{"id":4373,"date":"2025-09-05T16:05:59","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T20:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/?p=4373"},"modified":"2025-09-05T16:06:01","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T20:06:01","slug":"the-waiting-game-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/the-waiting-game-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Waiting Game"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The good news? We got a bank account!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The bad news? We still haven&#8217;t heard back about the apartment. I&#8217;m told that these things can take a few days, so I suppose it&#8217;s more like neutral news. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The appointment to get our bank account took about an hour and a half. The woman helping us kept apologizing for how long it was taking, so I am pretty sure that&#8217;s not the norm. American paperwork is extra tricky! She was a student at Lilian&#8217;s school and she told us how much she loved it there. She speaks four languages, which I think is a fantastic sign. Her English was really good. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m still really hopeful about the apartment, but I&#8217;m also glad to know that we have a &#8220;dossier&#8221; (all of the paperwork that you need to prove that you&#8217;re who you say you are and that you can actually pay your rent on time) ready to go if there needs to be a next time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the meanwhile, I guess we just have to be patient. Not exactly one of my strong suits, so I suppose this is good practice for me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Today, Kristian and I went to the march\u00e9 and got just about everything that we needed for dinner. I won&#8217;t rattle off our grocery list, but it included fruits and veggies, an assortment of cheeses, and a giant bag of pistachios. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We also stopped by a boulangerie and bought some fresh bread. No pictures, because it&#8217;s all in my tummy. You&#8217;ll just have to trust me that it was delicious. One of the cool things they have in the boulangeries here is a big machine that slices your bread for you. You purchase a loaf (or a half loaf), they stick it in a big metal box, it makes an unholy racket and then they bag it up for you. Then you have a delicious, crusty bread that you don&#8217;t have to cut with the terrible knives at your airbnb (can you tell that we&#8217;re super excited to get a place of our own?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Because of how our work schedules lined up, I ended up doing the cooking portion of dinner. I think it came out pretty good!<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-medium\"><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/IMG_5412-1.png?ssl=1\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/IMG_5412-1.png?resize=225%2C300&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4378\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/IMG_5412-1.png?resize=225%2C300&amp;ssl=1 225w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/IMG_5412-1.png?resize=768%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/IMG_5412-1.png?w=960&amp;ssl=1 960w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">With the exception of some staples (salt, pepper, oil, shallots, garlic), everything in my dish came from the market. And everything but the parsley was purchased this morning. I tossed the cauliflower in olive oil, salt and pepper and then roasted it in the oven. While it was cooking, I &#8220;zested&#8221; a lemon. We don&#8217;t have a rasp or a grater here, so I used a veggie peeler to get thin slices of the rind and then chopped them up finely. I saut\u00e9ed garlic and shallot and mixed it all together with lemon juice and parsley. Then, I roasted the pistachios for a few minutes and coarsely chopped them. When the cauliflower came out of the oven, I tossed it all together. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s a testament to the quality of the ingredients here that even I can whip something up on the fly and have it come out well!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">(And by &#8220;whip something up on the fly&#8221; I mean google several recipes for something super basic). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Tomorrow, we&#8217;re taking the train to Aix-Les-Bains. It&#8217;s our first train adventure, wish us luck! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The good news? We got a bank account! The bad news? We still haven&#8217;t heard back about the apartment. I&#8217;m told that these things can take a few days, so&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4377,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[69,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-food","category-france"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5yggS-18x","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/IMG_5412.png?fit=960%2C1280&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4373"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4379,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4373\/revisions\/4379"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}