yet another vacation vacation

We're off on another adventure. Tonight we fly to Valencia, Spain to meet Mary's mom and brother for a 10 day tour. We'll spend a few days in southern Spain, seeing the Alhambra and a bit of the frontier before crossing the Straits of Gibralter and moving through Morocco. That means back to sleeping under the stars in the desert for us. I'm pretty accustomed now to hot showers and a clean sheet, so this is going to be rough.

We'll be following some of the same trail that we did almost exactly two years ago in Morocco. We pick up our car in Tangier and will drive to Fes the night. After wandering the ancient medina of Fes, we'll head out to the big dunes near Merzouga. We'll spend as much time on camels as our butts will allow and then head south, hopefully finding the Tondra Gorge and some nice kasbahs on our way to Oarzazate. The trip will finish up in Marrakech with our flight home on June 4th.

Until then, au revoir.

ps. we'll leave the key to our place under the doormat if you're passing through Paris while we're gone. Just do the dishes before you leave, please.

Starbucks will never make it in Europe...

We headed into the Latin Quarter tonight for the beginning of a two week jazz festival. There's a few shows most nights in different venues and a bunch of the small ones are free. Very cool and cultural and Parisian, right?
There were 4 concerts tonight and 3 of them were in a Starbucks. The Latin Quarter isn't all that big, but there are at least 4 of Seattle's best affront to the Old World in place.
Welcome to the Americanification of Europe. Buy Starbucks stock.

Singing The Baguette Blues

We both love the bread in Europe. A warm baguette with lots of super crunchy crust and moist fluffy innards makes any day better.
Most mornings, I run across the street to get a fresh baguette and then fry up some bacon and eggs to complete a perfect brunch. Yes 'brunch'. It's light out until nearly 10pm here, so we're night owls these days.
So the whole daily fresh baguette thing is great and all, but we've discovered that the grass is not always greener. Several times now, we've bitten into (and been bitten back by) squishy, dense or otherwise boring bread. It's horrible. We're not in Milpitas; this is Paris. We have expectations to be met. The bread should -always- be crisp and yummy.
We've boiled down a few theories to these rules:
4) Don't buy on a Monday morning or after a holiday. The oven just doesn't have its heart into the job yet.
3) Skip it on a humid or wet day. It's just not worth the risk.
2) Think twice if the counter girl says "blahblah pas bien blahblah"
1) NEVER EVER buy at the Naturalia grocery. Even if they are the only boulangerie open on Sunday. UGGGG. Healthy bread in any language sucks.

Mary says: the baguettes from the Nature store are like Cold War bread 'da! you veel eat rock!' but today we found a boulangerie that sells the lustiest bread we've had. it's simply glorious.