Our Sabbatical Life

Confession: We'll move from (pseudo-) breakfast to lunch and then to bar snack food, so we're actually going to make a liar out of the title of this post by starting off with the Cronut, which was officially first produced in New York City .  However, seeing that it is based off of croissant dough, we think it qualifies to be in this round-up... In any case, here is your itinerary for a Montreal French-y food tour. Start with a not-very breakfast-y donut in Plateau Mont Royal neighborhood. We've consumed several different kinds of cronuts before, but this is hands-down the very best thing we've ever eaten in that category.  It wasn't cheap, mind you, but its large size (easily the largest cronut we've had), and quality, and the amount of custard filling, and, well, the currency conversion, makes this hybrid between croissant and donut worth its otherwise exorbitant price tag. Can you see the amount of custard filling (in the picture below)?  Wh...

I hate to sound like I'm giving up, but I decided not to continue with French classes.  Perhaps it is the teacher in me, but the brutal unvarnished truth is that the homework was really beginning to get on my nerves.  (I know, "Do as I say, not as I do," right?) I started to resent Will happily poring over different uses for etre vs. avoir , eagerly responding to a few questions or writing a 60-word paragraph, while I found myself chafing as I went through more subjunctive use cases than I'm ever likely to confront while ordering steak frites at a Parisian bistro (the real reason we were learning French in the first place), complete exercises 1-4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, write a 300-word essay on environmental gaspillage (with me comically re-counting all words after each sentence--even though I, of course, knew that the sentence I just wrote could not possibly have fulfilled the need for another 170 words...).  Often all this work was in addition to preparing f...