On the last day, we had lunch on the Seine. Bread and cheese, purchased at the market by Trevor. He had been taught by his bosses at work about how to pick the best baguettes: ‘They take their roles very seriously’, he said, leading to speculation on whether he had meant ‘roles’ or ‘rolls’. [It was 'roles', but either would've worked...]

Photo courtesy of some Americans, who offered to take it and then requested we take one of them. It was all pre-planned...

Afterwards we were going to go to the Catacombes, but by the time we arrived they were turning people away due to imminent closing. As a substitute we went to a mosque. Well, the cafe at the front of one, anyway. It was full of small birds, green tea and nice blue tiles.

Small Bird.

Tea, blue tiles

After the mosque we went to the Botanical Gardens for an afternoon amble.

A fishsculpture.

Someone didn't pay attention to the 'danger' sign

A nice treehug.

a Cedar of Lebanon.

The roof of the middle of the labyrinth

And we finished the night in a Scottish Theme Pub, where there was supposed to be a bluegrass gig on [oh, how multi-cultural it is all becoming] but there was a Scotsman playing tennis on TV, so it was put on earlier and we missed it. There was much roaring at the tennis, and fortunately the Scotsman won his match so it was happy roaring.

At some point I went to sleep. Got the Eurostar back in the morning, and was very pleased to have bought my lunch in the morning in Paris. It was a sandwich. I ate it in King’s Cross station feeling really smug, because I had a nicer sandwich than it is possible to buy in King’s Cross station.

The first thing I did when I got off the train in York was stand waiting at a zebra crossing for the cars not to stop, and/or attempt to drive over me, because in Paris this does happen a bit [even when the green man is lit up]. A taxi driver looked at me as if I was mad. I laughed at bit and crossed the road. Presumably this confirmed his suspicion that I was mad. Never mind.

Day 4 was not my most energetic. It began at around midday. I made some tea. Sophy emerged from her room. I lay around groaning and demanding that she went out to buy me drugs. Amazingly, she did. The drugs made the headache go away. I must now state that despite the wine and absinthe [well, and the beer consumed on the way to the metro stop] that this was not a hangover; it was caused by muscle tension and lack of sleep. [It was!]

Anyway, we ate spectacular things for lunch. We had fresh salad, egg fried rice and leftover lentil and bacon casserole. It was really excellent. [You see, if I had been hungover, I would've only been able to eat soup, so that proves it.]

After lunch we headed out towards the periphery and went to the last half an hour or so of the flea markets, which were very interesting but not as cheap as I was hoping [probably because tourists know about them these days so the vendors have put their prices up...].

A bit of flea market

That night Sophy’s friend Anne turned up, visiting from Strasbourg, and while I was feeling decidedly un-rock-n-roll and incapable of conducting a conversation in English with my eyes closed, let alone in very poor French with them open and with alcohol in me, they were keen to go out.
So I had a quiet night in with my laptop and a book, and Sophy rolled in at 4.30am with a pouffe she’d picked up on the street:

No, really.

It was quite comfortable.

She’d been, she told me, in an Arab bar, where apparently they’d been drinking peppermint tea and playing bingo all night. Well, Sophy hadn’t been drinking peppermint tea all night. In the morning I fed her the remains of the paracetamol she’d bought for me the previous day. These things do pay off.

Day 3 was rather rainy. I went to look around the centre of Paris, and decided to go to the Tuileries. It rained, but not drastically. Here are some people enjoying a pond with their umbrellas:

Tuileries in the rain

After walking around and along the Seine I went to have a look at the Louvre, which was expensive so I didn’t go in. This was despite the best efforts of a young man who worked there, who decided to very unashamedly chat me up. ['I have come to talk to you because I think you are cute' were his exact words. This tactic generally makes me slightly distrustful of those who use it, but he did it in a reasonably charming French kind of way so I let him off...] He told me that if I hung around until 6pm, under-26-year-olds could get in free. Unfortunately I am 27 [and had also promised to go home and make Sophy a cup of tea for when she got in from work because she says her boyfriend, who is French, does not understand the English need for being provided with tea upon entering a house and she wanted to make the most of my presence and understanding on this matter]. But I talked to him for a little while. He said that the rain made him feel miserable and he ‘needed people to love him when it was raining’. Quite sweet really. [And yes, yes, all right... it was very nice to be told I was cute, even if fundamentally I find the 'you look nice' approach unnerving. I was feeling a little bit over-rained-on myself...]

