Food and Weekends

I love weekends.  I love food.  Why not devote a blog post to that?  

So this weekend was good. ^see above photo^ It was my first weekend after having started work, meaning the break was welcome :)

I woke up Saturday "morning" and decided I would actually do something with my day. To recap, I've been to Paris once before (last summer...for like a day and a half) and so I had already seen la tour Eiffel, l'Arc de Triomphe, etc. etc.  But I didn't get to see some of the other sites that Paris has to offer.

I've made a deal with myself that I'll spread the touristy stuff out and that I'll try to do more of it later, when the tourists have vacated. P.S. Parisians are notorious for their rude, dislike of tourists.  Well, imagine having 27 million visitors in your town every year (44 million if you count the metropolitan area)...That's the entire state of California, plus Utah, coming to visit one city and its suburbs.  And they're loud.  No joke.  Even when talking at generally appropriate levels, something about tourist languages sticks out and makes them seem louder.  Parisians are actually quite wonderful when you make an attempt to appreciate the culture and language (and when you're not wearing a missionary tag...oh, sad.)

Anyway, so I got to my first destination, le Moulin Rouge (not pronounced mulan...I know disappointing.  It's more like moo-land, but without the 'd'...or the 'n', for that matter)

      

Well, there were soooo many people, and none of them were Nicole Kidman, nor Ewan McGregor - Kim and Tacy :( - so I took a few shots and left that one to the tourists. (I do realize that I'm basically a glorified tourist; no judging)

My next stop, almost literally, I think, the next stop on that metro line, was le Sacre Coeur (pronounced sa-cray cur [yes, cur as in pirate-talk]...accents are not my friend on this platform)
  

I climbed a whole lot of stairs, and it was definitely worth it.  It is gorgeous.

They said no pictures on the inside (though there were peeps doing just that) so I took this one of the central door.  The Latin inscription says "SACRATISSIMO CORDI JESU" which, unsurprisingly, means "The most sacred heart of Jesus," or something along those lines.  Once in there, I just took the tour around and then sat in a pew and thought.  It was really beautiful and peaceful. I stayed for mass (led by an actual cardinal of the Catholic church - cool) and then went home. 

Sunday I went to church at the Versailles ward which was also wonderful and that basically concluded my weekend.  Church twice and le Moulin Rouge.  Oh, and food!!
 

This is not necessarily a picture of my meal Sunday night, though it is a good representative sample.  I love eating in France.  It's so simple, but so good.  For example, on a different night, my host family made a salad with just roughly chopped tomatoes, feta, and some sort of balsamic. I could've eaten the entire bowl. "Manners?" Psh.