Old friends

My best friend from school was over for a flying visit this weekend. I think we must have talked 24-hours straight as we wandered the streets of Paris and ate and drank. It was great to see her properly and I was super pleased with the places we went. Sometimes, it just works out and you land on the nicest, most handsome, most interesting streets by accident. On Saturday afternoon we walked all the way down my street until we reached the Seine, crossed over to take a walk around Notre Dame, ambled up through the backstreets of the 5th to the Luxembourg Gardens then back down into the 6th, where we stopped and bought a mini-macaroon each in an impossibly glamorous cake shop. Fortified, we set off again.
Further through the 6th, peeked into the lovely courtyard of the building where I lived in a tiny 8m2 studio my first year in Paris, headed down to Bon Marché where we took a detour around the incredible food hall to compensate for the Christmas windows not being up and running, walked back through the poshest parts of the 6th and across the Pont des Arts into the beautifully illuminated courtyards of the Louvre.
Stood by the pyramid and waited for the Eiffel Tower to start her sparkling gig (which she didn't), then walked off through the Marais to a café just beside the place des Vosges where we had a well-deserved kir.
Again fortified (but now quite footsore), we walked up boulevard Beaumarchais and the boulevard Richard Lenoir until we got to the canal, where we settled in for a lovely long dinner and lots of good red wine. Home at 2am.
The next morning (the Aerobed was a great success - yay!) we walked down rue Lafayette until we got to the rue des Martyrs, ambled down oohing and aahing over all the beautiful cheese shops and flower shops and everything was just impossibly French and classy. Perfect for visitors. Cut along the boulevard to the Moulin Rouge for a photo op then all the way up the back of rue Lepic into the touristy bits of Montmartre and Sacré Coeur before lunch, coffee and a stroll back to Gare du Nord.
And that was that. Hope I get more visits like that soon.

Oh dear. I guess getting home after a couple of glasses of wine and attacking your kitchen wall with a scraper maybe isn't such a great idea:


But then, it's difficult not to be suspicious of your walls and attack anything that looks vaguely damp or mould-concealing when your afternoon has revolved around this:



And when you've been dealing with that the previous day, what you really don't want to notice when you're getting out of the shower the next morning is a big ol' crack that runs the length of four tiles halfway up your bathroom wall and corresponds perfectly to the big ol' crack that your excavations revealed along the kitchen wall.




There are times I really really wish my Dad lived up the road.