colleague from U of C working on Jazz in Paris--arrived this morning at CDG and I headed over there to meet him. His plane arrived a bit early, so I caught him just as he was heading over towards the RER station. I gave him a hand with his luggage and we were off to his new abode in Paris. After a thoroughly pleasant ride (haha) back to his place by subway and bus, we unloaded, had a drink, and set off to search for lunch.

First, we tried to grab lunch at Les Trois Marmites, which is a favourite of his. It was closed. We headed over to a Pho restaurant that I am fond of (the same as last Sunday) called Tin Tin. It was closed. Finally, we headed to a Thai place nearby (I can't remember the name for the life of me), where we finally got some food. I had this fantastic dish that was just a bunch raw vegetables and then this very spicy ground chicken sauce. I really like the idea of it, and I think I'm going to adapt it to beef+south american spices. I love the mixture of cold, fresh, raw vegetables with well-prepared meat. DJ had a pile of shellfish, which he seemed to enjoy a whole lot. After a bit of coffee, we were off and went our separate ways home.

When I got home, someone had again managed to hog so much bandwidth on the network (with filesharing programs, no doubt), thus making it impossible for anyone else to get onto the network. I turned off the WiFi radio for a moment, blocked all the ports associated with filesharing, and then started it back up. Already there was a substantial decrease in traffic. So, I spent the next couple of hours doing the same thing to the other two network routers. It's not a perfect fix, but hopefully it'll "throttle" the bandwidth use a little bit.

In the evening, I went out with an old friend from my high-school exchange program days (in Le Mans), who took me to a restaurant/wine-bar called Le Domaine Léopold. Since I had already eaten a bit earlier that day, I didn't order a whole stack of food. Nonetheless, I ordered a plate of foie gras (of duck), which came with a bit of salad and some potatoes. The foie gras was AMAZING. I just ate it with a sprinkling of sea-salt and some bread and couldn't stop. Of course, I still had room for several glasses of wine and a bit of dessert (caramel-centred fondant tart). After that, we headed off to the métro and headed our separate ways home.

Voilà! A short description of what was actually a rather full day. More to come tomorrow...