Going for Breakfast in America

I love Paris. Of course I do. I love everything about this great city. The cafes, the coffee, the wine, the bistros, the outdoor tables. The way you can sit for hours over a meal and no one comes around to ask how everything is.
But sometimes, just sometimes, I get a hankering for home. Bottomless cups of coffee (what the french call "jus de chausettes"or "sock juice"). Milk in a metal jug with a flip lid. Stacks of blueberry pancakes. And one of the few places in Paris where you can find veggie burgers. The French have fallen in recent years for brunch, but it's more of a fancy shindig with croissants, charcuterie, a cheese place, etc. For me, it's nice to know there is a place to go on a Sunday morning to sit at the counter with the International Herald Tribune and order up scrambled eggs and hash browns in English. I'm not saying all the time. But it's just reassuring to know it's there.

Best to get there before 11 on weekends, it gets pretty packed in that little space after that....

Le Coffee Parisien isn't bad at all either, one might even argue that the food is better than Breakfast in America, but that isn't really the point now is it. It just doesn't quite have the same atmosphere, the same people. Perhaps only another expatriate, someone who has been away from their homeland for a long stretch of time, will understand that hankering every once in a while to order in your native tongue and to eat what is familiar and comforting, no matter how much you really do love your new home...