Last week in Paris, we often stopped for a cold drink in outdoor cafes. I love Parisian cafes because the chairs mostly face out, which makes for great people watching and simply enjoying the easy pace of life in the city.
Badoit is a French sparkling water that my youngest child and I often shared on our many cafe stops. I took this photo on our first afternoon in Paris at Chez Paul in the Bastille. A perfect way to start a wonderful vacation.
A week ago I was getting ready to spend a weekend in New York to visit my oldest son, brother, and niece. I went back and forth between Manhattan and Brooklyn that weekend, and this is a lovely flower shop I passed in Brooklyn that Sunday. One of the things I love about New York is that the supermarket is not a staple for most shoppers. Instead, there are lots of little mom and pop shops, or bodegas, that sell produce, flowers, and other groceries. This corner store was bursting with color on the last day of April.
This is one of my favorite photos ever, taken almost 26 years ago when I was passing through Hong Kong with my father and met up with my college roommates for dinner one night. I’d always thought we’d gone to a Shanghainese restaurant and figured it was somewhere on Hong Kong Island. But a couple weeks ago I saw a Facebook post in a Hong Kong group I’m in and recognized the green tiles on the outside of the building in the posted photos.
I immediately thought to this photo and compared them a couple times (the tiles in the photo aren’t the clearest) and it soon became obvious that it was the same restaurant from my photo! The Red Pepper Restaurant in Causeway Bay is on Hong Kong Island, but it’s not Shanghainese. It’s Sichuanese. Thus the pepper.
It’s always fun to see restaurants from my time in Hong Kong that are still standing now. I just hope The Red Pepper will still be there the next time I’m in town.
I’m so proud of publishing-sister Samantha Verant and the release of her new memoir, How to Make a French Family (Sourcebooks, 2017). Not only did she grace me with the honor of beta-reading her new book, but she also asked for a blurb. It appears just inside the front cover on the praise page.
It’s a fabulous story and one that will resonate with anyone who has moved abroad, married into another culture, or loves stories set overseas.
