Planning for Paris

With the excitement of football and Mardi Gras behind us, Mark and I are beginning to focus on our 5th anniversary trip to Paris!!!

For any of you who have read this post here, you can tell that 1. I am a type A travel planner leaving no detail to chance and 2. I plan our trips around food.  Is there really any other way to travel?!?!  I will admit that I am finding planning for Paris to be completely overwhelming.  Unlike NYC, where I feel I finally have some sense of where things are, Paris is a complete mystery to me.  I can't decide whether I should start with activities and plan meals around where we will be or plan meals and base our itinerary around the meals.  I'm going bananas here.  Mark and I have decided to get a white board and chart out each of our days so that our itinerary makes sense from a location logistics perspective.  I think this will help me plan since I am a visual learner. 

A few details we have nailed down so far make me one excited tourist.  We will arrive in Paris on Sunday mid-morning following an overnight flight.  We are determined to check into our hotel, take showers, and hit the streets of Paris.  No napping!!!  Sunday night we will be partaking in what should be an AMAZING foodie experience.  I read about a place called Hidden Kitchen where two American chefs living in Paris prepare meals each weekend for 16 guests.  It is less of a restaurant and more of an intimate dinner party.  The meal is served in 10 courses with wines being paired with 7 of those courses.  The menu is not revealed until the day of the dinner once the chefs have been to the markets and picked out the menu's ingredients.  So we'll have to be extra willing to explore new and interesting flavors!  I have emailed HK and we have been booked for two seats at the dinner on Sunday evening.  The meal begins at 8:00 and ends at 11:30.  That is just my kind of food experience.  I love a good long meal filled with fabulous stories and amazing food shared over the course of an entire evening.  I am hoping by the end of dinner we have made some new friends and have learned all we need to know about what we must do in Paris!

The second item we have checked off our Paris planning to-do list is reserving my space at my food day with Chef Paule from Promenades Gourmandes.  On Wednesday, my Christmas Present will become real as I join Chef Paule on a tour of the markets of Paris.  I will be learning the basics of French culinary preparation skills and be preparing a three course lunch with the assistance of Chef Paule.  After a cheese tasting and some wine, we will be off on our food tour of Paris.  Mark will be joining us on this leg of our culinary adventure.  I cannot wait to walk the streets of Paris with him!

And finally, I have found the perfect museum exhibit for me!!!  Yves Saint Laurent is being honored in an exhibit at the Petit Palais.  It will feature the magificent works of this fashion icon whose career spanned more than forty years.  I'm not sure how crazy Mark was about this little discovery of mine, but I really can't wait to see it!  The museum stays open late on Thursdays and has a discounted admission during the later window.  Love that!  So I think we will be going here Thursday evening during dinner time to hopefully bypass some of the crowds.  Maybe we'll follow that up with a late night dinner at a brasserie.  My favorite part about Paris may be their tendency to dine late night.  You make such good use of your day when dinner is served after 8:00 pm.

PS - I did find the most helpful thing for translating foreign websites (especially menus).  Google allows you to enter in a URL here and translate an entire webpage.  This has been incredibly helpful when I have been browsing through the websitesof some of Paris's restaurants. 

While there is still so much to plan, I am so excited about the things we have already worked on that I can hardly contain myself.  For anyone reading who have visited Paris, I would love to hear from you!  What was your favorite thing to do?  Place to eat?  Tour to take?  Museum to visit?  Was there something you would suggest skipping?  Any and all tips are appreciated!!!