**Click HERE to look at pictures from our time in Paris**
Both: Hey everyone!
Jen: It's Jen and Greg with an update on our travels.
Greg: So as promised, this is the second update about Paris. This time we're talking about food and what else?
Jen: Our tours that we did.
Greg: Yes, that's right. So we'll begin with food because we did end up eating three separate times at a place right next to the hotel that we thoroughly enjoyed.
Jen: Yeah. The restaurant was called Le 27 Madame. And everything we ate there was spectacular.
Greg: Yeah, I think the appealing piece was it felt like if we had gone to someone's grandma's house in a little cottage and ate home cooked French food.
Jen: Yeah, because the chef that was there actually said he learned to cook from his mom and from his grandma and used all of his grandmother's recipes. And they have an adorable little maître d'. Her name is Maddy and she is a rescue dog from Ukraine.
Greg: You know what, though? Maddy was great. I loved her. She came over to me several times. She has an Instagram, right?
Jen: She does and I follow her, Maddy in Paris. He kind of takes pictures of her around town. He takes her on his motorcycle and they go riding. So she was a sweet dog and had a pretty cool story.
Greg: Yeah. We had several dishes there, but one that you did want to talk about - the braised duck.
Jen: Oh yeah. I would say that is probably the best meal that we had in Paris. It was a braised leg of duck and it had potatoes and roasted vegetables with it. I really thought about going back again for dinner, but I was too full and I had pastries waiting for me at the hotel.
Greg: Whether it was the duck dish or it was desserts or it was a cheese course, everything was so good…that when we met up with Rosalia and Gary and they asked where we wanted to go -
Jen: (laughing)
Greg: we said, we have the perfect place.
Jen: Right. So we did meet up with Rosalia and Gary, who Rosalia is an agent at Realty Austin - and a friend of mine - and Gary's her husband. And they planned their trip to Paris to be there at the same time we were. But we had a great dinner with them and really enjoyed spending time with some familiar faces. So, hey Rosalia and Gary!
Greg: Hey there! So, other than Le 27 Madame, the big food thing for us in Paris were the pâtisseries.
Jen: Yeah, I think we probably went in just about every one we passed by...
Greg: Yeah we did.
Jen: ...to at least look. We, and we bought stuff at several of them.
Greg: Most of them.
Jen: Exactly. And we bought more than one thing at most of them, so we definitely had our fill of sugar that week. But I think my favorite one that we went to was probably Pierre Hermé on the Champs Élysées. So that was the only thing on the Champs Élysées that we went into. They have probably the best macarons that we had in Paris or that we, we found. I love macarons and they were delicious.
There I go again…it's delicious. Everything's delicious in my world.
Greg: Yeah. We, we use two words all the time, “delicious” and “impressive”.
Jen: Yes.
Greg: But you know, Pierre Hermé had maybe the best pastry that we've ever had. But definitely the best pastry we had while we've been traveling. It was a triple vanilla tart. The crust was perfect. It was three different vanillas, Tahitian, Madagascar, and Mexican. And I promise you could distinctly taste three different vanillas when you took a bite.
Jen: Yeah. And...we wish we would have bought two of those. And I realized, as well, that I think pâtisseries for me are like my art museums. You know, some of those pâtisserie items are works of art in themselves, so it was just fun to go in and look at the counters.
Greg: Yeah. So besides the fancy pâtisserie, we actually went to the one near the hotel the most, La Parisienne.
Jen: I was super excited to find out that this one was about 600 feet from our hotel and would make it super easy to go get baguettes and croissants and everything in the morning. So that's exactly what we did.
Greg: Yeah, I don't want to sound like we were displeased. Everywhere we ate was so delicious in Paris. Again, there was the word delicious.
Jen: They were impressive too. (laughing)
Greg: Yes. Uh, but it was the same meal options pretty much everywhere. And by the end of it, it was getting a little bit old. It was not cost effective to eat at restaurants every meal.
So, you know, it was nice to just grab a wrap or a sandwich from that pâtisserie.
Jen: And one thing we did learn as well — breakfast is not really a thing. We get up pretty early and finding somewhere we could have breakfast food was not an easy task.
Greg: No French people breakfast, I swear, it's coffee and cigarettes. That's what they all do.
Jen: (laughing)
Greg: They might have a croissant or a baguette, but it's pretty much just coffee and cigarettes.
Jen: Yes.
Greg: Well, let's wrap up food there. Um, the big topic that we should talk about for our time in Paris were the numerous tours that we did starting with, Île de la Cité.
Jen: Yes. Île de la Cité actually means “city island”, and it's been the center of Paris going back to, like, 3rd century BC when it was occupied by the Parisii Celtic tribe. So that's where the term “Parisian” comes from.
