It's a good thing I can't afford this side of Paris regularly

Because that would be really dangerous. Monday and Tuesday with Shuli and my mom have been filled with food and drink.

Monday morning we met to try to go to Rose Bakery for brunch, but it was closed on Monday. Oh, France. We did find another cute cafe and had a delicious omelette for breakfast. Then they accompanied me over to campus where we shopped for a bit and then I went to class. After class, we we grabbed a salad and then tried to go to the St Ouen Marche aux Puces (flea market). Unfortunately it was closed or gone or whatever by the time we got there and found it, so it was just a bunch of really ghetto clothing sales. Awesome.

After we refreshed ourselves, we met up with Anne and Ali for dinner in the Marais (despite annoying-ass delays on the 1). We ate at Le Petit Fer au Cheval, which was awesome. I had the fish of the day with an amazing basil sauce, followed by a fruit tart for dessert.

And then we went across the street to La Belle Hortense for wine. My mom fell asleep in the bar after her hot toddy. So hilarious.

Unfortunately to catch the last metro, we had to leave at like 12. Shuli and I went out for a couple more drinks at a neighborhood bar, and then called it a night at 1:30am when the bar was closing.

Tuesday morning started with a delicious croissant breakfast near campus. After I had class, my mom and I went to yoga. Then we went out to Taillevent, one of the best rated restaurants in Paris. It was everything I could ever want. Best meal of my life, hands down. But that is getting it's own blog post.

After dinner, we walked around the Champs Elysee. After an amble to walk off our meal, we took a cab back to my area. Shuli and I went back to Syphax Cafe, the cheap neighborhood bar, and they definitely remembered us. I was only going to have one glass of wine because I was kind of on sensory overload after dinner, but they kept giving us free glasses of wine!! They told us "We love our clients, we have a good heart here, and it's a staff party". It was cute. We stayed way past closing with them, and Shuli and I were just drinking and talking.

So now it's Wednesday, and my mom and Shuli are driving to Belgium while I'm in class all day to get the second best beer in the world. But that's a whole other story.

"That's a lot more countries than I've been in with a lot of people."

Saturday I mostly spent waiting around for my mom and Shuli to arrive, although I did go to yoga and H&M :). They finally called me saying they got to their hotel at like 4 or 5pm. We walked over to my place, and I showed them the apartment and we tried to book tickets to Brussels and stuff. That ended up being way more complicated than expected, but eventually we made it to dinner.

I was starving, and so excited for Cafe de Flore. It's a famous cafe in St Germain de Pres (quickly becoming my fav neighborhood of Paris). It's been around for a hundred years or more or whatever, and Picasso, Hemingway, and Sartre hung out there, among others. Pretty cool. And the food was still awesome. We split quiche, onion soupe, grapefruit salad, salmon, and foie grois and lentils and a bottle of wine between all of us.

And then we went for dessert at Cafe de Flore -- profiteroles, chocolate tarte, and chocolate ice cream. Mmm.

Next we made our way over to O'Neil's, a microbrewery in Paris, right around the corner from Rue Princesse. We had fun there, and had a couple beers. My mom went home, and Shuli and I went to Frog & Princess for a couple more beers. At like 1am we found some street crepes, came home (Shuli stopped for pullups on the way, of course), and then passed out.

Sunday morning we woke up at 6:50am...ew. We made it to our 9:01am train out of Paris to BRUSSELS. It was a bullet train, which was pretty sweet. It goes like 200 mph. I slept the 1h20 min to Brussels, and when we got there, it was freezing. Even colder than in Paris, like 40 degrees Fahrenheit. After a couple of false starts and misdirections, we found our way over to a neighborhood filled with antiques that my mom wanted to see. Then we found a church that we THOUGHT was the main church. It wasn't -- instead of Eglise Sablon it was Notre Dame de la Chapelle. Too many churches. We finally found Eglise Sablon, which was kind of cool.

But even better was that behind it was the place that is known for having the best hot chocolate in Brussels. We enjoyed some hot chocolate, coffee, quiche, sole, and pomme frites for brunch.

