We took a flight to Paris yesterday afternoon.  It’s an 11 hour flight and a 9 hour time difference so you don’t actually “lose” that much time.  We got really lucky and got front row bulkhead.   Lots of legroom.

We spent the last few days in Paris.  We stayed with friends in Versailles (45 min by light rail outside of Paris) for two of the days and then stayed right in the Marais for the other three nights (less than a 10 min. walk to the Seine, the Louvre, Notre Dame etc).  We did a lot of shopping (shoes!) since we arrived for the last bit of the “soldes” (twice annual country-wide sales where the price keeps going down every week).

We also went back to the Orangerie for the first time in years (it’s been closed for 6 years for renovations).  It’s got two amazing oval rooms with 4 giant Monet water lilies in each, so you feel completely surrounded.  You can check out their virtual visit here if you’re interested: http://www.musee-orangerie.fr/homes/home_id25184_u1l2.htm

We went back to the Orsay as well – it’s the largest Impressionist art gallery in Paris – lots of Monets and Renoirs, etc.  We’ve been several times but it’s still really awesome.

We spent some time in Montmartre (artists’ area) and got our portrait drawn in chalk?  We think it’s chalk. Anyhow, it took an hour and a half, so we each had to sit still for 45 min.  Not as easy at it might seem. We also bought a painting.

We took several walks along the Seine (river that runs through Paris) and walked from the Louvre down through the Jardin de Tuileries (sculpture garden) down the Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triumphe again.  Paris is still amazingly beautiful no matter how many times you’ve been there.

Our friends very kindly took us out to dinner (L’As du Falafel – our favorite restaurant in Paris) and the theatre Friday night.  We saw a comedy and it was a cool experience.

Saturday night we accidentally wound up in the middle of more theatre again.  We had walked by this vegetarian restaurant the night before and so we decided to eat there.  They were filming this tv show, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.  Yeah, well we should have found out the name of the TV show before we decided to go to dinner…  From what we understand the premise is that Chef Ramsay comes and rescues a struggling chef.  Only they hadn’t gotten to the rescue part yet.

We sat down only to be told that while there were 6 things on the menu, only 3 were available.  2 of them sounded good so we ordered.  Our waitress goes off to give the chef the order and we hear her saying “So tell me what exactly we DO have on the menu tonight!” and then she tells him that something is burning and he says something and she
tells him “How can you tell me that it’s normal that things are burning???  It’s all burnt now!”

Anyhow, she came back with the news that there were now only 2 things on the menu, so we ordered those.  They were also out of wine.  At one point the two waitresses asked the chef to leave because it would go better with them in the kitchen and Ramsay suggested that they might as well close for the night because this was the worst he’d ever seen.  Anyhow, in the end the couscous was crunchy, there didn’t seem to be any goat cheese or hazelnuts in my goat cheese and hazelnut torte and it was quite burnt.  Actually Gordon Ramsay walked by on his way out of the restaurant to talk to the cameras and the waitresses about the situation (they kept leaving in tears).  As he went by we pointed out to him that my meal was a little burnt and he responded that it wasn’t a little burnt it was a lot burnt!

It was pretty entertaining in the end.  Lots of the waitress/owner yelling at the chef that he had to be doing it on purpose cause no one could be that slow and asking him if he was doing it on purpose just to spite her.  In the end she suggested to us that maybe he’d knocked back a couple of valium, cause she’d never seen him that bad.  Now we’ll have to watch for it on TV.  [Here’s part of the Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmare’s episode where we were interviewed about our meal].

(So, since we’ve been back it turns out we were the last people on Earth to hear of Gordon Ramsay and all our foodie friends can’t believe we’d never heard of him!  Oops!)