The morning after

on my first morning as an engaged woman, i had four really wonderful things.

the wonderful experience of getting lost in paris. i'm not sarcastic when i say it was wonderful. marlon and i began our morning ramble as a search for breakfast, with no particular plan for after breakfast, and we continued to ramble as we had difficulty finding something that was open on sunday morning... EXCEPT

the most divine lemon tart ever created. okay, i'm getting ahead of myself. the tart wasn't what we found open, but a bakery with a sign in front of it. on this sign was printed an unintelligible rush of french with only one word i recognized from my visits to market manila and dessert comes first: artisane. "marketman and lori seem to regularly rhapsodize about artisanal this and that," i thought to myself. "there must be good reason." so i dragged marlon inside, and soon we were aswirl in choices upon choices of delicious-looking breakfast goodies. heck, even the pizzas-on-baguettes looked heavenly.

wonder if you can guess which one i went for

a blissful breakfast in a quiet park with my fiance. since we had found ourselves a rather astounding (if you know how much i hate walking) distance from everything else except the sacre coeur, we decided to head for a small park we had located on the map, near the cadet metro.

it was a nice neighborhood park: a small pocket of green-turning-yellow-orange with no tourists or monuments, just parents with their toddlers, and little kids biking and running around, and autumn leaves littering the ground. it was here that marlon and i plunked down on a bench, too pleased to mind the cold, and unwrapped our respective artisanal breakfasts. his was a salmon quiche, i think, and mine was the aforementioned divine tarte citron.

you sinful little tart you

it was love at first bite, and pure unadulterated lust when i sank my teeth into the slice of candied lemon on top. all throughout my stay in france, i sought to regain the bliss of the first bite of this particular lemon tart, but it never happened. ahh well. it was good while it lasted.

a gorgeous view of paris from the sacre coeur. we went to grab a coffee and a hot chocolate at a nearby cafe before heading on the metro to abbesses, where we would elbow our way through hordes of tourists and sunday-morning picnickers to reach the sacre coeur.

thus begins my "ring in ________" series

we plunked ourselves on a grassy slope to try and call our parents with our big news, which proved utterly impossible. so we just enjoyed the rest of the warm, sunny morning with each other, and lit a candle inside the church for us, and for each other.

then we had to rush literally across paris for my first official acs engagement, and i was totally late and got 10 euros docked from my pocket money, but that's another story. just know that it was a blissful morning after. ;-)

(yes, i know, i said "gorgeous view". i'll update with more photos when i've got them all sorted out. which is soon. i hope.)

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back to the present for a bit: slowly getting out of zombie mode at work, after almost crying myself to sleep at 6am yesterday. why was i almost crying? because it was 6am and i was still awake. if i'm still a creature of the night by the end of the week, i may just be desperate enough to try sleeping pills.

i had almost forgotten what late nights at the office were like. then again, i'd also forgotten that siopao during late nights in the office make them seem soooo much better.