I love shopping in grocery stores in Europe. Maybe there are stores like this in the US, but I have never seen one. I loved all the different kinds of tomatoes, but mostly I love it because of the rows and rows of bread and cheese! It was nice having fresh baguettes to eat every day.
I went with Chris to the paintball field to help set up his booth. I haven’t been to a tournament in awhile, so it was fun to see all his new banners and products.
We drove into Paris with no real plan other than to walk around and explore. We started out by walking over toward the Louvre because we wanted to get to our favorite café for hot chocolate. By the way, it was freezing. So in every post I am wearing the same jacket and one of the scarves I packed. I packed for nice weather. Some days I wore three or four shirts I was so cold… and Chris and I both did not pack good shoes for walking. Chris was going to buy a new pair on the way to the airport but we ran out of time. Secretly I wanted to wear my cute shoes, but I kind of regretted it after walking miles and miles around the city…
We found this cool cookie shop with tons of different flavors of cookies and candies. We tried a few and they were pretty tasty.
This is the display case in Café Angelina. We go there for the hot chocolate, but their pastries are beautiful to look at (and extremely expensive, so we usually don’t bother with pastries since there are a lot of good bakeries in Paris).
This hot chocolate is awesome. I tried hot chocolate at a lot of other cafes, and this one is still my favorite. Pricey, but super dark and thick. And they serve it with whipped cream. And a carafe of water. I had a chocolate tour of Vienna one time and was told that all good cafes serve a glass a water when you order hot chocolate.
Mmmmm…. we bought a package to take home too.
We practiced taking pictures of ourselves – I think this was about the 6th try. See the Eiffel Tower? We are on our way there… on foot.
Chris kept taking my picture when I was making weird faces. You’d think I would learn not to make odd faces, but this was actually the most attractive one out of series of photos that I deleted… I love walking around Paris because half the fun is just seeing all the beautiful buildings and of course, all the beautiful pastries…
Mmmm… pastries! I always spend so much money in Europe on food. So worth it. I also really like the way the little apple tarts that are shaped like roses look. So pretty. I think I will have to try that some time.
We made to the Eiffel Tower! And found a pastry shop on the way. The chocolate mousse cake was really rich and amazing. The big ball had cooked meringue and some chocolate cream inside. It was pretty good, but too sweet. The cream was really good though.
It is surprisingly hard to take a picture of yourself with the Eiffel Tower in the background. We finally made it work. It is funny too, because the only people who ever offered to take a picture for us were American. And we offered to take some pictures of other people too, who all turned out to be American. So maybe only American tourists try to take their own picture in front of the Eiffel Tower.
We bought these little cheeses that had a cute little stamp so you could make a cow stamp on the cheese. Chris liked the French name for stamp.
Then we found this awesome huge spider in the bathroom when we got home that night. I may have shrieked just a little. This picture does not portray how large this spider was. I have never seen a spider this big in my life except for tarantulas. Eeewwww… Made for an exciting end to the day.
