A Circus Indeed

With L&D in town, I had an excuse to put work aside for a few days to explore the city with them. L has exceptional fashion taste and interests, so we spent a day shopping in La Marais. La Marais has both the best food and affordable fashion shopping in all of Paris, in my and others' opinions. We also happened to be wandering during the semi-annual sales in Paris, so it was a good time to be out. We were able to visit both chains (APC and Kookai, for instance) and vintage stores, which were a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, I did not think ahead and a great deal of establishments were closed for the Sabbath on Saturday, so we were not able to experience falafel or any other great food. Instead we ended up at Bar de Cirque on rue Amelot in the 11th for pizza. We had the strangest service experience I've ever had. No fewer than three people asked us what we wanted, put in our order separately, and confirmed our order. Nevertheless, both our drink order and our pizza order came back wrong. And we weren't complicated: we ordered three vegetarian pizzas. That's it. No special order, not even three different pizzas! Yet we received three (yummy) margherita pizzas. Unexplainable. Then all three different people charged us different amounts. Amazing. Disastrous. Don't do it.

After shopping, we stopped for a sit and mint tea at Riad Nejma, and enjoyed each other's company over some really delicious ice cream. We walked to Notre Dame with the hope of entering and managed to get there at the exact time they were closing the doors. Grr. We had another drink at another cafe, and then delicious dinner at Le Grenier de Notre Dame. Boy, I love that restaurant. I had the lasagna, and it was really something. We ended the night with jazz at Le Caveau des Oubliettes, one of my favorite places to be in Paris. I know it's touristed, but I don't care. I love interesting jazz. Let someone else listen to the standards.