Social butterflu

I had dinner with people 4 nights in a row, it gave me a case of the social butterflu.

I had dinner with two HRC Federal Club members from Australia (one of them is dual US citizen, that's where the HRC connection came in). They had a nice little one bedroom in the Marais, in an old building. The door into the complex was one of those monstrous doors that used to be the carriage entrance. All of the apartments open out onto the courtyard. You really are at the mercy of your neighbors when everything backs onto a courtyard, the noise just bounces around. (I play attention to stuff like this, since we'll be apartment shopping next month). They made a nice dinner, with some monstrous asparagus that musta been on steriods. They were really funny, and we polished off plenty of wine. As I left, I mentioned that I probably drank too much, to which one of them replied, "We're Australian. If you don't go home drunk, we haven't done our job."

I had dinner with Jeninne and Chris the night after that. They are two really sweet people from San Francisco that have escaped to France. They have a killer apartment, on Ile de la Cite, directly on the Seine looking across at Hotel de Ville, and a peek at Notre Dame's Towers out the backside of the apartment. The gay mayor of Paris is always doing something on the plaza in front of Hotel de Ville. Last February, there was a huge igloo with ice skating, this time, a bunch of tents housing a bakery exhibition. Jeninne and Chris get to look out across the water and watch the show.

The next night was dinner with Casey and Benjamin, who are on vacation here from Austin. They were having fun, but struggling with the food. The french have a completely different scale for how cooked beef is. The high end seems to be what Americans would call "Medium", and the low end of the scale says "mooooooo" at you. Benjamin had ended up with something too far down the scale. We went to Polidor, which has been open since 1845. Pretty odd to go to a restaurant that's been open since before the US Civil war. It definitely looks well worn.

The last night was dinner with the local GLBT employee group from my company. Just a few showed, but it was good food, and definitely good company.