Then I caught a metro back to Sophy’s. Some of the metro entrances are quite interesting:

Some bikes and a decorated metro entrance

Went to a shop to buy a bottle of wine, whereupon the owner, a small Tunisian man, asked my name and told me I was very beautiful. Interestingly, he seemed to already know all the names of three other women who came into the shop after me. The men are extremely forward around here. Maybe this is only compared to those in the UK, though.

Here is the bottle of wine that I bought:

Is this a region in France?

Obviously I bought it entirely because of its name. It was quite nice though. We took it to Trevor’s and he fed us some extremely nice food, and subsequently, via a complicated trip through some bars and metro stations, ended up in a goth bar at 3am drinking absinthe with some friends of a friend of Sophy’s. It had a special thing to drip water through the spoons and everything:

Sophy with blurred drippy absinthe contraption in the background

Today I have felt a bit tired.

I know it is considered more appropriate to go and look at things such as the Eiffel Tower, Louvre etc. when on holiday in Paris, but instead I spent my second day indulging in the pleasingly diverse activities of being experimented on in a psycho-acoustic laboratory, and being taught to knit in an upstairs room of a restaurant.

The main thing that concerned me that morning was that I had to go out and Use The Metro On My Own in order to get to Trevor’s workplace to be experimented on. Fortunately this went very well. I said the phrase which Sophy had told me to say in order to get a booklet of ten tickets, and the woman issuing them did not stare, fail to understand or immediately begin to speak to me in English so I must have said it halfway comprehensibly. I rode the metro, changing twice, and arrived at the correct place, at the correct time.

Then I realised that I had been so concerned about whether the metro would work or not that I had made rather a major mistake in another area, which was Forgetting To Bring The Phone Numbers of Everyone I Know In France. Which was not ideal given that I was supposed to phone Trevor when I arrived and meet him at the Pantheon. After much faffing about, phoning other numbers I had for him, texting his girlfriend to get more numbers off her [thanks Kirsty!], phoning things that played recorded music and someone told me in French that I had done something wrong, or just getting a repeated bleep as an answer, I gave up and went to look for a net cafe where I could email people in a panicked kind of way. I failed to find one, but during my search a text message managed to exchange itself between phones belonging to Trevor and myself – since apparently the phone that played the repeated beeps was the right one an that is the French ringing tone – and eventually we found each other and went to eat things in the Jardin de Luxembourg. Apparently he hadn’t had my number either any more. He did once, but the phone it was on [the only number for him that I did have!] had recently been fried. It was all generally a little bit silly.

So, clearly need to wean myself off the internet-dependency, or failing that, get a phone that has the internet on it, since I clearly cannot cope without it.

Anyway, we went to the lab and I had experiments done on me.

Nerdily, I was delighted that the first thing I saw was the same model of mixer that we use in Pillowfish Headquarters:

Just like home...

I then had experiments done on me in a little booth:

Psycho-acoustic guineapig

Trevor did some work while I did this, although in this photo he is not doing any:

We even played a few tunes in the middle of it to stop my brain dissolving due to the repetitive nature of the tests. Fortunately the room is soundproof so nobody came in to see exactly what part of the research this was supposed to be.

In the evening I went to Sophy’s knitting club with her. We CYCLED to the centre of Paris, me on a Velib which a bike you can just hire and then put back at another hire depot thing. Excellent idea but completely terrifying, especially when at a junction I nearly started riding on the left. But we made it unscathed, apart from mild emotional trauma on my part, and I had a really nice glass of wine and knitted this spectacular piece of … erm, knitting:

My entire night's work

According to Sophy and her knitting-friend, Sabrina, this was a very good first attempt, even though it has holes in and appears to be expanding [I started with 20 stitches and by the time I had done the amount depicted, I had somehow developed 29]. Sophy was planning socks with a knitted space invaders pattern on, and Sabrina produced a small bag with a skull and crossbones pattern knitted into it. I clearly have a long way to go…

Sophy took me to Sacre Coeur, past a great deal of fabric shops which I managed to stop myself from going into and buying acres of stuff [which I would have intended to sew into proposed glamourous outfits, and which I would have never got round to]. There were a lot of North Africans selling things. They were all selling one or both of two products: small, tacky, shiny models of the Eiffel Tower, or large leather handbags. They were also putting braids in people’s hair in exchange for cash, apparently. One tried to do this to Sophy, who shook her head violently, and said, ‘Non, merci!’. They guy said [in French], ‘Oh! You’re French. I didn’t know you were French’ and went away. This was an amusing insight since clearly they only regard non-French tourists as stupid enough to pay for the braids; and also because Sophy isn’t French.

