Once Upon a Time... At the Paris Police Station

There are many stories in our lives. This is just one of them.

November 2, 2017 Friend of ours visited us when we lived in Toulouse, France during August of 2017. The couple and their son spent some time with us in Toulouse, then continued on to Paris where the husband unfortunately lost his wallet. It was possibly stolen on the metro. They filed a police report, but nothing was resolved before they returned to the United States. Weeks later, the police contacted him and said it had been recovered. We fabricated a letter in English and French to authorize us to retrieve it.

Then, during the kids' school break in October/November, we initiated a trip to Budapest-Vienna-Prague-Munich-Paris (as you do). Dan joined us in Budapest. The Budapest-Vienna-Prague part of the trip included my parents. The Munich-Paris leg was just me and the boys. I know there is a Dracula story in there that should be told as well, but that is for another time.

When we finally made it to Paris, we stayed at an AirBnB that was a bit off the beaten path, but located near the police station where we needed to retrieve the wallet. We went to an amazing restaurant for breakfast while waiting for the police station to open. As it was off the beaten path, there weren't tourists, so the proprietors of the restaurant were actually nice to us:) And the food! It was the best French breakfast we have ever had. It was necessary to get this picture out into the world to show you the amazing breakfast. I apologize for inducing drooling.

After breakfast, we went to the police station, put our bags through the metal detector and found that Alex was carrying like 8 bottles of water. I have no idea why. For those of you who know Alex now, this will not surprise you. The police officer who was on metal detector duty just kept pulling water bottles out of the backpack. I shrugged, made incredulous hand geustures, admonished Alex, and tried to say, "He is a crazy child." in French. It probably came out, "He is fire."

Once we got inside and were actually able to wait in line, it was so slow that the guy in front of us a few places actually fainted! Emergency services had to be called. Turns out we were in the wrong line on the wrong floor, which we found out after we left the crazy line to investigate elsewhere. We got the wallet back, minus the cash, obviously, and saw the ambulance leaving when we departed. But at least we had been fortified by the earlier amazing breakfast!

If you can be a well-behaved tourist, I highly recommend the restaurant Café Arthur et Juliette in Paris. It looks like it is still there. And, according to recent pictures, they have other meals beyond breakfast!

Awesome Things in France - Bread

The bread in France is excellent. And comes in different versions. The most commonly thought of is the baguette. But there are flutes, campagnettes, brioches, croissants, and many others. 

Cutting bread is not something most people contemplate as an issue of the day. But we contemplate it much during our mass consumption of bread. Normal cutting boards have this problem if you cut lots of bread.

Crumbs Accumulate on top of the board

Here, the good designers at IKEA have come up with this bread cutting board with integrated knife storage. 

Crumbs captured under the surface of the board

One aspect of our massive bread consumption in France is that the boys are now allowed to use the bread knife. They have developed advanced bread cutting skills and have lost no fingers yet.

In our prior US based model of bread consumption, we ate many bagels. Our bagel consumption was so prevalent that we had basically given up buying sliced bread, opting to purchase dozens of bagels at Costco instead. This led to Will's invention of the leaning tower of bagel. This epic creation involves a bagel topped with scrambled eggs, a sausage patty, and acacado slices. The avacado slices give the bagel sandwich its leaning quality. 

We have tried to duplicate this food architecture here in France. Unfortunately it is difficult. The kids have determined that they don't care for the common preparation of sausage here. It is a bit too corse for their liking. The avocados never seem to be ripe at the time we like.\

And bagels!  They are difficult to acquire here.  If you buy them from the bread section of the grocery store, they aren't really bagels.  They resemble bagels in that they are round shaped bread with a hold in the middle.  We do have a few bagel stores around including Bagelstein and Brugger's.  Bagelstein tends to allow us to buy bagels on their own and take them home.  Brugger's initially told us that it was not possible and that we had to order individual bagel sandwiches, not plain bagels.  But finally, after asking a few times, Brugger's came up with this:

Take Bagels Home!?!

The first time I tried to order it, the bagel girl looked at me in confusion.  I had to point to the sign a bunch to get her to understand what I liked and say, "emporter a la maison" or something similar.  It was just not a concept that was common here.  

In actuality, we have given up, for the most part, on acquiring bagels and are quite happy with our massive campagnette consumption.  Plus, the bread delivery guy is kind of cute:)

Is that a campagnette in your jersey?