French Quarter Quarterly

Whew, it's becoming harder and harder to catch up from my blog backlog! OK, prep yourself for some lame posts. Oh well, at least I have some pictures.

Steph had another work trip to Paris in late August/early September, which she craftily extended through the weekend for some R&R and invited her husband (me!) to join. All in the spirit of honoring our half-serious oath upon departing Chicago for Europe to visit our favorite city quarterly, we've surprisingly almost achieved that goal this year--our third visit in nine months.

I arrived Friday afternoon and after rendezvous'ing and situating ourselves at our favorite Hyatt Madeleine, we headed to a classically Parisian quaint grocery-shopping street for wine; Steph (who has been refreshing her French with a weekly tutor) impressed both the wineshop staff and me with a fairly full French conversation regarding our wine options. We promptly carried the bottles to a lovely dinner at the downtown apartment of one of Steph's coworkers, where we spent the remainder of the evening.

Saturday we again repeatedly rented the all-too-easy and so-available Vélib bicycles to explore Paris as we love to do. We checked out the city's outskirts, visiting the canal district for a very neighborhoody and different feel than downtown. We hunted down a recent award-winning bakery (and that's saying something, given just a bit of competition in the city) and over-ordered all manner of sweet and savory baked goods, which we promptly biked to a nearby park and scarfed on a bench. Cruising back into the city center in the mid-afternoon, we stopped at a lively Bohemian bar called Chez Prune for a beer before returning to the vicinity of the hotel. We shopped briefly at our favorite food shops around the Madeleine church (and peeked in the window of 2007's MOTY champion Maison de la Truffe) before the mandatory Saturday afternoon nap, necessary to pass our non-eating time more quickly.

We hit a neighborhood wine bar to warm up for dinner, a simple restaurant known for its steak frites; we make a point of eating steak outside of Switzerland, where the price-to-value relationship is a bit too out of whack by our spoiled U.S.-beef eating standards. We stopped at another café for a final nightcap glass of wine, until we realized how close we were to Harry's New York Bar (we've visited before), where we stopped again for a final-final nightcap. Harry's dates from the early 1900's; it's decked out with a fascinating array of throwback (authentic) U.S. university banners (which creates a weird sense of nostalgia) and is widely credited as the birthplace of the Bloody Mary in the 20's. They haven't lost a step, as the one I sampled again that Saturday night ranks as possibly the best (or close second) Bloody Mary I've ever imbibed.

Four hours on the train saw us home that Sunday. Chalk up yet another perfectly lovely trip to Paris, although I am slightly concerned how we'll fit in that final trip in Q4. Pictures: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=2hd8fyj.6hn4l8ib&x=0&y=-mcdd8z&localeid=en_US