Just a couple of silly quibbles: 1) No French person would call a brasserie a bra-ser-ee because they are lazy (like how lots of our words get mangled from laziness). It's a brah-sree. I remember when I first started taking French I would read aloud from Le Petit Prince or Les Miserables with my mom, to practice, and she always corrected this in the words "cependent" and "maintenent" and I just couldn't get the hang of it until I heard real French all the time. Same thing with macaron, it's not mah-cah-rohn, it's mah-croh, with a nasal n.
2) I'm pretty sure not many American people would know what you meant if you said crehp for crepe. I've only ever heard people say creyp there I think?
This reminded me of an incident just after I came back from living in Paris last time. I went out to dinner with a friend and we got coffees or something after. The thing I ordered was hot chocolate with orange flavoring and the menu called it something like chocolat a l'orange. Having just returned within the week I automatically said it the French way and the waitress didn't understand at all. I repeated it, trying but failing to make it more English-sounding, but she still didn't understand. Very embarrassed, I had to just say, "the one with orange." My friend laughed at me for being pretentious but I really couldn't get my tongue around the English pronunciation!
Second a propos thing: on a whim today I decided to get a pastry with my daily baguette at my corner boulangerie. It was still early enough in the evening that there were lots of delicious-looking ones left. I really liked the look of a whitish one next to a small sign saying "framboisier chocolat," meaning it was raspberry and chocolate. Yum. So I asked for that, but the girl grabbed another one, in the picture below it's on the left. I was confused and pointed to the white one near the sign and said, "No, that one." The boulangerie was quite busy so after I saw her pick that one up I moved along to pay. I told the cashier what I got, paid, and went home. Upon opening my box I was surprised to see both pastries.
The one on the left seems to be the real "framboisier chocolat" and I have no clue what the one on the right actually is. It does have raspberry and chocolate but the white frosting-like stuff was almond-tasting and there was some white cream in the middle. On a good day I can only eat half of a pastry like this at a time so I'm going to have to make a concerted effort to eat both of these in the appropriate time. A hardship indeed.
* Sometimes I feel like living in France makes my English a lot worse. This is two words in French but one in English, right? How embarrassing.
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