Paris: Monday

[NB: All these posts were written on the train on the way back. I'm spacing out the posting to keep you all suitably entertained without overwhelming you with my brilliant prose, and so that Google likes my blog again.]

You’re probably getting bored of the walls of text that I’m putting up. But it’s a very long train ride back home, so tough. Also, while it’s easy to put text up with intermittent internet access, putting photos up takes a lot longer, so is less likely to happen until I get back home or find out whether the library has internet access. I do hope it does, else me and MacDo might well get way too well acquainted over August. The things I do for you, beloved blog readers. (All 2 or 3 of you. Feel loved.)

I’ll keep the next couple of days short, because not a huge amount happened. Monday was full of walking and shopping. I walked from Madeleine, along the Grands Boulevards and down to Les Halles, bits of this twice, because I wanted to see Place Vendome. Again with the pretty Google Maps, assuming I learnt how to do this properly for the last post. Even this wouldn’t have been that bad – it was sunny, I had nothing else to do, and the sales were still on – but I took a wrong turn when I finally got to Strasbourg St Denis (I am not, needless to say, gifted with a brilliant sense of direction...) and went up instead of down. I knew the top of Bd Sebastapol was a bit dodgy, so it didn’t surprise me hugely that it was the way it was. But it got steadily worse, and I didn’t remember it being that bad... By the time I got to Chateau d’Eau and the Gare de l’Est, I knew I’d gone the wrong way.

So, I turned around and got down to Les Halles feeling rather more knackered than I had expected to. Clothes shopping was a fairly fruitless experience – long queues everywhere, and nothing particularly nice – but by this point, the heavens had opened and it was chucking it down. So I stayed inside, taking the Metro up one pathetic little stop to Etienne Marcel to continue my quality control check of Frog pubs. (This one had friendlier staff and more comfortable seats. You should go there. Hi, Frog and Rosbif people.)