It was kind of grey and rainy:

Sacre Coeur in the rain

A view of Paris in the rain, from Sacre Coeur

We went on through Montmartre and were going to go to an exhibition about absinthe but it cost 7 euros so we decided it would be better to save them for getting some absinthe to drink instead, since the actual experience was bound to be more enlightening than looking at pictures of it.

We headed down some steps into what the Rough Guide to Paris rather irritatingly describes as the ‘younger and hipper’ end of Montmartre. There was some good graffiti:

Paris graffiti 1

Paris graffiti 2

We ate lunch [sandwiches in the rain] and then went for a coffee in a cafe. This cafe was evidently ‘young and hip’ due to these murals decorating the toilets:

Men

Women

Women

Then, via many, many twisty little roads, we went to the red light district and had hot chocolate in a cafe opposite a sex shop. Also in the cafe were a woman with a small dog which was dyed pink, who was having coffee with a tall, stunning transsexual who had a chihuahua [not dyed pink], plus two drunk old guys at the bar who were trying to chat up a tall, noisy, gothy biker chick type who was clearly loving every minute of it [mostly, I think, because she spent most of the time telling them off]. One of the drunk old guys found out I was English and started talking to me, in French, about the the Queen of England visiting Paris two years ago; then Sophy came back from loo and told him that this didn’t interest her since she wasn’t a royalist, at which he got very defensive and said he wasn’t either [all of this was explained to me afterwards - I had previously been sitting there understanding about 15% of the conversation and looking a bit clueless, wearing an expression that hopefully communicated: 'I am very interested in what you have to say, I just have know idea what it is and I am sorry about that'].

We paid for our hot chocolates and went on past a Mechanical Fountain:

An Orchid House:

Sophy looking at orchids

Me, also looking at orchids

Notre Dame, where I attempted to take an original, non-postcard, non-just-standing-in-front-of-it picture:

Feet, and Notre Dame

And finally met Trevor in a Basque bar where it was Happy Hour [that means the very cheapest beer only costs the same as a regular pint in the UK...]

Sophy demonstrates visually the size of my French vocabulary?

Then we went for Vietnamese Pho Soup [one of the most amazing things I've ever eaten - it had some sort of leafy herb wilted into it, a bit like spinach but with a lemony taste - utterly delicious] and caught the Metro home, at which point much collapsing occurred in the leg regions of Sophy and myself. Apparently I can still walk today, though, which is pleasing.

I have managed to get myself to Paris. I realised that this is, at the age of 27, the first time I’ve ever gone abroad on my own. I was kind of slightly proud of myself, slightly anxious about it and also rather unimpressed that I was feeling either of these things given the facts that I’m supposed to be an adult and that catching the Eurostar is really not that big a deal. It was extremely easy and there was even free wifi for a good a portion of the journey.

I did not notice the Channel Tunnel. There were several tunnels on the way down the UK portion of the journey and I think when we went through it I was furiously typing a magazine article; the only reasons I was aware that we’d gone through the main one were a) Someone announced it over the tannoy, and b) suddenly a great deal more people seemed to be speaking French. It was as if they’d been slightly nervous about doing it in England but now were in France so it was OK again. I kind of wondered whether I should be doing the same, but my French is rather basic and appalling, although I have been trying [more on this subject later].

The train pulled into Paris Nord and I noticed this fantastic thing: they have double-decker trains here! I stared at these quite a lot. Then noticed my reflection in the train window, looking like a slightly mad wild-eyed person, and tried to look a little less amazed by them. I mean, in the UK we have double-decker buses. It’s not a hugely new idea. But! It’s such a more efficient use of space.

I was met at the station by my friend Sophy, who has just moved to Paris. We ran through some rain to a cafe, where we got beer and coffee and met another friend, Trevor, who has also just moved to Paris. They didn’t know each other prior to this, but I introduced them via Evil Facebook, which apparently does have its uses [outside of mildly stalking people on your friends list who you then do not communicate with because you haven't spoken for ten years anyway so why are you going to start now? This process is also known as Wasting Time].

Anyway, we hauled ourselves back to Sophy’s via a supermarket which provided us with beer, and had some mackerel and listened to music. Tomorrow I will attempt to detail what happened today, but right now I am really quite worn out after all the walking, of which there was a great deal. I know I don’t have to type with my legs, but their fatigue has reached other parts of my body and I don’t think valerian tea or even whisky will need to partake in any aspect of my imminent falling asleep.

I might have a bit of whisky just because it’s nice though…