For our last day in Paris, we gave up on sight-seeing and cultural pursuits in favour of some serious shopping, which my sister and I both love to do but to which we both have different styles of approach. Monique is a bargain-hunter and goes for quantity, whereas I tend to go for quality and am less concerned with price tags. I do like a bargain as much as the next woman though, and will be forever grateful to my sister for dragging me into C&A, a chain I usually abhor, where I found a mock-military style (think Adam Ant) leather coat at an absurdly reasonable price. After several hours of traipsing through the isles of Zara and H&M and Bershka, where she bought tons of clothes for herself and for my niece, I finally persuaded her to allow me half an hour on the 5th floor of Au Printemps: heaven, or as it's more prosaically known, the shoe department.




Monique's frugality had by then rubbed off on me, and I bought only one pair, from the lower end of the price range. They're actually in that picture: the pink & grey wedges in the foreground.

We ended our day sunning ourselves and eating pancakes in the Jardins des Tuileries, and the next morning boarded our bus for the 7 hour drive home, with a 45 minute break in Brussels.


Romeo, enjoying a bowl of pasta on a bench in Brussels