You'd think I'd never been abroad before...Leaving home, I made the stupidest mistake ever: I left my passport behind. I only noticed when I was en route to the station, and with half an hour to spare, I appealed to the charitable nature of a taxi driver on one of their busiest and most lucrative nights of the year, begging him to take me back home, wait for me to run up and get my passport, and take me back to the station again. Typically, the bastard didn't have much of a charitable nature to speak of; he took the opportunity to extort 30 euros in fare that would normally have cost under 10 (I live 5 minutes from the bloody station!). Meanwhile, my sister had the job of holding up our mode of transport until I got there.



Since this was 20 minutes late in coming, she didn't have too arduous a task.

We arrived in Paris in the early morning hours of April 30th, had a quick breakfast of croissants and coffee/hot chocolate at the international bus station, travelled on to Pigalle, found our hotel, and as check-in wasn't until 2pm and we weren't even halfway through the morning, left our luggage there while we ventured into town without any set purpose. We bought a guide to 'unknown places of interest' such as the Museum of Skin Diseases which I'm sure we would have visited if my niece hadn't vetoed the idea on account of her weak stomach, and Le Phallus Géant, which became something of a running gag throughout our stay. The weather wasn't particularly nice, but it was mostly dry and we were in our best holiday spirit, so it didn't affect us...much.



Eventually, we did seek sanctuary from the elements in McDonalds, which in the Champs-Elysées branch at least serves delicious coffees and pastries as well as fastfood.

Fortified, we walked from there to the top of Blvd Haussmann and down along it to Printemps, my favourite of the Paris department stores, stopping off to shelter from the rain in Monoprix where Romeo was overjoyed to find Dragonball-Z and Ben-10 cards that are guaranteed to be the envy of his classmates for the simple fact that apparently, you can't get them in Holland. Or not these ones, anyway. So we got him those cards and a Pokémon starter pack, and his trip was made.

We had a fabulous lunch in the sous la Coupolle-restaurant in Printemps, where our waitress made a few minor mistakes and explaining that it hadn't been her day all day and that she would have done better to stay in bed, offered us coffee on the house.

We checked into our hotel around 4pm, dozed in our room for a few hours, and then went out to pick and mix our dinner from the various traiteurs dotted around our neighbourhood, taking it all back to feast on in our room.

tbc