We woke up late after visiting the Eiffel Tower the previous night (and resetting our clocks), with the room service knocking on our door. Due to using a discount broker, we didn’t have breakfast included in our hotel. Sure we could pay an extra 12€ for it, but the great thing about Paris is there are Boulangeries (bread shops for those that haven’t played My French Coach on their DS) and street vendors everywhere. And by street food, I don’t mean the ever great street meat, but crêpes, panini and stuff of that sort.

Today’s adventure involved heading over to the Latin Quarter, and since it was on the way, to try and visit Notre Dame again. Guess what, it was raining. So we continued on our way and discovered a Greek neighborhood in some back alleys. This would have been a good place to stop for breakfast/lunch, but it had stopped raining so there wasn’t a good reason to seek shelter. Though, they (every place basically) had in their window these really big shrimp-wrapped-around-tomato shish kebobs that I wanted to try. They also had a lot of Greek men trying to pull you into restaurants. I figured it was a tourist trap, so ignored them (plus no dancing of the table-top variety right).

We opted for street food, we bought a street (limon sucré) crêpe for 2,5€. It was simple and good (although when you do the conversion it doesn’t seem that economical! Every day was kind of the same way. We would wake up, go to our destination and buy something like a 0,75€ croissant or a 4€ panino along the way. Although the street food is not as convenient as I thought it would be, there were only crépes/panini around the tourist areas (but neighborhood Boulangeries were common). The only weird experience we had was ordering a jambon (ham) crépe at what seemed like a Muslim place (they do not eat Ham due to religious reasons). There was a bit of confusion amongst the cooking staff while they were making it, although it could be because we were English-speaking customers; all I can say is if they didn’t plan on serving it, then it shouldn’t be on the menu!

We also stopped in a lot of cafés, sometimes to avoid the rain, sometimes for rest, and sometimes because we were hungry. The cafés were never as busy as I thought you should be, maybe because it wasn’t tourist season or maybe because it wasn’t consistently sunny. They say you should relax at a café and people watch; well the menu is certainly priced for it! A café au lait or would run you about 4€! One day we got a café au lait, a plate of spaghetti, a panino, and a dessert plate and it cost 20€ — that’s $30! The whole people-watching concept conflicting with us though, because we didn’t have the time to idle away an afternoon watching people on Boulevard Saint Germain.

The last thing we were confused about was whether to tip or not. I had read previously that tipping was mainly an American thing (and by extension Canada), and many of the things we normally tip on was not required in Europe. The confusing thing was that our semi-fluency in Français enabled us to kind-of figure out that tips might be included in the price (“Prix net services compris”) except because it didn’t follow academic French structure, we weren’t entirely sure. Of course they didn’t say anything in English since they had to pay the Americans back for that freedom fries thing. We tried observing people and it seemed like they didn’t leave extra cash so I think we were followed correct social behaviour!

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: diary, etiquette, europe, food, france, france08, travelling