Chicken Soup for the...Oh, God, I Just Can't

Normally, my favorite part of having dinner with Elena would be listening to her order her meal. Seriously. It usually goes something like this:

Elena: [pointing to item on menu] Is this like [obscure dish from a different type of Asian cuisine from that of the restaurant we're in]?

Waitress: [Obscure dish]?

Elena: The sauce sounds the same, and it's a little spicy with these wide, flat noodles, and--

Waitress: Oooh, this has thin rice noodles, but other than that....

Elena: Oh...well...I was really looking forward to the noodles.

[Long, awkward pause]

Waitress: [Other dish] has those.

Elena: Well...can you make [other dish] with shrimp instead, and without the curry, but more of a regular spicy brown sauce, and--does this one have peanuts? And--

Waitress: You want [first dish] with wide, flat noodles?

Elena: Oooh, could you?

I might have been a tad disappointed when she ordered right off the menu, but I haven't gotten to see her in so long that I didn't even miss the ritual; it was just great to catch up. And while I teased her about posting something else funny that she did say here, I find that I am disinclined to do so, because the story should be that I've missed her, not that I'm giving her a hard time.

Nick is having a reunion of his own: Aaron and Langley have flown out for the week, and are sampling life in Paris. And while I am terribly jealous, I almost feel as though I am there. The other night they went to my favorite restaurant (this cute little place near the Pantheon with a lovely fondue prix fixe), and now Langley is feeling a little under the weather.

See, for about a decade, I've gotten horrifically ill every time I've crossed the Atlantic. From my first trip to France, when my host sister pressed this noxious throat spray on me, to when I lost my voice in Greece, to hiking around Montjuic on the first leg of my Great Europe Trip while my fever brought me ever closer to full-blown delirium, I have spent a good chunk of every trip in abject misery. It only stopped this year, when I began to accept that my immune system just hates Europe. In that vein, I would like to take a moment to adamantly plug Airborne®, which, taken more or less constantly, has finally allowed me to travel comfortably.

Anyway.

When I reached Nick today, he was in the kitchen [look away, Mary] boiling down a chicken carcass [okay, you can look back] for soup stock for Langley. Which is just exactly what he would do for me, because, although I often accuse him of being inadequately sympathetic when I am sick, he manages to convey his kindness through that sort of gesture. Especially if said gesture allows him to be in another room while I'm sniffling.

While Langley is, I mean.