European Vacation: Day 2

Alexia's the best. As I mentioned in my last post, David and I slept in until 2 p.m. the day after we arrived in Paris. When we woke up we discovered that our hostess (who had slept a normal 8 hours) had delivered us fresh pastries from a patisserie down the street. Our wonderful breakfast included pain au chocolat, which is SO much better in France than in the U.S. because the French know their pastries and don't overdo it by smothering the whole thing in chocolate. I know THAT sounds crazy - but trust me. It made me happy.

The only touristy thing I had any urge to do while we were in Paris was to see Monte Martre a>again. I had been there once before during a previous visit with Alexia and remember loving it. It feels like a small city inside of Paris but is actually just a really wealthy neighborhood on top of a hill in the center of the city. The area surrounding the hill, however, is inhabited by the starving artists who sell paintings of Sacre Coeur (the large cathedral which is the highlight of the area) and offer to draw your caricature. We lucked out and got beautiful weather despite the forecast for rain, rain, and more rain.

While on top of Monte Martre I had a chance to indulge in another French masterpiece - a sugar crepe. You walk up to a window as you might at an ice cream stand in the States and a man with a hot plate cooks a crepe right there before your eyes and adds whatever ingredients you desire. I like my crepes simple - but what could make a sugar crepe even tastier while maintaining such simplicity, you might ask? The answer is butter my friends. Mmm...

We then walked around and toured the dismembered statuary of the area (the one of the bishop holding his own head stood in the middle of a playground - and there was no plaque with his name or any sort of explanation as to why he was standing in the middle of a playground holding his head).

We wandered back down the hill, craving refreshment in the form of cold beer at a French cafe. The waitresses at the cafe we ultimately chose ignored us thoroughly for a good 20 minutes, so we left and wandered into a bar called The Lounge Lizard, which happened to be American-owned. There we experienced the best service on our entire trip from a California woman who didn't speak a lick of French.

Alexia then took us to a tea shop just down the street called Mariages Freres. If you like tea and are ever in Paris, GO THERE. Here's the trick: the store is divided into two store fronts directly across the street from one another. In the larger of the two you can buy all the tea you want but you can't smell any of it - you can only look at the names (which are in French). I believe there's also a cafe in that store where you can taste, but of course you'd have to pay for a whole cup. But at the smaller space across the street you are free to open any of the thousands of tins of tea and sniff out your favorites. Sure, you can also buy the tea from this store, but if their credit card machine is down as it was when we were there, then you can just write down your favorites and go back across the street.

We dined at an authentic French restaurant that was decorated much like a cheap U.S. diner but offered awesome food. Alexia and I enjoyed various parts of duck while David had tournedos. It was nearly 10 p.m. when we finished but there was still light in the sky. We walked back to Alexia's parents' home to use their computer to find a map of Bamberg, Germany - our destination the next day - and made an amazing discovery: French keyboards are messed up. The A is where the Q should be, and if you try to go to google.com you'll end up typing zzz.google.com (also, you have to do some fancy trickery like going to google.com.us or some silliness in order to get the English version over there). What's that? You want to end your sentence? Don't forget to hit the Shift button as you type in a period. Same goes for numbers. And no, hitting the Caps button doesn't save you that step. Typing an email message was just painful. And so, computers were thereby banished from the rest of our vacation. Shame about that.


Next up: Our crazy train schedule as we venture into a country where none of us knows how to speak the language (unless you want to tell someone there's a boy under the airplane or a dog under a table. The German language lessons David and I had listened to beforehand had well prepared us for those everyday scenarios).