Day 5 of France Trip 2010
Yeaaaa buddy, look at that arch! I’m on the way to become yet another stereotype tourist here in Paris. Day 5 was about seeing the Arc and eating lots of food. It was probably the most food heavy day so far. It probably doesn’t start off as you might imagine… and I’ll get to that in a minute. But I just want to mention that the trip is almost over and the blogging might come to an end after this post. I just can’t keep it up during vacation, yo! This is vacation, after all. So we go from one famous arch to another…
Golden arches baby! In Paris! Near the other Arc! Yeaaaaa buddy. I know it’s odd to eat McDonald’s in Paris. Here, the motivation matters. Steph has been telling me that Mickey Dee’s in France is different than those in the U.S. For those of you who’ve traveled internationally, you know that there are menu items overseas that we don’t get domestically. Here, they have a special sandwich that they claim is The American! It’s THE BIG TASTY! It’s actually better than the McDonald’s burgers in the U.S.
And then we have McDonald’s macarons. After stuffing our faces full of fast food, I had the smart idea to buy macarons because you just have to… you’re in France, and McDonald’s sells ’em so… yea! We were gonna get two each… then the woman behind the counter convinced us to get five because you get the sixth for free… and that’s how we ended up with six very average macarons. They’re nothing to write home about, so if you’re ever in Paris and you’re a curious American!? BUY ONE! Just one!!
So what you do after all that? You climb to the top of the arch! Yes!!!! And you do touristy things like take pictures of Paris from the top. I tell you, seeing Paris from a birds-eye view.
We walked by the Louvre but didn’t go in because we needed time for the other stuff, the food stuff. We have more time for museums later, but first… we need to eat some pastries…
Laduree! Woo! Apparently they have a sit-down area in the store on rue Bonaparte. The dining room is flanked by an over-priced candle store and the take-out store. The most interesting thing for an America about this dining room is that you see the price markup between the take-out and the included gratuity that’s in the price. I have a lot of say about this subject but not during the vacay yo.
So let me show you a $10 bottle of juice. Yup, ten buckaroos. Who is this? Danny Moneybags?! We all do things on vacation that we don’t normally do. What happens in Paris, goes into the coffers of Parisians. Ten dollars? WTF was I thinking? Yea it was good. Fuck.
So I told you the take-out section is next to the sit-down section… well they take the pastries straight out of the take-out portion of the store. Then they bring it to you. So if the pastry is a little damaged like the one you see above, they serve it, and charge you $10 bucks. Damn. Laduree pastries were a disappointment in that they weren’t so super awesome. If you want some, do take-out. There’s a park a little ways down from the store… after you walk by Pierre Herme…
But come on, I’m no idiot. You go to Laduree, you buy some macarons too. We took eight and tried them all. Some of the ones were bombs. The cherry seemed to miss flavor and one with some lime where the citrus flavor was super duper strong. One thing to note is that the outter crust is cracklin’ good. As opposed to…
Pierre Herme! We just took three of these because I mean… eleven macarons with two people is a lot, especially when the two people both eat two pastries a piece. The Pierre Herme macarons were more solid all around. There was an olive oil that was divine. It had the spot-on flavor, chewy innards, and ample filling. It didn’t have the crisp outer shell that Laduree macarons had. All your cookies are belong to Pierre Herme, but it wasn’t an all out win for that one thing.
But the pastries… oh the pastries… these are wet dreams. These are the things that battery powered ‘rabbits’ can’t do for you. And this the one vacation food blog post that makes really obscene and unnecessary references like that. But damn yo, get yourself some desserts. Sit your ass on a park and enjoy life. If this is to be the last vacation post, I hope y’all have a good weekend. Next week we resume normal operations. Peace out! J’adore Paris!
Posted by Danny on April 16, 2010 at 8:30 am
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