Olive On The Buses Quotes

Spain is my favorite country mais ça m'empêche que Paris est toujours ma ville préférée. I long to be again among all those foolish people, running for métros and jumping off of buses and dodging motorcycles and having traffic jams and admiring all that crazy statuary in all those absurd parks. I weep for the fishy ladies in the Place de la Concorde. Spain is not like that at all. Whatever else Spain is, it is not frivolous. I think, really, that I would stay in Spain forever--if I had never been to Paris. Spain is very beautiful, stony and sunny and lonely. Buy by and by you get tired of olive oil and fish and castanets and tambourines--or, anyway, I do. I want to come home, to come home to Paris. It's funny, I've never felt anyplace was home before.

When my hunger grew to the point of distraction, I climbed onto buses and rode to the Marina, Fillmore Street, or Pacific Heights. I toured high-end delis, lingering at polished marble countertops and sampling an olive, a slice of Canadian bacon, or a sliver of Havarti. I asked the questions Elizabeth would have asked: which olive oils are unfiltered; exactly how "fresh" was the albacore, the salmon, the sole; how sweet were the season's first blood oranges?