I took the TGV high speed train from Brussels to France on Friday evening, and didn’t do THAT much, so it might have made sense to include this post with the one day I did spend in Paris. Except that one’s gonna be a doozy, so here’s a short one about just Friday night instead.

Paris has a number of major train stations – I was arriving in to Gare du Nord, but would be leaving from Gare du Lyon, so I had booked a hotel closer to the latter, near where the Bastille used to be.  Which meant navigating the bonkers that is the Paris Metro at rush hour.

Actually, it was fine – not as bad as Tokyo, and purchasing passes directly to your phone is super easy.  The biggest difference with Tokyo is that the connecting passages between the platforms and the exits and the other lines are winding and tiny, where in Tokyo they are wide, generally straight, and huge.

At any rate, I arrived at a column erected in a square named to celebrate a bunch of people who didn’t think an autocrat should be arbitrarily confining people in a horrible prison.  I wonder why it occurred to me to describe it that way.

Just to cause confusion, the column itself is about the revolution of 1830, not the storming of the plaza’s namesake prison.  But hey – I’ll take my autocrat eliminating where I can get it these days.

After checking into my hotel, it was time to get dinner, and I wanted to check out a historic restaurant named Au Pied de Cochon, literally “At the foot of the pig.” Opened in 1947, it is known for being a 24 hour restaurant with excellent food and ample people watching opportunities.

While perhaps its most famous dish is the pork trotter, a close second in terms of being iconic, and a distant first in terms of how much I actually wanted to eat it after a long day of travel, was the onion soup.

A thing of beauty, I tell you.  Honestly, that would have been a meal in itself, but I didn’t necessarily realize that when I ordered.  And had I done so, I would have missed out on another lovely thing:

After the carbonnade in Belgium, the represents the second of three times this trip I would have the opportunity to try one of the dishes from our “cook the world” project in the actual country of origin.  This is a seared duck breast, and it was fantastic.

After dinner it was time to head back to my hotel.  I had a LONG day ahead of me…