Merci!!!

Saturday morning I met Anne for brunch at Rose Bakery. I was so tired because I didn't sleep till 5:30 the night before, but their amazing organic coffee woke me right up. I had the cheese scone, salsa, and scrambled eggs, which was amazing, of course. Something about the way the cheese scone was with the eggs....and then we had this weird pear thing for dessert because the waitress said she loved it. It wasn't my favorite, but obviously still good. 

Then we tried to meet up with Alex at Musee d'Orsay, but after waiting for 45 minutes in the cold we gave up and just went inside ourselves. I started feeling really sick and I had just been to the museum a couple weeks ago so I just sat down while Anne looked at the exhibits. Oh well. 

After a nap and some Tylenon Cold and Flu that I dug up, I felt soooo much better. Anne and I went to Ave Maria for dinner, a really kitschy cool Day of the Dead themed Brazilian place in Oberkampf. Very dark, weird lights, lots of colors. We ordered a drink (slushie cosmos, so good) at the bar while waiting for our table, and these British guys noticed us speaking English and started talking to us. They turned out to be really cool -- one was a linguist, one was a photographer who had taken a 6 week roadtrip across Europe and Asia to raise money for an orphanage, and I don't remember what the other one did but he was really funny. They were all in Paris from London celebrating the one guy's  birthday.  After a couple drinks and talking for awhile, they invited us to join them for dinner. 

The waitress was really mean to us, but we made it fun. She would come over and ask us if we knew what we wanted yet, and we would just be like "uh, we don't have the menus." It was terrible. But the menu was really interesting -- it had all these Brazilian specialties and stuff. I got the Hakuna Matata, which was like stewed chicken and vegetables with salad and exotic fruit and rice. The best one was the "Unhappy Destiny of Emily the Chicken" (in french obviously) and the menu description was a story about how this poor chicken  met some sweet potatoes and they all ended up being cooked. The 5 of us had really good conversation throughout dinner, and then we all split desserts -- this coconut creamy thing with raspberry and kiwi sauce, and "Death by Chocolate", a super rich chocolate cake with chocolate sauce.

During dinner, one of the guys got up to go to the bathroom, and came back and said, "There's a note in the bathroom that just says 'Merci' and has two lines of coke on it. I didn't believe it, but then I tasted it and now my tongue is numb." We were all shocked, and didn't really believe him either. Anne and I decided to go investigate, but by the time we got there, the note was left behind but there was no coke on it. It was on an index card, and it just said "Merci!!!" in blue highlighter. And we found 5 cents and another note, that said "Franck -- Salut. Je t'aime. Gros Bis!" (Franck -- Hi. I love you. Big kisses.) At that point we realized we had definitely interrupted some coke deal-love story. Woops. 

After dinner, they invited us to go dancing at L'Alimentation Generale. After much confusion about which direction it was, we finally made it there and danced till 4am. The name means "General Store" and the decor was really funny, with tires as lamps and random bottles hanging from the ceiling and the menu written on a chalkboard on the wall. The music kept switching between like world music, techno, rap, and random oldies, but somehow it worked. There was also this really drunk guy who kept trying to grab, grope, and hang on to all of us, male or female. Eventually he ended up just hugging the speaker for an hour. Poor guy. This 50 year old man also tried to steal my purse, just like grab it off my shoulder, which was really crazy, but luckily our friends jumped in and helped me out. And around 3am, two of the bartenders got up on the bar and started pouring mint vodka into anyone and everyone's mouth, but one of them had terrible aim and we all ended up very sticky.

One of the British guys took pictures of all of our adventures, so hopefully I can get those later :) I did take some ridiculous ones of everyone dancing though: