Au Revoir, Belle Paris

Today, I am wrapping up my coverage on our short stay in Paris. What I loved most about the city is that it's truly a work of art in itself. The architecture, the sculptures, the flowers, the people. It's just all so beautiful everywhere you turn.

The one thing that I regret is not getting to experience the French cuisine while we were there. Like I've mentioned before, we were there at the most inopportune time while festivities raged on all weekend, so most of the restaurants were closed. I did insist on a spur of the moment stop for banana hazelnut crêpes when I smelled them wafting through the air on our way to Notre Dame. This little bowl of crêpes and 2 scoops of ice cream set us back $15 at Haagen Dazs, but let me tell you, it was so worth it!

The only restaurant we could find open at 8pm was Indiana Cafe.  The menu was very Americanized, so we had to settle for salad and BLT sandwiches. Nevertheless, the girls were geeked over eating french fries in France. The food was good, but the service was very slow. I don't know if that's true of all of the restaurants in Paris, but our waitress never did come back to see if we needed anything else after taking our order. We had to get water refills and our check from the bar.

When we ventured out of our hotel at 7am looking for breakfast, again, we couldn't find anything open that early. We stumbled upon this boulangerie selling pastries that looked pretty tempting. Here's the thing about ordering from a bakery or whatnot in Paris. They expect you to know what you want right away. They don't have patience for dilly dallying or being indecisive. Place your order, then move it along without holding up the line. HOWEVER, you can buy yourself a little extra time if you know a little basic french. I've noticed the locals are appreciative and give you leeway if you show you've attempted to at least speak even a tiny bit of the native language. I was ordering for the 4 of us and was able to buy a few extra minutes in the line without drawing ire from either of the workers by using french numbers and telling them c'est tout when we ordered enough. So on to this bakery. It did not have a name that we could find, but if you are in Paris, I INSIST you stop at the boulangerie at 49 rue Linois, 2 blocks away from the Eiffel Tower. You can read the Yelp reviews here. Not only were the croissants the flakiest, crispest, mouthwatering treats I've ever had, we bought a few apple tarts (tarte aux pommes) that I have not been able to stop thinking about ever since my first bite.

I'm seriously not lying when I say a day hasn't gone by since last July that I haven't thought about these apple tarts. Yes, they were that good. If you go to Paris and tell me you didn't stop at this boulangerie, we can't be friends.

The French have a reputation for being rude, so I was a little worried about interacting with the locals. However, I didn't come across a single rude person during our stay. Everyone we spoke to was most kind and helpful, but our Uber driver on our first night in was the best. He insisted on giving us a tour of his favorite stops before taking us to our hotel, showing us some lovely views of Paris lit up at night, where to find his favorite watering hole, and pointing out his house, which was a bit odd, but we just rolled with it lol. He even gave us half a lemon loaf cake to send us off to our room with something to snack on for the evening.

I admit, we haven't seen the Statue of Liberty in New York yet (that's coming this summer since we had to cancel our Cuba trip last week), but we did make a point of seeing the smaller version in Paris before leaving.

While I don't think we got to experience the essence of the true Parisian culture while we were there, since it was such a festive weekend, I truly loved soaking in as much as we could during our 2 day stay.

Even though we aren't big on going to the same place more than once, I do think a return trip to Paris is definitely in order, but when it's calm. Maybe in springtime or when the first snow of the year hits. Plus, I still need to check off going up the Eiffel Tower and the Catacombs off my travel bucket list :)

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What activity or food would you like to experience first in Paris?