Our Blog - Paris January 2018 - Day 6

Our last day, and we actually didn't do all that much! After waking up late, having a leisurely breakfast, and then packing and checking out of the hotel, we headed down to Rue Rivoli to Angelina's for Hot Chocolate. Angelina is an institution, really, just steps from the Louvre. Housed in a belle époque salon, it is regularly in the "best of" lists for their desserts (they were in the top 10 for Millefeuille, which we enjoyed with our hot chocolate). The hot chocolate is pure decadence; you just can't imagine how think and rich this is without experiencing it yourself.

Of course, then we had to walk to burn off the 92,000 calories that we had just consumed! From there, we walked through the Place de la Concorde, down the Champs Elysées as far as the Arc de Triomphe (near where we used to live, which we had visited a few days earlier to check out the old neighborhood). Around the Arc to Avenue MacMahon, down as far as the Marché couvert des Ternes. We used to come here, although it seems a lot smaller now than it did. We don't think it actually *is* smaller, but the markets here in Toulouse, especially the ones that we go to every week, are just HUGE! It is not a covered market like those in Toulouse, where they are all stalls under a single roof. These are mostly individual stores on 2 or 3 streets just off Ternes. From there, we walked up towards Montmartre to have lunch at the little bistro that was rated #1 for their Croque Monsieur (basically ... a ham sandwich with melted cheese on top). I always comment that I miss the places in Paris which make the Croque Monsieur with a famous bread from the Poilâne bakery, but this bread was actually really good also ... not just your typical "white sandwich" bread that most of the CM's in Toulouse are made with. We didn't really need much after our Angelina stop, so we just shared a CM along with a small plate of sausages.

We headed back to the hotel from there, grabbed our luggage, and took the metro to Montparnasse. We were able to catch up with our friend Donna, who we met 10 years ago when we were both new arrivals in Paris. We've kept up with her and I think we've been able to meet up with her every time we've been in Paris since we moved away. She is very much now a Parisienne and loves to show people around her adopted home town through Best Friend in Paris. One of the things that I thought was interesting was her Paris Weeks with Cara Black, an American author who has a set of mystery novels featuring a female Paris-based private investigator named Aimée Leduc. I learned about them when I lived there and went read the first several of them. She continues to publish them about once a year, so I'm a little behind on my reading. I guess I need to add them to my Christmas wish list next year! Then we grabbed the train back to Toulouse. Our goal is to spend a week or so in Paris every year, now that it is a fairly short train trip ... or a leisurely drive!