No Spicy Food, but Good Cows

This is the Monoprix I go to; pretty sweet building, huh? This is a fact : dairy in France is much better than dairy in the United States.
This is a fact: I eat more dairy per day in France than I eat in a week in the United States.
The butter, the milk, the yogurt, the cheese; all these things are so astronomically good, it’s impossible not to eat them. This is unfortunate, because Chinese people are generally not that tolerant of lactose, and this includes me. So my palate is thrilled, but my stomach, not so much.
Most of the food here, at least the basic building blocks of a meal, are better here. The produce is great, the dairy is clearly great, the grains are legendary. If you want to eat nothing but European cuisines, it is ideal.
The problem I run into is when I want to eat something other than that. I went to a Chinese place down the street from school, and even though the idea of Chinese food was there, it wasn’t the same. It was bland, and everything was sort of pasty, as though the cook was afraid of the seafood being too seafood-textured. One of the criticisms of the French palate that is common is that there is a general avoidance of strong flavors, and particularly spicy foods. This is true. I want hot sauce all the time when I go out. However, Chinese food is an exceptionally difficult food to find in France. If I want Thai, there isn’t a problem. Thai food here is really good. And of course, Vietnamese. Anything Vietnamese can be found here, no problem.
I almost always cook at home. Going out to dinner can be really expensive, and I would generally rather make a three euro meal at home than go out and pay eight euro. Eight euro seems not that bad, until you realize you just spent over ten dollars for something tiny. I even bring my lunch to school most days, because the options nearby are not that extensive, and there isn’t that much that interests me.
Grocery shopping is always a fun experience for me no matter what, but here, because I’m trying to spend as little as possible, it becomes a sort of game to try things and see how well I can live on the cheapest things I can find. Is Monoprix brand chevre as good as a more expensive brand? No, but I can handle it. Does a fifty-centime can of lentils work as a full meal? Yup.
So even though I want a bowl of soup from Great New York Noodletown on Bowery more than anything in the world, I can console myself with a cool boxed soup from the grocery store, mostly because, even though it’s not exactly what I want, I’ve never had it before.