102. Something fishy

I just had a very odd experience in our local fishmonger. I went in to buy some sea bass for dinner. It was surprisingly quiet; I was the only customer in the shop. So I chose a fish and asked the nice fishmonger to fillet it for me. ‘Sure’, he said, ‘with the skin on or off?’ ‘Off’, I replied, and he passed the fish to the younger guy at the back, who started doing gory things to it, so I went over and paid so as not to watch. The young guy came out, handed me a bag and I went home and put it in the fridge. Three hours later, I was starting to cook dinner, later than usual. I got out the things I meant to bake the fish with – some olive paste, tomatoes, shallots, parsley – then got the bag with the fish out of the fridge and opened it. Out fell… a fish. Definitely, inescapably, unfilleted. And possibly not even a sea bass (I’m not very good at these things).  By now, of course, the fishmonger was closed. ‘I’ll be brave’, I resolved, ‘I can fillet it myself.’ I picked it up, and it dripped unpleasantly. So I thought, well, maybe we’ll have pasta for dinner.

I’m still not quite sure how the fishmonger could have carefully gutted and filleted my fish, then just as carefully picked up a completely different fish and handed it to me, but there you are.

This week I’ve also increased my vocabulary of automotive French quite considerably, through helping two Australian friends to buy a car. As well as negotiating the masses of paperwork that accompany every such transaction in French (papers that go with the car, papers that go with the owner, carte grise, certificat de conformité, certificat non-gage, volet A), I also discovered that car salesmen pitch things a little differently here. ‘This car is an excellent buy’, said Jean-François at Porte de Saint-Cloud, ‘it has never been owned by a German. It has never even been driven by a German!’

In the eleventh arrondissement, meanwhile, we spent some time looking for an address that, in true Parisian fashion, n’existait pas (see this post from December 2009). Well actually the address did exist, but 68 boulevard Richard Lenoir was unquestionably not a car dealer’s but a formidable 1960s apartment building. We googled, we asked in nearby cafes but nobody had heard of it and they weren’t answering their phone. So we went and had lunch in a nearby bistro. After lunch we called them again. ‘Oh I’m sorry, we sold that car this morning’, said the woman who answered, and I thanked her and hung up, then wished I’d asked her where on earth she actually was.

And trying another car out at Levallois, I received the best, albeit strangest, compliment that I’ve ever received for my French. ‘Gee, you speak English really well’, said the dealer as I translated the car’s history for my friends.

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