Perfect Paris Night - Perfect Paris Morning

The great thing about our vacation was the pace.  We didn't rush around trying to see everything.  That would be 1) impossible, 2) insane, and 3) exhausting.  We spent plenty of time just chilling and people watching and soaking in the culture.

After a morning of sightseeing, a picnic in the afternoon, an afternoon of wandering around, and delicious dinner there was nothing left to do but to find the perfect cafe.  So, we ended each night the same way:

Eat crêpes, drink coffee (Gana sipped hot Cognac), sit back for a few hours and just enjoy.  We are in Paris after all.  Time to savor the moment.

Crêpes sucrées with crème Chantilly.

The view from our table

After we were sufficiently relaxed we spent a little more time wandering around the City of Lights at night.  In the morning, we had breakfast at a cafe near our hotel.  Croissants and café crème.  A stroll in a book shop and then a little shopping for our picnic.

Bread and pastries

 Fresh fruit

Cheese heaven

Gana snapped this picture and then waited for me outside.  He couldn't handle the stench aroma.  I hardly knew what to get.  I wanted a wedge of everything!  Thankfully the shop keepers let you purchase small quantities, so I could choose several different things to try.

Forgive the long quote, but I simply adore it and can't decide how to edit it:

GK Chesterton on cheese, "My forthcoming work in five volumes, `The Neglect of Cheese in European Literature,' is a work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that it is doubtful whether I shall live to finish it. Some overflowings from such a fountain of information may therefore be permitted to springle these pages. I cannot yet wholly explain the neglect to which I refer. Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if I remember right, refers to it several times, but with too much Roman restraint. He does not let himself go on cheese. The only other poet that I can think of just now who seems to have had some sensibility on the point was the nameless author of the nursery rhyme which says: `If all the trees were bread and cheese' - which is indeed a rich and gigantic vision of the higher gluttony. If all the trees were bread and cheese there would be considerable deforestation in any part of England where I was living. Wild and wide woodlands would reel and fade before me as rapidly as they ran after Orpheus. Except Virgil and this anonymous rhymer, I can recall no verse about cheese. Yet it has every quality which we require in an exalted poetry. It is a short, strong word; it rhymes to `breeze' and `seas' (an essential point); that it is emphatic in sound is admitted even by the civilization of the modern cities. For their citizens, with no apparent intention except emphasis, will often say `Cheese it!' or even `Quite the cheese.' The substance itself is imaginative. It is ancient - sometimes in the individual case, always in the type and custom. It is simple, being directly derived from milk, which is one of the ancestral drinks, not lightly to be corrupted with soda-water. You know, I hope (though I myself have only just thought of it), that the four rivers of Eden were milk, water, wine, and ale. Aerated waters only appeared after the Fall.


"But cheese has another quality, which is also the very soul of song. Once in endeavouring to lecture in several places at once, I made an eccentric journey across England, a journey of so irregular and even illogical shape that it necessitated my having lunch on four successive days in four roadside inns in four different counties. In each inn they had nothing but bread and cheese; nor can I imagine why a man should want more than bread and cheese, if he can get enough of it."

Entire passage, definitely worth the read, here.