Lis and Tyler in Germany

I’m sitting down to write this post with a hot cup of delicious coffee, thanks to my sweet friend Katie who heard my cries and sent Starbucks and a french press.  Oh how I love a hot cup of coffee.  And while I am not “addicted”, per se, I do miss the wild and crazy abundance of coffee shops that surrounded us in Seattle.  “Coffee to go” is a brand new thing here and, funny enough, McDonalds is the company picking up the trend.  They have McCafes, the first of which we saw in France, but now we’ve seen a couple go up here in Germany.  They look like a McStarbucks.  They have a dessert case, a huge menu on a board behind the counter with a million ways to order your caffeine, nice chairs and tables, a surprisingly nice ambiance.  But, being the snob I am, I haven’t even tried the McCafe coffee.

Yesterday we went to France for water again, and it reminded me of what a great time Tyler and I had there and what an amazing country it is.  You cross the boarder from Germany to France and things change immediately.  The buildings and store fronts are more quaint, you buy mustard in beautiful little glass containers (I can’t even use the word jars), your bread comes with a little square of paper around the center, not a bag, there are teeny tiny cars everywhere and, of course, the language.  It’s still funny to me that you cross the boarder and the language changes.

Tyler and I took the train to Paris and took the metro from the train station to the Latin Quarter, where our hotel was.  I will always remember coming up from the subway right into the middle of Paris.  We stayed at my grandma and Hans’ favorite hotel, Hotel Bresil, which is ideally located and fairly inexpensive.  In the morning we’d get a crepe and walk through the Luxembourg gardens or sit at an outdoor cafe and have the petit déjeuner (baguette and/or croissant, butter, jam, coffee or tea).  Then we’d hit the ground running.  We saw a ton of Paris in just a few days.  One day we walked Avenue Champs Elysses, the famous shopping district, to the Arc de Triomphe, then caught a tour boat on the Seine and stopped at the Eiffel Tower.  We went to a grocery store and bought bread and cheese (a huge round of brie–in a perfect little package, of course–for a buck) and then took it to a bench in the park below the tower.  It’s funny, tourists were swarming right under the Eiffel Tower, waiting to go up, taking pictures, finding their group…but just a few hundred feet away was this very nice, very empty park.

I think my favorite part of Paris was the walks at night over the bridges around Notre Dame.  We’d just walk and walk and then find somewhere to sit for dinner and then walk some more.  We’ll have to go back, there’s so much we didn’t do and so much I would love to do again.