Birthday Season

November is the month of birthdays in the apartment - GG's was the 6th and mine was last week. In France the cutoff for school is by calendar year instead of academic year though, so GG turned 19 while I turned 20. This means I'm now a 20-year-old guy living with a bunch of 19-year-old girls.

The roommates and Becky and Madeline chipped in to get me a book about Barack Obama for my birthday, which was really sweet, and we went out to dinner at Le Pistol. I don't think I'd been there since going for my birthday last year. Le Pistol is a wonderful restaurant for many reasons:

• All the lighting is red.
• They play good music that's not painfully obscure.
• They show all the Canadiens games.
• They have great beer, great sandwiches, and great fries, which is pretty much all you can ask for.

We got GG a rice cooker for her birthday and I don't think I've ever seen anyone happier to get a gift. I've mentioned before that 75 per cent of GG's diet is rice, but without living with her it's difficult to understand how much she loves it. Today she told me that when she went on vacation with her family to Japan, she was always happy because they had rice with every meal. And a couple weeks ago I carried a ten-pound bag of rice home from Provigo for her.

GG is also a vegetarian, which recently got me thinking that I should try being one for a week to see what it's like. There are occasionally days when I don't eat meat just because I don't happen to have any, so it would just be like seven of those days in a row. Then I'd have to eat nothing but meat for a week to make up for it.

Provigo

Except for Kate, the everyone in the apartment stayed in and did work this weekend. On Saturday night, GG, Genna, and I went to Provigo together and it made me think about how differently men and women like to eat. In general, I like to buy bread, meat, cheese, apples, carrots, juice, milk, and beer. These are pretty simple foods. GG and Genna, on the other hand, normally like to eat lots of vegetables and some rice/pasta, but occasionally crave foods like chocolate and social cookies. On Saturday at Provigo, for example, GG wandered around the produce section eating mushrooms while Genna spent five minutes trying to decide the best kind of ice cream to buy. Strange.

I just bought capicollo, Nutella, and a scone.