Honeymoon Part 1: Paris

With our pandemic wedding saga finally put to rest, Bae and I set our sights on our honeymoon, which would be our first trip abroad since the pandemic started. It was hard enough to plan a wedding around COVID guidelines, stressed out and overworked vendors from the backlog of weddings from 2020-2021, and so planning a trip abroad in sort-of-post-COVID times seemed like it would be a walk in the park in comparison.

Of course, hardly anything in life is as easy as it seems, and we still encountered minor challenges during our planning and over the course of the trip. I see challenges as learning opportunities in costume, so they’re really just stories to be told. The first issue was that between the wedding and our honeymoon, the two of us got really super duper busy at work. What that meant was much of our trip planning was done late on weekday evenings which resulted in hasty, sub-optimal booking decisions made in the midst of decision fatigue, when neither of us were mentally fresh enough to spend any meaningful effort on price and vendor comparisons. By the time 9 PM rolled around and we were feeling the anxiety of price fluctuations at a time when gas prices were all over the place and the amount of “certainty” with air travel is in flux at best, we booked things just to “have something booked” or “so we don’t have to think about it.” Not exactly a glowing reason to pay a few hundred dollars a pop for the various tickets and accommodations we needed for our trip.

Our departure date couldn’t come soon enough at the same time it snuck up on us. With no shortage of anxiety under my belt and still in the midst of work decompression, we got our things packed and got ourselves to the airport where we realized our first blunder: forgetting a debit card, which meant getting cash from an ATM would be basically impossible. Oops. In any case after a bit of panic, we boarded our Air France flight - Paris, here we come!

A tired Meg who is still decompressing. The excitement hadn’t set in yet.

Air France really delivered on the meal front. Economy class standard meal option was chicken or pasta. The lady who sat next to me ordered a special meal that appeared to be kosher, and it at least looked more impressive than the standard meal.

Chicken option. Came with a sweet cold grain thing, creamed vegetables, a (cold) bread roll, cheese slice, and a surprisingly good mousse-cake thing.

Pasta option. Was pretty tasty, actually, naturally so when you have a trifecta of cheesy cream sauce, chewy pasta, and cooked tomatoes.

We arrived in Paris a bit later than anticipated since our original flight schedule was modified to take off a few hours later (gotta love when airlines change schedules on you) and went straight to our hotel, Best Western St. Germain. The hotel staff were very nice and polite, but our room left a lot to be desired. The room was tiny, as we expected for a 2-star place in the middle of the city, but the real issue was that the ceiling leaked and we had to move to another room. We also had a lot of issues with the outlets not working, so that wasn’t great for our first night in France. In any case, we weren’t going to spend that much time in the hotel room so it didn’t matter in the end.

After dropping off our things, our first order of business was to get some food that wasn’t airplane food, so we ducked into Café St. Placide, which was right across from our hotel. I decided to get myself a Beef Tartare - very decidedly French, which came with a salad and fries, and of course we were also given a bread basket with baguette slices prior to our meal - something we very quickly came to expect at just about every cafe.

Beef tartare - very sour with the pickled vegetables and tomato. I would not normally describe beef as “refreshing,” but in this case, it was!

In any case, we arrived on a weekday so we decided to meander over to the most touristy parts of town first. We used Google Maps to bookmark some spots and spontaneously created our route to overlap them where we could. David was particularly interested in visiting the Louvre. By the time we finished eating, it was just about early afternoon, so we walked over to the 1st arrondissement to check out the area. Luckily, it wasn’t very crowded, and it only took about 10-15 minutes for us to get through the security line and enter the museum.

The line to get a closer look at the Mona Lisa. We enjoyed it from afar and marveled at the crowd of people taking phone photos, myself included.

Right across the Mona Lisa is this incredible painting which had no line at all.

Like a kid in a candy store, I was most excited about visiting all the wonderful patisseries in the city that I could - not just to taste pastry, but to see how my homemade versions stacked up. Turns out, my attempts at pastry weren’t too shabby, and in fact, sometimes better than store-bought (though, obviously, I’m biased).

Cakes, tarts, eclairs galore!

Couldn’t help but visit Sadaharu Aoki’s Paris location to try some of his pastries. Unfortunately, the wasabi flavored macaron was a loser. The matcha tart with caramel was delicious, albeit verging on too sweet for me. Probably should’ve gone for one of the cakes.

Precision is clearly valued.

David and I love sourdough, so we took every opportunity to try some delicious pain au levain and we were not disappointed!

So many varieties!

And of course, we just had to have croissants, which I think we may have had nearly daily, sometimes multiple times a day.

Honestly, you could get croissants from practically any bakery, but I love them warm, so getting them from a cafe isn’t really a shabby idea.

Just look at those buttery, crispy layers!

The day we flew in, we had been awake for about 20 hours and by late afternoon, we were really feeling the fatigue. We decided that at the very least, we would have dinner and watch the Eiffel Tower sparkle before turning in for the evening. The melatonin we brought with us helped us adjust to the time zone quickly, but we felt like we were sleepwalking by the end of the day!

A delightful tree-lined path on our way to the Eiffel Tower, located in the 7th arrondissement.

Italy is right next to France, and this Italian restaurant we stopped in (which was one of the few non tourist-trap-y and non sold-out restaurants in the area) did not disappoint with its beautifully plated and delicious fare.

We did our best to have something that wasn’t pastries as our meal.

Following dinner, we enjoyed some sparkles on the green space by the tower before heading back to St. Germain.

We slept incredibly well that night, and we were ready to take on our baguette bread making class at La Cuisine Paris - a cooking school that offers classes in English! We made baguettes, of course, as well as pain d’épi, fougasses, and flutes. I had to find myself some espelette pepper from the grocery store before I returned to the states, as this was the first time I had used it on anything!

First time using fresh yeast!

The class was a few hours long, but fortunately, we were able to snack on our bakes!

Our fougasses, before going in the oven.

Our Pain d’epi and Baguettes

We had so much bread and nowhere to store it, plus other things to try, so we were able to eat some of it but unfortunately had to let some of it stale before we could eat it :(

After our class, we explored some more, and hit up L'Eclair De Genie which our instructor recommended to us. I was surprisingly disappointed by the choux, which felt thick and rubbery - not the light crispiness I was so used to when I made choux at home.

They were pretty though!

We chose the vanilla pecan.

You can’t really go wrong with pastry cream, but this felt heavy and dense, which is not my preferred texture for eclairs.

After our snack, we went to Trouble Obsessionnel Culinaire, where I marveled and ogled the selection of baking supplies. I didn’t want to haul too many things with us at the very start of our trip, so we didn’t come away with anything.

So many tart rings!

The next morning, we were slated to fly to Geneva. Because we were so jet lagged, I was up at around 3 or 4 in the morning, and my first thought was croissants. David was kind enough to humor me and walk a mile or so to La Maison d'Isabelle right as they opened, which meant warm, fresh croissant!

Oh my gosh.

And that experience didn’t stop us from having yet another croissant with our breakfast a few hours later.

Did I mention they were kind enough to warm it up for us?

We had a bit of a snafu as we had planned to visit the catacombs that day before our flight, but somehow we had booked a ticket for the wrong day - apparently there was some confusion around the days and time zones when we booked the tickets, so we were turned away at the gate. Ah well. C’est pas grave.

We agreed that we needed to come back to Paris, but for the time being, we readied our bags to head back to Charles de Gaulle for our flight to Geneva. Au revoir, Paris!