Today:

1. It is sunny

2. I had enough sleep last night

3. I have a small fund labelled Designated Shoe-Buying Money which I am going to utilise shortly

4. Tonight I am going to cook minestrone soup

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.