Makes me laugh

Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places. One of their annual missions is the No Pants Subway Ride.

10 Things I Loved About Paris (not in any specific order)

1. Our street: We stayed on a quiet residential street in the 7th arrondisement a block away from the Champ de Mars park just south of the Eiffel Tower. You could see the Eiffel Tower from our street. There was a street lined with markets one block the other direction, Rue Cler. Rue Cler had everything. Butcher shop, bakery, flower market, cheese shop, fish market, cafes, restaurants, creperies, everything. We even had a metro station just around the corner, which made it super convenient to get anywhere in Paris.

2. Croissants: I loved getting up every morning and visiting our local bakery and buying croissants for breakfasts.

3. Parisians and their dogs: Parisians love their dogs. Everywhere women walking their dogs, sitting at cafes with them, carrying them. It was so cute.

4. Cafes: I love the street cafes and how people just sit and sip coffee and people watch.

5. The Metro: I love the convenience and efficiency of the Paris metro system. I love how cheap it is and how easy it is. It is the best in Europe.

6. Dinners in Paris: Multi course events that usually don't start until 8pm. Most restaurants didn't open for dinner until 7:30pm. We ate dinner every day around 8:30 or 9pm and then didn't get done until 11 or 11:30pm. My favorite dinners were at Chez Janou and Le Grand Colbert. Chez Janou was in a quiet back alley. Tiny and cramped. Young and hip. Loud and funky. Food was incredible and well worth the wait. Le Grand Colbert was exactly that...grand and the Paris of your dreams. Opulent and yet cozy. It was featured in Something's Gotta Give.

7. French baguettes: Long and crusty. I could eat them all day long.

8. The Eiffel Tower: Strangely there really is something incredibly romantic about it.

9. The language: Every thing sounds better in French. Je t'aime Paris.

10. Versailles: Okay, not technically in Paris. It's actually a 30 min. metro ride outside of Paris. But it's fabulous. The Palace, the gardens, the grand canal in the gardens, Marie Antoinette's house, Marie Antoinette's Hamlet (a little peasant village she created on the grounds) I love imagining what life would have been like.

Good Morning from Paris

It is 10am on a Friday and we have already had an exhausting two days. We left on Wednesday and flew into Chicago at 2. Our flight from Chicago left at 5:30pm and we were in Paris by 8:45am on Friday. We took the train/metro into Paris, found our hotel and dropped off our stuff and headed straight to the Louvre. Most people would probably need to rest at the hotel for a little bit, but not us. We needed to get stuff done.

Of course now we're tired, but need to head to off to the markets. We are staying the Rue Cler neighborhood in the 7th arrondisement two blocks from the Eiffel Tower. The markets are just one block over. Time to peruse for some food. Yum!

song in my head

1,2,3,4 from Lucid Online on Vimeo.