And then we had some more chocolates at a chocolatier. And then some macarons at another chocolatier.

We walked around some more, back through the antique neighborhood and just around. Found some cool graffiti, and the Jewish museum, etc.

Eventually we made our way over to this brewery museum...but of course it was closed! Boo. So we decided to walk to Grande Place, the main historic square in Brussels. On our way we found Mannekin Pis (peeing boy), a hilarious Brussels landmark. He wears costumes from different nations and cultures a couple times a week, and he's been there since like 1600something.

We also found a store called 250 beers, where we stocked up on Trappist beers (to compare to the ones that Shuli and my mom are driving three hours to get from an Abbey in Belgium because it's known as the best beer in the world), beers from the brewery that was closed, and a couple other Belgian specialties.

Then we found Grande Place, which was pretty cool. It's basically a huge historic square surrounded by old gilded buildings. Then we stopped in for a beer, at a place that had a stuffed horse. Awesome. I had Duvel, which was like the classic Belgian beer. It was good.

After warming up, we killed some time by eating a Belgian waffle. Check.

Then we took the metro to Atomium, which is this awesome landmark that was built for the Brussels World Fair. It's a hydrogen atom or something like that, and you can see the city reflected in the balls. We should up at kind of an awkward time, because tours stopped at 6pm (which is when we got there) but the restaurant at the top where we had dinner reservation didn't open till 7:30pm. So we found this like shopping mall/restaurant area nearby and stopped for another Belgian beer. I had Leffe Radieuse, which I really liked. Belgian beer is also like double percent alcohol, which is great, haha. After we killed some time, we went up to the top of the Atomium for our dinner.

We were kind of worried because we had to make a 9:37pm train. It was the last train out of Brussels before the strikes shut down all the trains, so it would have sucked to missed it. We talked to the waiters, and they said if we got two courses instead of three that it would be ok. That was totally fine, because we'd basically been eating and drinking all day anyways. They started off with a gazpacho, and then we got ravioli and mushroom and cheese dishes. Our entrees were salmon tartar, veal, and chicken pot pie.

It was supposed to be this molecular gastronomy restaurant, but clearly was not. It was delicious nonetheless, and you could see the whole city from the top. Then we took a cab to the train station, and made our train home safe and sound.

I just had the best meal of my life

Details to come.

Message coming soon

I PROMISE. Uploading photos has been taking awhile, and I haven't been home enough to sit down and do it. I like updating every couple days though...I'm doing my best.

Because I know there's so many people who care. :)

This one is for Janet

The French all have a trench coat. It's amazing. I swear, it's like a right of passage. Men and women. They don't wear them all the time, but you notice it a LOT more than you do in the US. And they're all super-chic trench coats, obviously, not scandalous or sloppy. They wear them on fall days even when it's not raining, or carry them in their arms when it gets hot. It's just sooooooo French.

[Some random, CLEARLY French girl on a street style blog. Just to illustrate my point.]

Anyways, this week kind of sucked. I've been super exhausted and I had so much work. I volunteered for two 15-20 min exposés, on Tuesday and Wed, so I spent a good part of my weekend and all this week preparing. (One came with a six page single-spaced essay, too.) But of course, we ran out of time in BOTH classes, and they both got postponed until next week. Cool. I mean the hard part is done, but what a pain in the ass.

The French also had another fucking grève (strike) this week. I though it was just for Tuesday, but no, it was Wednesday too. That means that the metro took foreverrrrr and was super crowded and I got groped on Wednesday but a creepy man. Ew. 

But last night was my last real class of the week (short week, I know, haha). I celebrated by getting dinner and wine with Maya, Tahra, and Anne. I had a salad and tiramisu, but didn't take any pictures. Sorry. But it was just what I needed. That and the 2 hour nap I just woke up from.

I'm going to try to get all my work out of the way for the next week so that I can truly enjoy myself -- Shuli and mi madre are coming! Oh, do we have things planned...pictures of lots of good food to come, to say the least.

