Part I of what I hope will be a seven part post about my eating holiday in Alsace

I grabbed a croissant from Le Fournil de Gare, a small boulanger opposite the Gagny train station. It was warm and yeasty and chewy and buttery. Almost perfect, I thought, as I strode towards the commuter train that would take me to Gare de L'Est and thus to Strasbourg. I needed a holiday, I had decided a few weeks before. Yes, mounds of law school debt awaited me when I returned to the real world . And I hadn't exerted myself that heavily over thirteen weeks of my summer job - apart from a few late nights, the summer associate's lot isn't the harshest even among the cushioned paths of the western elite. But it would have been a shame, I thought, to have been in London, just a few miles from Paris, and to have neglected Europe. And so I booked my tickets on the trans-Channel Eurostar, and imposed myself yet again on the hospitality of my ever-ready uncles in the suburbs of the French capital. It was time to travel.

I spent a long time musing over where to go. France is a diverse country; of sun and of mountains, of plateaus and plains. But as always, my priority was food. And as the Larousse Gastronomique notes, there are few places better blessed with edibles than Alsace, oft-traded between France and Germany, and the better for it. After much thinking, my plan ended up incorporating some of the most interesting places I could find in the eastern province. I would start in the great Alsatian capital of Strasbourg, and then, after a brief stay there, would trek down to the little towns of Obernai and Selestat in the wine-making south. On the way, I'd eat and hike as much as possible, to offset the grosser excesses of my eating with the rough discipline of mountains and forest. If all worked out as planned, it would be a perfect vacation. How could I go wrong?

The Topless Jumble

A short time later, though, I found myself staring not at the glorious foothills of the Vosges, but at a topless woman in Gare de L'est. She wasn't, unfortunately, there in person, but stamped tawdrily on a magazine, with the word “Jeux” or “games” written diagonally across her head. I wondered for a moment what she could mean - I mean, nude games? Eventually, my curiosity overcame any embarrassment I felt at leafing through such a thing in public. I gingerly picked it up, and backed unhappily into a remote corner of the store.

Well, it turned out to be the jumble – the word search, in other words. And it’s not as if the puzzle was particularly connected to the salacious cover – the first word to be found was "pain", or bread. I put the magazine back, unsure of what to make of it. But I do know that if anyone ever asks me to explain France to them from now on, I'll say that they can understand France if they understand the topless jumble. And by the time I thought of that, my train was minutes from leaving.

I scare a woman away. I am not surprised.

The trip from Paris to Strasbourg takes four hours, by Corail rapid train. For some reason, the real speedsters of the French railway, the Trains Grande Vitesse (TGV), haven’t yet made their way to this route. A more cynical person might note that it is telling of something in the French psyche that the TGV have long plied the holiday route to Nice, but still ignore the capital of Europe. But I am not cynical, or at least wasn’t just then.

In any case, I passed the time by alternatively eating and staring out the window at the passing countryside. As to the food, I did well, I think - a baguette stuffed with ham, a blueberry tart, small cornichon pickles, olives, some strong German beer, and a little pate. The only complaint I remember now about the sandwich was that too much butter had been spread on the ham inside, in an obvious effort to obscure the fact that both better ham and bread exists elsewhere. But that niggle didn’t stop me from enjoying myself. In fact, I ate so enthusiastically that the attractive woman sitting next to me moved away when we stopped at Nancy. Maybe I should have talked to her instead of eating, but by the time I thought of it I had got to the tart, and it was very good indeed.

Zum Zwissell

Clearly, the chief job awaiting me the first night in Strasbourg was to get myself some choucroute garni, the headliner of Alsatian cookery. It’s not complicated, choucroute garni. It’s just some sausages and ham hocks piled on top of relatively humble preserved cabbage, or sauerkraut. But in all cases, choucroute in Alsace is a treat, made with some of the best sausages and smoked meats to be found anywhere. After a good bit of wandering around the great Gutenberg square of Strasbourg, dazzled in the shadow of the extraordinary one-towered cathedral, I found my target – Zum Zwissel, probably the most traditional winstub, or wine restaurant, in Strasbourg. I sat myself down outside in the delightful weather and ate for the next two hours – First a perfect onion tart, studded tastily with small cubes of local bacon (lardons), and topped with a thin layer of emmental, followed by a mighty plate of choucroute garni accompanied by a freshly grated bowl of horseradish to liven it all up. Washed down with almost a litre of the powerful Mutzig beer, I couldn’t really handle dessert, so I satisfied myself with a light sorbet there, and then a pistachio ice cream later. Standing that night in front of the Cathedral to watch the summer’s special light show, I remember noting that this was a great start to the trip. I had tasted the Strasbourg’s most famous export, and I was impressed. But that, surely, was only a start.

