Wandering

After a somewhat stressful week at work, I've had a weekend of doing pretty much nothing at all. Saturday morning was spent in the gym followed by a coffee with a French garçon, which was lovely but after he casually dropped into conversation that he's moving to Hong Kong for the foreseeable I think I'm going to let that one slide! Afterwards I decided to go on a wander around Paris alone, it was so nice not to have a plan and not really knowing where I was going I discovered a bustling area about 10 minutes away from the Eiffel Tower in the 7th full of cute little brasseries.

I jumped on a metro and headed towards the Marks & Spencer food shop on the Champs Elysées, as it's a colleagues birthday tomorrow and she loves all things "British". This did mean however I went a bit crazy and bought an insane amount of food, including iced mince pies. You heard it here first, these bad boys are divine!

Last weekend was slightly more interesting, in that Matt and I decided to do some more Paris exploring. We wanted go to the Grand Palais but the queue was just insanely long and didn't actually seem to be moving, there was this woman all on her own who kept trying to push in front of us which was so irritating, so we walked across the Seine to get a coffee at one of the little riverside cafés, which kind of remind me of the Southbank back at home.

A view inside the Grand Palais, this is where Chanel usually does all its extravagant catwalk shows

We then jumped on a metro to Montmartre, to go to the Fete des Vendages, which was essentially a farmers market held on the hill up to the Sacre Coeur. They had a really cute little parade of what I assume were the various food production associations around France, which was slightly strange but also quite fun.

I was DYING to try these, but genuinely could not justify dropping €7,50 on cheese and potatoes!

We popped into the Sacre Coeur just to have a moments peace from all the hustle and bustle outside. It was so strange how quiet it was inside, but it was nice to have some time to just sit and think, before heading back down to the bottom of the hill to watch the fireworks from above.

On the Sunday, walking to the Métro I discovered that mass rollerblading has now hit my area, it seems to be a BIG thing here in Paris to go rollerblading around the streets! 

We decided to go to Paris Louxor, a beautiful cinema in the not so beautiful area of Barbès – Rochechouart, near the Gare du Nord, built in 1921 with Egyptian influences throughout. We went to see La Vie d'Adele, which I really enjoyed despite it being 2h59mins long... I managed to keep track of the story line and the French wasn't too complicated.

As exciting as my weekend was last week, today has been a day of admin and just attempting to bring some order back into my life!

A la prochaine!

Sophie