2 steaming drinks in one weekend??

Yesterday I decided to do some exploring on my own. I went to Colette, which was really cool and way out of my budget range. Then I wandered over to Jardin des Tuilieries, which is apparently only like a 25 min walk from my place. I read in the sun for awhile, it was quite nice. The sun was nice after all the shitty weather last week.

When I came back home I ran into a flea market type thing on the street next to me, so I had some fun looking at everything for awhile.

Then I worked and napped for a bit until I went out. I met Anne and Alisa at Cafe Mabillon in the St Germain de Pres, and then we went over to Pub Saint Germain. We ordered the Scorpion, which was like a big bowl of vodka and random juices, with dry ice in the middle to make it smoke.

Then they were all going to this guy's apartment, and I don't really like him or his friends all too much, so I called it a night.

I have so much work to do, ugh... Two 20 min presentations this week and an essay. WTF, where did schoolwork come from all of a sudden??

Also, I still can't get over how ridiculous this whole broken door this is. The union that represents the landlords in the building decided to blame me and my roommates for a broken entryway door...which I clearly did not do last weekend because I was in Barcelona. My roommates were gone all night that night too, so they didn't do it. But the building is blaming us because we're Americans and it's easy. On Thursday I had to meet with Melanie, the NYU housing coordinator to discuss this. She made us sign our statements and that we understood what the union was accusing us of, and that if they decide to kick us out/blame us for anything else NYU can't do anything about it. And that this could go on our NYU judicial/housing record and we could get kicked out of NYU housing in the future for doing other things??? ABSURD. They have no proof, no video cameras, etc. And I was clearly in Barca. We wrote a letter to the union saying we didn't do it, but I haven't heard back from them. SO glad I'm moving off campus when I get back.

Cheri Bibi, etc

Last night Anne and I wanted to a cute dinner at sunset in Montmartre...but we kind of missed the sunset. By the time we got to Cheri Bibi, it was definitely dark. We had to walk through kind of a sketchy neighborhood to get there, but when we did, it totally lived up to the reviews. For 26 euros, we got entree + plat + dessert, and drinks were only like 3 or 4 euros each. The place was charming -- very modern but also French. Because we didn't make reservations, we had to sit at this communal table, which was kind of awkward to eat from, but whatever.

I started with a  pea soup...

And then salmon with figs.

Anne and I switched to share: she got chicken.

Then I finished with a tiramisu and she finished with a chocolate pear crumble.

It was such good food. We're definitely going back there. After we finished our meal, we wandered over to another bar/restaurant that was supposed to have a fun crowd. We ran into Montmartre...

We get to La Famille, and all the drinks have dry ice steam coming out of them! They're like mojitos and caipirinha drinks, and they all had candy and were so strong...what more could you ask for. Anyways Anne and I started talking to this guy, and he was like in an orchestra/quintet that traveled the world and was just back in Paris for the night. He was gonna buy us a drink but then he had to run home really quick? (He lived around the corner, apparently.) So Anne and I are chilling and Maya comes to join us. She says this sounds really sketch, so we decide to peace before the bartenders realize that we never paid for our first drinks.

We're wandering around, trying to decide what to do next, when we see a cafe/bar that looks fun. We decide to stop in so Maya can eat, and we dance in our chairs and read the fun writing on the wall. There was a guy wearing an NYU Hockey shirt, but apparently he was French. Weird.

We decide to go to Cafe Oz, which is free for girls on Fridays. We cut a shitload of people on accident and get in...super trashy. Fun American music (I get sick of French techno quickly) but there were too many creepers. We walk across the street, and basically the same situation. At the third place on the OTHER side of the street, finally find a good place to dance without being too grabbed/yelled at. One guy did grab my face to try to kiss me though...EW. We dance until like 2:30, and then call it a night. We were dripping sweat.

Pole dancers at Cafe Oz.

Oh also, I got told "Hakuna Matata, sexy." K. French guys make really aggressive creepy comments all the time because apparently French girls are prudes so they have to be aggressive...