I know I’m going to get in trouble for not blogging about the wedding, but I promise I’ll come back to it.  For the moment, we have more important things to discuss.  Like the view from our balcony:

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We enjoyed our first morning in St. Maarten sitting on the balcony, eating French pastries and drinking coffee.  It was awesome.

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So the wonderful thing about the island is that half of it is Dutch and the other half (where we’re staying) is French.  It’s nice to experience several different cultures.  Think Hawaii weather, beautiful beaches, really nice people, and insanely amazing French food.

The area where we are is Grand Case (pronounced “Gran Caaz”).  It’s known for it’s terrific restaurants, which are all pretty much on one little street (you can kind of see it below). The first night here we walked down that street and checked out the menus.  Almost every place had a lobster tasting menu, several had fois gras tasting menus, and one had all you can eat fois gras.  Did I mention the fabulous French wine?  I’m in heaven.

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Yesterday (our first real day), after our super-French breakfast, we drove over to the other side of the island, to Dawn Beach, where we had a couples massage at the Westin.  Jealous yet?  We also sat on the beach and had a beer.  For lunch we went to Captain Oliver’s, which is basically a dock in the marina with see-through plastic floors.  While I munched on some of the best sashimi I’ve ever had, I could watch my lunch’s little fishy cousins.  We sipped on rum punches and discovered a wonderful SMX tradition: every time you eat somewhere, they bring you a shot of infused rum.  Just for fun.  Here are a couple of pictures of us at Dawn Beach enjoying an El Presidente (the most popular beer on on the island):

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In the evening we walked down to the beach and had a glass of champagne on the water and watched the sun go down.  The sunset and a self-shot:

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When the sun went down we walked down to the main restaurant street in Grand Case and ended up at Le Tastevin.  It was incredible!  We each had a fois gras starter, Jason had a to-die-for mahi mahi which he says was better than his lunch at Le Bernardin in NY and I had young potatoes stuffed with escargot and topped with melted brie.  Yumsy!

After dinner we wandered down to a live music bar where Jason enjoyed a mojito with a giant lizard:

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Today we had breakfast at a patisserie (quiches and a chocolate macaron–mine are better) and spent the rest of the morning/afternoon at Orient Beach.  Orient Beach is breathtakingly beautiful and reasonably peaceful, considering the amount of people there.  It’s on the French side, and as French beaches go, there was a lot of topless sunning going on.  We walked down to the far end and checked out Club Orient, which is entirely nude.  As anticipated, it was a lot of old floppy naked people (it’s never the hot people who get naked).  I’ll spare you with any pictures.  We had a lovely sushi lunch followed by some super yummy profiteroles.

And now we’re sunburned.  Le sigh.

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