Greg: Yeah. While we were on that tour, we saw something called the Conciergerie, which was a part of the Palais de la Cité until it became a prison during the revolutions. They call it the conciergerie because the person who ran and managed that thing, kind of like a prison warden, they called a concierge.
Jen: So the conciergerie actually housed Marie Antoinette. We saw both of her cells. She had two because her first one, she attempted an escape, so they put her in more of a secure location in the second one. So we saw both of those. One of the other things that was there was a really cool tribute to all the people who were executed during the revolutions, whether they were politicians or peasants or nobility, they were all together in this wall. And it's just a really neat thing to see, and it covered an entire room.
Greg: Yeah, maybe it wasn't exactly the most appropriate, but I remember that was the point that Ben made a hilarious joke. So Ben and his wife were the other couple on the tour with us. We got along very, very well. We had a similar humor, I think, but when we were in that room and we were kind of looking at names, he just goes, “Oh, did you find Jean Valjean?”
Jen: I laughed out loud, which was probably slightly inappropriate. And our tour guide didn't find it that humorous. (laughing)
Greg: And she got the joke. I think she just thought, like, this is not the place to make it.
Jen: Or she's heard it 5,000 times before.
Greg: Well...yeah.
Jen: Um, but I thought it was funny.
Greg: Yeah. After the Conciergerie, we went to Sainte-Chapelle.
I mean, the whole upper section was pretty much just stained glass.
Jen: It was so beautiful and I wish I could have gotten better pictures because the pictures I have just didn't do it justice.
Greg: It also had incredibly detailed stone work all throughout that I thought was particularly...neat.
Jen: Impressive... (laughing)
Greg: So after we visited Sainte-Chapelle, we walked over to Notre-Dame. Unfortunately, because of the construction still couldn't go inside, but it was kind of really cool to see, you know, Notre-Dame, even if it was just from the outside.
Jen: She did mention that the work is progressing to where they think people will be allowed back in around December of this year.
Greg: Yeah. But. I think the biggest tour that we did was Versailles.
Jen: Whew — where do we begin with that?
Greg: Yeah, so I guess let's begin with the idea that Versailles is huge.
Jen: Yes, like city blocks huge.
Greg: Yeah, I think a neat little fact that I did not realize is that it did not start out that way. Initially, it was…I mean, it was still a palace, but it was smaller.
But over the course of 200 years, each person that controlled France, or at least Paris, added on to or modified Versailles until it was this massive complex that it is now. And, you know, more than one person we heard talking about how seeing the opulence inside of Versailles, you just can't help but really begin to understand why the people revolted when they were all starving, and this is how nobility was spending France's money.
Jen: Yeah. I know there were at least three times that I can think of that I actually said, “this is excessive”. Like it was borderline obscene, honestly.
Greg: I mean, and I, I know it's going to make me sound, I guess, like a hypocrite or a jerk. But like, there was some beautiful stuff in there.
Jen: Yeah. I mean, I'm glad that it was around so I could enjoy it hundreds of years later, but...
Greg: Right. Yeah, I will also say that walking around Versailles was miserable, or at least inside, because it's so many people, mostly tour buses. And at one point there were four separate tours with tour guides. Each one had about 20 people plus the people who came there without a tour - including us - trying to go through an area, one small normal sized door, into a room that had been roped off so that you couldn't, like, spread out.
And so it was an area of probably about 10 to 12 feet wide. And then about 30 feet long, and all four tour guides stopped in that room at the same time with their tours while we were in there whilst other people were trying to get in there. It was miserable.
Jen: Yeah, so we went through the, the house and quickly went outside to the gardens where we could at least get some fresh air and spread out from the throngs of people inside.
Greg: So yes, we went out to the gardens and the gardens were absolutely stunning.
Jen: It's a lot of green, like manicured lawns. And you could look down a straight line of just trees. Pretty cool.
Greg: Yeah. Large bushes, trees, a lot of green, a lot of fountains, some, uh, gravel and concrete that provides all of the walkways and seating areas, as opposed to Keukenhof, which was colorful and flowery. And I mean, it was very different. It was a terrific garden. I think I would rank Keukenhof higher, but I think everybody else would too.
Jen: (laughs)
Greg: Um, but I think that's the best part for me of Versailles. And if I lived in or around Paris, I would probably go to that garden a few times a year just to walk around.
Jen: So we spent a lot of time in there because it was a lot to go through to be able to see the whole thing.
Greg: Yeah. I think we walked nine miles that day.
Jen: Yeah, Probably. My feet said we did by the end of the day.
Greg: Well, I think that's about it for. Paris, part deux. So the next part, we will talk about the museums that we visited, which will be mostly me talking about how great the Louvre is.
Jen: (laughing) But we did see other ones besides that.
Greg: Yes.
