Trifecta of food (yesterday) completed, and officially tourists!!

    Seems as if yesterday (Friday) was foodie day - totally unintentional. We ended up going to an Italian place for dinner - very close to the apartment - and again, later than we really wanted. We're slowly moving into the correct time zone...the main problem with eating so late is it's not as easy to go to sleep at a decent time. It was after 2am last night, so of course, that led to a later start than we'd thought. Nothing to worry about though...the beauty of this vacation adventure is NOT having a schedule, and doing whatever seems to be right at any particular moment. No specific plans, no time schedule (except when catching trains and metros and buses...more on that  later...) - just being "relaxed spontaneous." So - here is last night's dinner - I was going to wait to see if anyone could figure out what it was, but it may be more obvious than it was to me...and I know what I ordered!

Lasagne à la forno - a bit too much "forno"... I didn't finish it, intending to take it home, and have room for dessert, and the waiter admonished me, telling me I had to finish it to grow up hahahaha! I told him I was saving room for dessert, and wanted to take the rest home - he obviously didn't listen or understand me (he was speaking English, so I did, too), because he whisked it away and it never came back. Oh well...it was just ok, so no great loss.


Lemon meringue pie - serious meringue here! It was described as "ancienne" - not sure if that meant old-fashioned (it did) or just plain ancient! Luckily, the lemon layer was strong enough to be tasted with the couple of inches of meringue - and it was also dusted with powdered sugar. It was in a shortbread-kind of crust, and really good. I really had my eye on a crème brûlée - we were seated next to the dessert cooler case - but deferred because there was cheese in the lasagne, and I didn't want to overdo dairy. Good second choice, though.

    Ok...enough with the food - at least for now. When we have particularly wonderful food, I'll continue to "share" knowing how much I've enjoyed others' posts of interesting, delicious-looking food. We spent yesterday, in addition to eating, ordering and retrieving our "Paris Pass." It took a lot of adding, discussing, back-and-forth decisions, and we decided to purchase a pass that gave us entry to almost everything (not the Eiffel Tower, and not Giverny) we want to try to fit in while in Paris. We rode a ho-ho (hop on - hop off) bus for the entire loop, and then found lunch (unremarkable, but the place we stopped took liberties with the word "saucisson" - it should have been sausages, but turned out to be hot dogs - how disappointing! Hot dogs are either "hot-dog" or "saucisson de Frankfort" - but it was a casual place, and we guessed the "hot-dog" on the menu must have been the one served to another customer in a baguette) and walked through the outside of the Louvre. It was too late to really get through some places we'd considered whilst (I'm adopting this because every translation here uses "whilst" instead of "while") having lunch - the Louvre, Notre-Dame, Sainte-Chappelle - all were closing before we could get there with time to spend after waiting in line to get in.
  We decided to go to the top of the Arc de Triomphe; there was some sort of military remembrance ceremony with militia (looked like veterans) laying wreaths, singing songs, very official-looking people keeping tourists at a safe distance. View was magnificent - first picture here is when we were on the bus (top level) the first time we stopped at (but didn't get off the bus) the Arc:

And this is from the top of the Arc: (looks much better bigger; I edited out a stranger and the wrist strap of the camera, so it's a little small here)

 Interesting revelation on the way home - about 7:45 pm, we got off the bus at the Eiffel Tower. People in all sorts of groups - couples, singles, families, groups of several people, etc. were sitting on the grass looking at the Tower. Suddenly we realized they were waiting for the Tower to light up - a pleasant Saturday evening activity. The nearby restaurants were practically empty...we walked back and also predicted that they would probably soon be full, as the nightly lighting begins at 8pm. Feeling spoiled, we headed back to the apartment and looked at the view from our windows. We WILL be turning in earlier tonight - have a lot to see tomorrow! Bisous to you! 

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