My brother and I were sitting in the kitchen of my apartment thinking about where to head to from Paris so we could swim in the sea. We turned to the wisdom of Google for inspiration and guided by the “20 Best Coastal Towns in France” we image searched “Cassis” and found many images that looked a little something like the one above, evidently it didn’t take much convincing to book our tickets.
It’s one thing to visit the Cathedrale Notre Dame de Paris and another to attend a service on Sunday. I accidentally came across mass on a Sunday evening whilst wandering around the 1st arrondissement with a friend like a pair of vagrants looking for something to entertain ourselves with. Interestingly, there are actually two places to line up to go into the cathedral and curiously people and their sheep-like tendencies, all line up in the line to the right. So take this locals tip: slip into Notre Dame by seemingly queue jumping to the left of the line. People may not be friendly about letting you through the door when you get there but remember, they’re just pissed off that they weren’t as smart as you.
This is what I painted my toenails for.
The idea of spending five hours cruising on a ferry through the Greek islands to Mykonos sounded EXACTLY like my kind of thing. I imagined watching the sun turning the surface of the water into a thousand diamonds and rendering the infamous white buildings in stark contrast to the blue sky whilst my hair playfully obscures my vision.
Three months of city life has my nature loving inner child throwing a tantrum so when my friend suggested we go to Mykonos I had already committed before she had finished her sentence. So we boarded an Athens bound flight at the beginning of April for a dose of Greek sun. I got chatting to the lady next to me who was en route from the US to pack up her 20 year life in Athens. Her Greek husband is a victim of the economic crisis so their solution was to start afresh in the States. She kindly offered to drive my friend and I to our hotel which was incidentally very close to their home. Door to door service, such is the kindness of the Greeks.
Ever since I learned about the Palace of Versailles in the stuffy dark underground lecture theatre at architecture school, I yearned to visit it. It was close to the top of my list of things to do in Paris but as it is a day trip by train, it took the visit of a friend to act as the catalyst.
Of course, romantically I imagined wandering through the halls of the palace to turn a final bend and see the famous Hall of Mirrors just like in the lecture slide below
By no stretch of the imagination finishing a half marathon in 02:10:43 as I did, is no record breaker but since running is ultimately a very personal experience, it broke my record by 10 minutes so I was pretty happy. Statistically speaking also, I managed to beat over 5000 men and women (not to mention the 20,000 people who bet me but I think they were from Kenya), it was certainly an amazing race!
Avez-vous du feu? Is a question you will be asked a lot on the streets of Paris and a girl must always be prepared. My reaction varies from completely ignoring them to smiling flirtatiously and replying “Non, je n’ai pas” in direct correlation to their age, gender and appearance. This morning whilst drinking my café au lait chez moi, I was playing with my flatmate’s lighter and was struck by a moment of illumination! I must carry a lighter with me! My soulmate may or may not have slipped through my fingers last night when a gorgeous man and I had an aforementioned situation, if only I was carrying a lighter I may now be on my way to a romantic embrace on the Champs Elysees.
Here I am 3 weeks out from the Semi-Marathon de Paris after having been out in a comparably warm -3 deg Celsius run, not taking into consideration the wind chill from the frozen Canal St Martin that licks up off the ice blowing me kisses that flush my cheeks. It is one of the joys of this winter chill holding Europe ransom at the moment. It is a necessary evil to stick with it though as this training is currently the only constant in ma Vie en Rose. It really is quite a romantic picture, both the surface of the canal and the lake, have shards of ice strewn across them illuminated by the pauses between the elongated and intermittent shadows, in appearance not unlike the wine glass I broke on Saturday night.
WINE CORKS. You can say what you like about the French but wine corks are an example of life’s simple pleasures that they have flatly refused to let go of. It brought a nostalgic tear to my eye to see one again as it reminded me of childhood when Dad would choose one of us kids to be the sommelier for the night. This meant we could run down to the cellar (cupboard under the stairs) and choose a red wine and open it. The introduction of screw tops to NZ was a day of mourning in our household. The hideous sound of scraping of metal on glass simply isn’t as pleasant experience as wedging the bottle between your knees and hearing that festive and well earned pop as you yank the cork out of it’s neck. To purchase this simple pleasure you only have to fork out a mere 4 Euro at the local Franprix which are actually partout.