Arrivederci Parigi! Goodbye Paris!

Even though I still feel Italia does coffee better and I didn’t care for the escargot… I fell in love with your charming cafes, architecture, and Chardonnay’s. You are beautiful in the fall, even when it’s raining, and are a great city to spend a long weekend in, getting lost wandering around, and filling up on all the delicious cuisine. But I sure am glad to be back in Italy where I can understand people! Our only plans for a three-day weekend in Paris was to visit the Louvre to see the infamous Mona Lisa and to walk by the Eiffel Tour and Notre Dame. Otherwise, we just wanted to walk around and eat and drink our way through the streets of Paris. We walked through the city with its sidewalks lined with book stalls, fall foliage lining the river, and gorgeous bridges and arches popping up at every turn. We drank all the white wine, ate our way through cheese platters, indulged in French onion soup and beef tartar, enjoyed $20 glasses of French champagne, and ate lunch on the balcony of the Louvre. The weather was pretty dreary and rainy for almost the entire time but we found some warmth in their mulled wine or by ducking into their many corner cafe’s for a coffee or snack to wait it out. I thought it was interesting that the chairs for outdoor seating at the cafe’s all face away from the buildings, not towards each other. Instead, they look out out at the Parisian city and people going about their everyday lives. Italy is similar with a large outdoor seating area in most of their restaurants and cafes as well, however, Italians placed the chairs like they would be found at a kitchen table in a home, with the people facing each other. I adore how many outdoor dining options are available in Italy, but I grew to like the French set up of outdoor dining. I will always remember having to carry our bag full of dirty laundry through the airport because our six bottles of wine that we bought to bring back put us over our bag weight limit! They wanted to charge us 150 euro extra, and the laundry was the only other thing in our bag that we could take out so… do what you gotta do for French wine, right?! Haha. Here are some pieces of our first European adventure outside of Italy since arriving here almost a year ago!

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