A Gastronomical Weekend

An early Friday morning train took me to Strasbourg to meet Allie for the weekend! We came into the weekend with an agenda that was based on consuming all of the Alsace specialties (as decided by wiki). Based on our *slight* obsession with food I'm sure none of you are surprised that all of our tasks were completed with ease ;)

Our first lunch was the ever famous tartes flambé. The original tartes flambé is like a wafer thin and crispy pizza with onion, cream sauce, and bacon. Both this and the apple based dessert tartes were delicious! Dinner was composed of a vegetable and a niçoise quiche and a dessert of chocolate and caramel flan, strawberries, and whipped cream -- hopefully this will be more interesting when there are some visuals to match the descriptions. Aside from our meals, the day was spent wandering around the town, seeing cathedral, and looking in every boulangerie and pâtisserie in the city. Allie taught me a very important French phrase: je regarde seulement - I'm just looking.

Day two in Strasbourg began with a breakfast of a nutella croissant and a capuccino at a pâtisserie. Following this was a tour of Kronenbourg Brasseries, a Strasbourg based beer. I learned some interesting European beer

history thanks to my designated translator. Lunch included an appetizer of fois gras (as rich and creamy as I imagined) and main course of choucroute. This is another traditional dish consisting of a mound of sauerkraut and lots and lots of meat. While it was good, the shear amount of meat would deter me from ever ordering it again.

After lunch we decided to take advantage of the fact that Strasborg is very close to Germany. We took a nice walk through Strasbourg University's ghost town of a campus to a beautiful bridge that led over the Rhine and into Germany. I may have put one toe (ok, maybe a bit more than that...) into Germany! There was an extreme lack of border control and I had no trouble returning to France :)

After venturing back to the "legal" side, we has an in hostel picnic before venturing out in the cold rain for ice cream sundaes.

Our Sunday actually included a bit of culture (other than food, that is) with a trip to the modern

art museum! This trip did only last about half the length of our lunch, though :) Our last lunch was made up of beef carpaccio and Baeckeoff, a triple meat, potato, and carrot stew. This was delicious and the perfect lunch for such a cold and rainy day.

Note - mid and northern France in the summer is cold. No one warned me about this and I am very jealous of the 100+ weather you guys are enjoying at home.

After a bit more wandering, Allie left to go back to Germany and I had a a quick donar kebob and

a McFlurry. Yes I did say McFlurry. They're actually suprisingly good outside the US! Tomorrow headed back to Paris to meet Mom and begin the family vacation!

Paris

After dropping my huge suitcase off at IAE (school in Aix) Wednesday morning I made my way to Paris! I like to think that my lunch of a baguette, Camembert, plums, and Nutella was pretty French, but all of the French families eating around me were munching on Pringles. Maybe my assumptions about French food were wrong?

Other than taking a solid two hours to find

my hostel the day was uneventful and was wrapped

up with a champignon and Comte crepe.

My full day in Paris was spent taking a trip to Versailles with my new Romanian friend I met at the hostel. The palace was more than grandiose and it was easy to see why the French Revolution occurred. The day was wrapped up with a night time picture session at and on the beautifully lit Eiffel Tower. Once I'm reunited with my computer I'll include some pictures!

Sara is actually in France!

I made it to France! To do this I had to overcome a 9 hour layover and no sleep on my 7 hour flight due to a brother-sister screaming duo. I have learned my lesson and next time will either have noise cancelling headphones or earplugs with me. Anyways, seeing as it's nearly midnight here and I'm still going I think that I'm doing pretty well!

I got a chance to walk around Aix during my jaunt out to find food and based on that short encounter I think I'm going to really like it here! It's got an old city vibe but still seems to have all the perks of an interesting city. I also passed five bakeries in a quarter mile walk so that's certainly not going to hurt my view of the city :)

Now for all of you who are eagerly waiting to hear what I had for my first meal in France.... I wanted something fast but good so I wandered down an alley and found a little pizza place where I had a fromage blanc pizza with olives, mushrooms, and ham.

Croissants in the morning :)

Hello!

So I've decided to start a blog for this trip in order to keep everyone updated with what is going on in my life for the next six months. Most likely this will also double as a way for me to catalog all of the food I eat while I'm there so don't be surprised (not that any of you would be) if 95% of this blog is pictures of food.

I also cannot promise that I will actually remember to update this. The kumquat4(5) can attest to this based on the shear number of food blogs we started that still remain empty -- Allie, apparently we started one called Sallie in 2009? Anyways, if I seem to be lagging behind please bug me and tell me to update this and to load the vast number of pictures hanging in limbo on my camera onto the internet.

Clearly I should be packing now. Why else would I have procrastinated this long to start a blog?