A Taste of Home

With regard to Pat's comment about needing a taste of home:

Some Saturday mornings we get ourselves together and trek up to near Place Terreaux, to Lyon's only bagel shop, a little place on Rue d'Algerie called Best Bagel (see pic with English sign). Now, I didn't grow up eating bagels, but I had some pretty good ones in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill, topped with lox and served by guys with sidelocks in funny black hats.

Best Bagel doesn't have that kind of Red-Sea-Pedestrian cred, but the bagels are fresh, and they have honest-to-Jehovah Philly cream cheese, which they'll sell you by the gram to take home.

But we don't just come for the bagels: This is also the only place in Lyon to buy Dr Pepper. Sure, it's 2 Euros a can, but I'm worth it. As the "US groceries" on the sign implies, there's also a small selection of American goods: Froot Loops, Crisco, Miller High Life, Betty Crocker cake mix, Twix bars.

For V., the attraction is equally filled with artificial flavors and preservatives: On a table by the window is a stack of the fairly-recent trashy gossip mags (People, Us, Entertainment Weekly) she used to flip through at the gym back home. Boog and I have bagels and Dr Pepper, and V catches up on slightly-stale gossip she already knew about (Mel Gibson's bottle battle! Stinging heartache for Croc Hunter's wife!).

If you squint, it's a little like Carrboro! Well, maybe if you close your eyes completely. And your ears. And don't sniff too deeply.