Last summer my wife and I spent a week in Paris—one last shot of travel adrenaline before Baby Nora arrived in November.
If you’ve never heard of Paris, it’s a city in Europe where, every single morning, locals eat cheese and cigarettes for breakfast on a balcony overlooking a big, metal tower.
What a town.
Well, there’s one other thing you need to eat for breakfast in Paris…
Fresh baguettes.
And that’s exactly what I’m searching for on our third morning in the City of Love.
Problem is, 90% of Parisians go on vacation for the entire month of August.
Most streets are lifeless and empty. Almost spooky.
4 times in a row, all of my local “best baguettes near me” offer the same sign plastered to a barred front gate:
“Closed.”
What kind of baguetteless excuse of a man am I, who can’t even fetch bread for his pregnant wife?
There’s one last option around the next corner. It’s SUPPOSED to be open.
I cross my fingers…
Round the corner…
And…
No, I went down the wrong street.
I’m about to turn around when a woman pops out of a gym on the corner and starts walking towards me.
And let me tell you, this girl is ODD.
She’s decked in a sports bra and yoga pants, which, for my American readers, might seem totally normal.
But Parisians do NOT wear exercise attire in public.
She might as well be wearing an astronaut suit.
Weirder still, as soon as she hits the sidewalk, her eyes dart to the left—towards the building she just exited.
Her eyes dart to the front…to the left…the front again…and she starts walking faster.
Getting closer.
That’s when I remember…
Paris isn’t just famous for cheese and wine…
It’s also famous for…
Pickpockets.
Just TRY it, I think…as the shifty-eyed yoguette speedwalks ever closer.
She’s 3 feet away (that’s a metre, for the Parisians reading).
Closing fast…
Eyes twitching left and front…
She’s REALLY booking it now…
Is that her hand reaching towards me?
One foot away (about as long as a demi-baguette)…
I clutch my phone like an (American) football player…
Do it! I’m not afraid to judo-toss you onto a public bench.
She’s so close I can FEEL my pocket sucked into her gravitational field…
And then…
She…
Passes me. Keeps power-walking, right on around the corner. Gone.
I still have my phone and my wallet.
Must have TOTALLY read that situation wrong. Poor girl.
I laugh a little to myself, and my tunnel vision disappears…
And, uh…there’s someone else there, too.
A man, sitting near the wall.
No, he’s not “sitting.”
He’s squatting.
Pants around his ankles.
Bare sourdough boules rising in the cool morning wind.
And I finally learned where to find the freshest baguettes in Paris…even during summer vacation.
Boules to the woules,
Nick
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Let them eat baguettes…from the NEXT bakery.
