"I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life" - Thoreau

Apparently it's quite possible that "sucking all the marrow" out of something was quite a literal experience for Thoreau and those of his era.  I have officially sampled cow bone marrow (yes, BONE MARROW), a "rare treat" according to one website, generally supposed to be roasted and sprinkled with sea salt and eaten on toast.  Ours was cooked in a stew kind of meal, I suppose for flavor, like cooking with ham hocks.  It was very slimy and gelatinous, and when I scraped it out of the bone it just kind of made a weird sucking noise like cranberry sauce coming out of the can and landed with a sickening squelch on the side of my plate.  It looked like grey jello. (I even had an image of Bill Cosby from the Jello Jigglers commercials in the 90s going "IT JIGGLES!" in one of his sweaters)  Really, it wasn't a bad flavor.  It has lots of fat in it (and we all know fat tastes great) and the texture was kind of like a thinner version of flan (which they say they have here in France but it's a dirty lie and a fake, more on that later) and if I didn't know that I was eating bone marrow I might have liked it but I really couldn't get over it in my head.  Maybe I'll give it another try one day.  I hear they have it in some restaurants.

                    looked like this, but less presentable.                                          ...and of course Bill Cosby. Just had to throw that in there.

But yeah, that was really the most exciting part of my day.  Unfortunately I thought it would be rude to whip out my camera at the dinner table (like, "excuse me, do you mind if I take a picture of this dinner you've made me so I can show my friends back home what freak shows you all are?") so I didn't get to make that my picture of the day.

Instead, I give you Day 5: the metro.

Day 5: line  13 coming to take me home at Saint Lazare

I still like taking the metro, it feels very big city chic (although I'm fairly sure the truely chic take cabs).  I wish we had better public transport in America/in the South.  If biking here wasn't a constant threat to my life I'd do that too.  At least when it gets warmer.