One of our Favorite Things

When we were making plans to move here, we imagined ourselves sitting in a different café every afternoon, reading and drinking espresso. 

That's one of the reasons we decided not to bring our cold coffee press (the other reason being that we knew there would be an Italian-style, stovetop coffee maker in the apartment already). But we also knew that buying coffee every day gets expensive very quickly. So when I stumbled across a coffee shop in the Marais during my ill-fated trip to the Archives Nationales, I was happy to invest in a bag of Central American blend. (Cafés are on every corner, but shops where you can buy beans are rare, as far as I can tell.)

What I didn't expect was that I would also invest in our first souvenir of the trip. When I asked the proprietor how long the fresh-ground coffee would stay fresh, he said that if we kept it in the fridge in a normal coffee container, it'd keep long enough. Fridge? Coffee container? I was intrigued. And so for only a nominal sum, I ensured that we could make ourselves coffee every afternoon for two weeks with this set-up:

Container, and "Café Amazone" Coffee

Coffee + Italian Coffee Maker = Hooray!!!