A guest for dinner

Wednesday February 23, 2011 Day 238

I went to Cook & Eat this morning. Ours was a Vietnamese meal today, with pho (beef soup with cellophane rice noodles) and a green-papaya salad. Both were quite good, but I don’t think I will be cooking that sort of food any time soon. It wasn’t so delicious as to send me into transports, and it involves lots of specialty foods available only at oriental grocery stores. It also involves more work than I want to do. The salad is not low-carb, nor are the noodles, although the rest of the soup probably wasn’t bad, carb-wise.

I arrived home around 2:00, and Roger was already at chess club. I put the pork roast into the oven and made some tea. Roger got back around 5:30. Near the appointed hour, he began keeping an eye out for Troy, and at about 7:00, I heard him call out to “Troy” into the street below. He then pressed the buzzer to unlock the door, and a young man soon appeared in our apartment. Thus I met Troy. He is probably in his mid-to-late 20s, tall, and very nice. He is taking art classes, although he came to France to attend seminary. It was not clear to me whether he is still in the seminary. He shares an apartment with at least one other guy, and also has an art studio, I think in or attached to a church. We talked art a lot, and chess a lot, and the U.S. and what we miss, and he enjoyed the barbeque, salad, pasta (which I forewent), the iced tea, and the raspberries in cream for dessert. After dinner he showed me his art work on his website, and we discussed art some more. I introduced him to Raoul Dufy. I already knew he and Roger had connected through chess, but I didn’t realize how much he and I would connect through art. He was truly a delight to have over. He left around 10:00 and Roger and I cleaned the kitchen and went to bed. How nice to have him over for dinner!