Another Great Giveaway: MBR

Hop on over to My Blonde Reality to check out Shasta's latest fabbie giveaway!  (If you haven't already...)

xo

West-End Hotel, Paris

For our entire Europe trip, my husband made all the arrangements, and he was very kind to have us stay right off the Champs Elysees for some fabulous shopping while in Paris. Being that we have small children, this was not a museum trip... we went to the top of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, but other than that pretty much just walked around and enjoyed the sights, looked for play areas, shopped, and ate! We did go to Notre Dame, but the line was way too long for the patience of our crew.

So we were booked at the Claridge Hotel, which is right around the corner from Laduree, but the first two nights there was a problem and they took us the 5 minute walk to a same-class hotel, the West-End. At first I was disappointed, but not after seeing the rooms! Here are some pictures - we had two triples that connect to each other. The Claridge is lovely also and I have some nice snaps from those rooms also.

Another good feature of the West-End is that when you step out the front door and look to your right, you are looking directly at the Louis Vuitton store on Avenue Montaigne. I was in that store four times, so that was handy. More on that coming up.

a great place to blog

beautiful fabrics - each room had one of these sweet single beds

OOD 7.7.09 (first day in Paris)

J Crew ruffle tank in gray, ATL cardi in black, Paige Premium denim, Tory Burch Revas in black & LV Neverfull MM:

Paris Possibility #1 by sparrowsandsparkles featuring Juicy Couture accessories

Laduree Paris (Champs Elysees)

This place is absolutely amazing! We had lunch and made a few purchases... but I am thinking I need to go back for a couple more things (for one thing, I didn't see the candles until after we left - in a window display). It was soooo crowded and soooo hard to choose.

I will let the photos speak for themselves!

Paris {we're here!}

We're here and it's wonderful!

I have lots of posts coming up: a very exciting time at Louis Vuitton yesterday/last night, dinner at Jules Verne at the Eiffel Tower, lunch at Laduree today, shopping at Petit Bateau (thank you to Ema for the recommendation - I have been twice and have two shopping bags full of goodies), taking my girls into Christian Dior (so chic!) ... and loads of pictures of course! But for now just one snap of a cute window display at Laduree (amazing pastries & those beautiful macarons) on the Champs Elysee as we are running out to dinner. Stay tuned!

xoxo

Lost in Translation: The Menu Version

So last night we ate at the hotel - there are a few different connected dining rooms in the hotel, all done up nicely with candles and flowers and pretty furniture (except for the back room which was apparently the family buffet section where they initially tried to seat us but I asked them not to... the nice section next to it was full of tables with children also, so it wasn't like people were there for quiet romantic dinners).  I did ask my son a few times to please not get us kicked back there again.  We even dressed up a little bit which people seemed to be doing here (I wore the J Crew dressy jersey strapless in gray with a Tiffany blue cardi and my black Revas, sorry no pics) but here's a similar Polyvore from a while back:

OOD 4.26.09 by sparrowsandsparkles featuring J Crew

So anyway, the menu was pretty full of heavy meats and potatoes - you know, Danish food, and I was having a hard time finding something but ended up ordering steak and pomme frites.  The waitress had me point to it on the menu just to make sure.  It had a long, fancy Danish name which I didn't know or use.  Hubby speaks Danish but I didn't ask him since there was an English translation on the steak & fries part.

After a long while, our plates come and Hubs starts refusing them, saying there's been a mix-up.  I don't know what is going on because they are all speaking Danish.  I finally get a good look at the steak and say yes that's mine.  He was surprised because I almost never eat steak and was telling them it wasn't ours.  After they leave he says he was surprised because 1) I almost never eat steak and 2) the dinner was called something that roughly translates to The Man's Meal.  To make things funnier, the dinner he ordered, which was some kind of salmon/phyllo appetizer was called something like The Fisherman's Wife's Dream Basket.  We got a good laugh out of that one.

Dessert was awesome, by the way.  Chocolate Cake, and A Taste of Hawaii:

Chokolade Triologi: chocolate cake on raspberry syrup with lemon sorbet, crisp caramel flake, and white chocolate egg

Smagen af Hawaii: caramelized bananas with pineapple parfait on wildberry puree with coconut tuiles

Today we are off to another morning at Legoland... it really is so fun... and then I think a castle on the way up to a friend's beach house for the night!

xoxo

Dinner Detour: Flensburg!

We left the little town where part of my husband's family still lives this morning en route to Billund (Legoland!) when it dawned on me how close we were to the border to Germany and Flensburg, the city my Great Great Grandfather is from... so we detoured for a nice heavy German dinner in this amazing harbour city.

Though my children have been enjoying their Danish meals tremendously, my daughter remarked that she wanted to see what it was like to eat in Denmark "not in someone's home". We've only eaten breakfast out, otherwise at relatives' and friends' since we've arrived. Ironically our first dinner out was in Germany. It was loads of fun, but unfortunately made us about five hours late to check in at our hotel. Luckily our room was not given away! And... they have a free & easy wifi connection - so here we are!

"Flensburg Fish Plate" - salmon, halibut, dogfish, "shellmeat" dijon mustard sauce and German fried potatoes

German apple strudel with vanilla sauce for dessert, of course

my kids loved the double coasters and pouring from their own little Sprite bottles