Paris

Finally Sally’s three years of learning French at school has paid off with five days in Paris. She had the most essential phrases ready – “Je voudrais un pain au chocolat s’il vous plait”.  We filled in the gaps in our vocabulary by pronouncing English words with a French accent, asking each other for “le map” and “la camera” (don’t worry, never in earshot of “le French”). Despite this cultural butchery, we must have done okay with our pronunciation – at one museum we were given the French rather than the English version of the map!

We CouchSurfed in Paris, with two different hosts. It was great fun and we got to learn a bit more about life in France. At our first hosts’ place we were treated to a dinner of Raclette. This photo shows the Raclette machine. Slices of a special type of cheese are placed in small pans and grilled. The melted cheese is then poured over potatoes and a selection of meats. Super tasty!

Staying with the theme of cheese, we went out to a specialist cheese restaurant with our second Couchsurfing host. It was a cute local restaurant with just a handful of tables. As well as a traditional fondue, we got to try a selection of French cheeses. The cheeses were delicious, although some of them did challenge our palate, particularly the strong goats’ cheeses.

Still staying with the theme of cheese, we had a delicious picnic at the Palace of Versailles one day. We did the French thing of buying each ingredient from a different specialised store - yum. However, we didn’t do the French thing of eating in moderation as we’d overestimated how much cheese (and red wine) we’d need. Silly photos ensued - rocking the blue tongue look.

Okay, enough about cheese now. We did plenty of sightseeing while we were here. While at times we felt like we were on a conveyor belt of tourists, we were lucky to find only short queues.

We’ll instead try and write about a few of the things we saw that are less well known. We came across some unexpected awesomeness near the Eiffel Tower. A group of people have combined skipping ropes and breakdancing which made for impressive watching.

Another cool thing we saw was a very talented guy playing the piano out on the street. Apparently there are a few of these public pianos around that are left out for people to play.

One romantic afternoon in the city of love, we went down into the sewers below the city. It might not be quite as prestigious as the Louvre, but the Sewers Museum gave us an interesting (if stinky) view of Paris. The museum outlined the history of sanitation in the city – we now have a new appreciation that we’re not city dwellers in the Middle Ages, when they threw their sewerage out into the streets!

We weren’t blown away by all of Paris’ parks. Some seemed to be mostly an expanse of crushed stone. But we did discover one beautiful garden surrounding the Palace of Luxembourg.

As well as being spectacular in its own right, the Palace of Versailles was particularly interesting because modern art pieces are exhibited inside the historical palace. We thought this combination of old and new worked surprisingly well.

Paris was a great city to wander around with tourist attractions around every corner and beautiful buildings throughout the centre.

We’re off to Nice in the French Riviera next, but we’ll leave you with this… One of our CouchSurfers had a Chinese version of Lonely Planet New Zealand which we found hilarious. We think Chinese visitors to New Zealand might be disappointed not to see many Māori guys riding a horse carrying a surfboard!

Comments from WordPress

• Garry 2012-09-08T23:43:43Z

  Great photos! Nice tongue shots too.

  Good to talk to you the other day and glad your trip is going so well. Happy travelling!

• Alice 2012-09-09T19:51:51Z

  We went to the Luxembourg Gardens! Everything was frozen over cos it was January. Also Martha stepped in dog poo. That wasn’t frozen, unfortunately.

Written by Craig Drayton and Sally Robertson