How do you say "blog" in French?

Blog.

We had a great dinner Saturday night with a few AMERICAblog readers (and spouses), including my friend Marcus who is a great American ex-pat artist here in Paris, and two of France's top bloggers, Loic Le Meur and Cyrille de Lasteyrie. Loic runs an eponymous tech-ish blog (with some politics thrown in). Here is Loic:



Cyrille (who goes under the pseudonym "Vinvin") runs two blogs, a personal one called 20/20 (which is the top grade (unattainable, since "only God is perfect") in France), and a second blog I've linked to before, Bonjour America!, which is a humorous effort to explain France to Americans. And here is Cyrille.



They were part of a larger dinner party Chris in Paris and his wife Joelle threw for me and friends as a going away party, of sorts, since I'm leaving France today. The dinner was classic European culinary excess. China, crystal, a ridiculous number of plates and silverware, and lots of wine and champagne. Chris made a mustard soup, followed by a pork tenderloin wrapped in ham, topped with caramelized onions, goat cheese and prunes, then wrapped entirely in a bread crust, and roasted. To die for. We topped that off with the obligatory cheese plate, then Chris' chocolate-death torte for dessert.


(click image to see enlargement)

Blogging has become quite the thing in France over the past year. Not necessarily political blogs, but rather blogs in general (interestingly, political blogs still haven't made the big splash in France that they have in the US).

The dinner was interesting, as Loic is quite the talker, and now working for conservative (well, conservative here, not really conservative from a US perspective) French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy (so he got a lot of questions about his boss), and as Cyrille is simply insane. It was a bit like having the French versions of Arianna Huffington and Benny Hill sitting across from each other, sparring, for four hours. We knew the evening was off to an odd start when Loic's and Cyrille's wives both arrived wearing the same dress. It then picked up steam when, during the first course, Cyrille knocked an entire bottle of red wine over on the white linen tablecloth that Chris' mom gave them as a wedding gift (smashing one of Joelle's Austrian crystal glasses). Mrs. Cyrille was clearly mortified - while Loic, ever the blogger, snapped a pic with his phone and immediately posted it on Flickr.

Well, there's more to report, it really was a hysterical dinner, went until 1:30am, but as I'm running to the airport in an hour, it will have to wait. I'll check in this evening when I'm back in DC. JOHN