I've recently been scolded with comments along the lines of: "You didn't have time to come to (my crucially important event X) but you have time to write all this stuff on your blog?"

The implication here is that whatever time is spent drumming out posts like this could have spent going to the event in question. As I have mentioned in passing, and Vice Squad's Jim Leitzel has said more clearly, there is some unfortunate merit to this line of thought when the "crucially important" project is something like a paper to be written, laundry to be done, or email to be answered.

But the comments I'm talking about are more along the lines of "why can't you meet me for dinner tonight at 7?" or "why did you miss the meeting at 4?" or "why don't you ever come to the parties that I throw?"

The logical error here is that blogging time is fungible where these events are not. That is, the complaint-- that blogging subtracts from social attendance-- would only work if the hosts would be happy to have me showing up at 1:30 a.m., or were willing to bring the shindig to the midddle of class (yes, I have blogged from class).

Instead the problem is one of timely and adequate notice. Yes, I would dearly love to come to your terribly important event X, but the sooner I know about it, the more likely that I can come to it without impolitely shunting off somebody else.

[Incidentally, it is always revealing which organizations and people give great respect to and understanding to the rule of etiquette that one doesn't back out of a social date simply because a better deal has come along (like the Antient and Honourable Edmund Burke Society), and which ones do not (and shall remain unnamed).]

This time Judge Posner pops up not in Torts/Procedure but in Contracts. This is from his opinion in Amoco v. Ashcraft (791 F.2d 519):

[Ashcraft] put himself over a barrel: the courts will not pull him upright. He gambled that at the price he was paying for Bowlby Oil Company he would be able to pay off its debt to Amoco and make a profit for himself. He threw a pair of balanced dice, and lost, and that is the end of it so far as Indiana law is concerned. If the courts let him off the hook, it would just make it more difficult for people in his position to strike deals they believe are advantageous -- that indeed are advantageous when made, though given the inevitable uncertainties of commercial life (of life, period) a certain percentage go awry.

Slate has an article on the Old Spice ad that alleges that "Scent is the strongest sense tied to memory." Meanwhile, TNR's Chris Orr reviews the stellar Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with a counter-claim:

This is nonsense. Yes, a scent may on occasion provoke an emphatic, unmediated recollection, but it is typically an imprecise one--a general period in one's life rather than a particular moment. Our specific memories, by contrast, are primarily visual and auditory, not unlike a movie playing in the mind's eye.

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth. [Margaret Atwood]

It did not matter, it did not matter. Destroy and forget! But a butterfly in the Park, an orchid in a shop window, would revive everything with a dazzling inward shock of despair.

Lawrence Tribe has taken "full responsibility" for his failure to attribute some material in his book, thus proving that the art of the apology-without-resignation is not limited to the Secretary of Defense.

According to Section 2-302 of the Univform Commercial Code, the court is invited to find that contracts and parts of contracts are "unconscionable". "The principle is one of the prevention of oppression and unfair surprise." The court in Star v. Jones is worried that "a caveat is warranted lest we reduce the import of section 2-302 solely to a mathematical ratio formula."

Why the subjective guess of a few politically-connected state officials is less likely to surprise people than arithmetic, I don't yet understand.

I'll eventually have a little more to say about the degenerating Harvard Square bookstore situation that Will notes below. But my first thought was that this might all be part of a Larry Summers plot to get our faculty to write their own books. But then, that's probably a bit unfair. The library's still open, after all.

Other bloggers are returning to Hyde Park--

Zev Berger declares that Hyde Park/The U of C is "one of the top 10 places in the world."

Phoebe Maltz photographs the too-familiar ride down Garfield/55th from Midway.

Ed Cohn waxes on the superiority of the Hyde Park book market to Harvard's. (I spent an hour last weekend using up a precious table in the COOP's cafe, but didn't see anything on the shelves worth writing home about.)

Also, Spencer has just embarked on the enviable life of a University of Chicago law student, but he hasn't blogged in almost a week. Maybe he wandered too far south of 60th Street, or got lost in the law school tunnels?