Monday 

Leaving work late Monday night…Still makes me smile that I can see the beam of the Eiffel Tower circling above the building next door.

Proper labeling if I ever saw it!

Checking a restaurant off the list! Chez Denise is over 100 years old, and it’s in Les Halles, where the gigantic city market was located for years.

Went with Maygan, Kyle, and their two friends in town, Kerri and Justin…

…and got the same thing as Anthony Bourdain when he featured this restaurant in the first episode of No Reservations: Blanquette de Veau.

Picnicking Season is officially open!! For the first time in 6 months, it’s warm enough to sit outside in the sun.  Oh how I’ve missed it!

Make that a double picnic!!  In honor of opening day of Picnicking Season, I had two picnics. Lunch AND dinner.  It was glorious.

Friday

Celebrating a friend’s birthday with wine, cheese, charcuterie, & tartines.  The best part was the appetizer…

We had difficulty finding a place that would feed 20 people, and continued to get rejected wherever we went.  It was getting late and everyone was really hungry, so the birthday girl bought cans of Pringles from a convenience store across the way to tide everyone over, and someone else got sushi to go as we waited for the food.  Pringles & sushi, bon appetit!


Saturday

Jillian and I got invited to a new private bar that just opened.  It’s so private that the front is an unmarked all black facade with no windows and just a buzzer.

St. Patrick’s in Paris? No thank you, ever again. We went to meet up with coworkers at an Irish pub, expecting jovial Irish jigging and the like.  When we arrived. people were pouring out onto the sidewalks in both directions, you could barely squeeze your way inside, shuffling along smashed in between other people, where it smelled like a frat house, was 1,000 degrees, and they played traditional Irish rave music.  No wait, just rave music.  With strobe lights. At the loudest possible volume for human ears to handle before bursting into flames. They must have been trying to thin out the crowd, and it was working.  Jillian and I politely stayed for 4 minutes before squeezing our way out of the techno sweat house of insanity.

On the opposite end of Saturday night…I wrapped up the week with a wonderful Sunday spent an hour outside of Paris with a French family!  Maygan & Kyle met a French couple, Phillipe and Martine, while on vacation in Prague, and they were invited for a Sunday lunch!  Since the Frenchies didn’t speak much English, and Maygan and Kyle don’t speek much French (oh my gosh-“speek”. I’m leaving it. Couldn’t be better.), I was happily invited along to help translate.  We had a long, multi-course meal with lots of laughing over the silliness of trying to speak in another language and the difficulties we each find with the other’s language.  Their son, Maxime, helped translate as well.  After a nice long lunch, we went for a walk to the nearby 13th century chateau, and headed back to Paris around 6pm.  It was my first time since moving here to hang out with a French family, and they were wonderful!  We’re already dreaming up what we could make to invite them over for a proper Tex-mex feast!  Velveeta can be mailed to 3 Avenue de Champaubert, Paris, France, 75015, should you feel so inclined.