In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself. - Albert Einstein

Alors, je pense que this trip will go down in the annals of my (one-day-to-be) illustrious history as All Those Days I Looked At Sheep. (NB: Alternate titles include Un Petit Histoire de la Paysanne, The Autumn of the Cold and Damp, and French People Don't Eat Vegetables.)

So. Les Brebis. Just to explain, brebis are ewes. Lady sheep. There are, I discover, a great many of them en France. Their milk is responsible both for the only genuine Roquefort cheese (which was originally crafted by convicts and orphans) and for the most absurdly delightful confiture ever to grace my tongue. Having it in your mouth is exactly what it would taste like to kiss Mary Magdalene.

There are a a number of things that I do in France that I NEVER do in the United States. Wake up at 5.30 in the morning five days a week to run. Drink diet coke at room temperature. Write compositions in French. Lust after sheep's milk confiture. Read comic books. (Also in French. Calvin and Hobbes, for the most part. Lately I've begun to tackle Agatha Christie, although ca ne marche pas aujourd'hui.) My favorite, by far, though, involves a sinful little street vendor called Cornet d'Amour. I don't care much for cheese or chocolate or the ubiquitous baguettes, but if they have to roll me onto the airplane back to Colorado in January, it will be because of fucking Cornet d'Amour. I don't care for ice cream. I haven't been much for it since the days when I still thought cartoons were funny, and my grandfather bought me those upside-down clown cones at Baskin Robbins, the ones with the faces made out of frosting. At the time, my favorite flavor was mint chocolate chip. But in France, they aren't ice creams. They're glaces. And they aren't flavors. They're parfums. And I could eat the glaces at Cornet-sodding-d'Amour every sodding day. What parfum do I prefer? Let's see ... is it the gingembre, with the cold chunks of crystallized ginger? The citron basilique? The noix de coco avec curry? The chocolat noir noisette? The violette, with real sugared violets? The Italianate straciatella? The the vert menthe? (Uhm, yes. I have tried all of these. Along with the guava, mango, and passion fruit sorbets.) It's a real problem.

I'm already thinking about the French habits I'll have to consciously endeavor NOT to bring back to the United States so that my friends will continue to talk to me. These include peppering my conversation with French phrases, insisting on finishing each meal with a cheese course and an espresso, calling it confiture instead of jam, talking about politics to an exhausting degree. But even my favorite gelato spots in San Francisco can't hold a blowtorch, a flamethrower, let alone a candle, to Cornet d'Amour.

One thing in which the residue of my cohort indulges that I DON'T have to consider is le chocolat chaud. Hot chocolate. Even in France, I just don't care for it. If you know me well enough reading this, you know that I have a perhaps unreasonable contempt for things that I associate with childish tendencies. Maybe it's because I'm five-foot-three in my Danskos. I don't like cartoons; I didn't wear my hair in pigtails even when I had enough hair to do that. I don't eat macaroni and cheese. I loathe lunchboxes and Hello Kitty wallets and temporary tattoos. I don't try to justify these feelings. I accept them, just as I accept the fact that Georgie will be our president until January of 2009, even though I can't wrap my mind around the logic.

Granted, hot chocolate is different in France. It doesn't come powdered and presugared out of a pacet from Nestle. There's no lapin cartoon with long ears and a terrifyingly bucktoothed grin. This is France, kids - they grate fresh chocolate shavings into your cup (over a saucer, toujours) and pour fresh whole milk over them, and if you want it sweetened you have to add your own sugar in, which comes in a cunning little tube or in a cube in a silver dish on the side.

But for whatever obscurely stubborn steak of my own, rooted in some childhood malaise that wants a Berkeley therapist in broomstick skirt and scarves and Ethiopian beads to decouver, I can't enjoy the French hot chocolate. Why, and wherefore, this contrary streak? It's important enough and continuous enough an issue in my daily life to have warranted a place in my stock vocabulary alongside Est-ce que vous comprenez l'anglais? Je ne parle pas francais. Ou est le toilette? Je n'aime pas le chocolat chaud.

The superiority of chocolate, both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America which it has in Spain. - Thomas Jefferson