It is back to Brazil with us, and back to the weird round-robin/kind-of blog format we all know and love.
Yesterday I sat on a plane for eleven hours being fed and watching endless films, which I quite enjoyed and which ended too soon if anything, but before that we were in gay Pareee for the end of 2017. After a goodbye scone at the Ely tea house we struck out to London and got the Eurostar to our ridiculously posh Airbnb, a huge Haussmannian pile near Montparnasse. I was particularly chuffed as it was right underneath the tiny chambres de bonne on the sixth floor, the likes of which I used to frequent.
We eventually dragged ourselves away the next morning, heading straight to the good stuff at the Eiffel Tower and the Pont des Invalides before wandering around the War Museum ("you can't fight here!", etc) and on to Notre Dame for a crepe and ice cream on the Île St-Louis (as is tradition, no matter how cold it actually is).
Friday was very grey so we stuck to the Louvre, but not before heading down the Champs-Elysées and getting caught in the pouring rain in the Tuileries - we eventually dried out though and Gaby's grandma used her senior skills to get us to the front of the security-check queue, which went on for several miles. The Louvre is still pretty great, FYI. We then achieved peak Frenchness with onion soup on the Rue de Rivoli, followed by more soup at home.
The next day we went to the establishment of Ridaut's boulanger friend, although he wasn't in so we drifted down to Notre Dame again for a look inside, then up to Opera and the Galeries Lafayette rooftop, and finally to Montmartre, for a singing-nun concert in Sacré Cœur and a waistline-expanding medley of fondues at our favourite fondue place. Then after a quick excursion to the Moulin Rouge we headed for home.
By this point we'd basically covered everything so we took it easy the next day, went to the boulangerie for endless pastries and a galette du roi, made a sumptuous New Years Eve meal of cordon bleu and chocolate mousse and piled on the tube to the Eiffel Tower to see in 2018, which was followed by a desperate few hours trying to get back to the flat in the midst of huge crowds, shouting policeman and a non-existent metro. Eventually we got in our red-eye cab to Roissy and now here we are, back across the Atlantic.
Lovely to see you again, and hope you had fun over the réveillon... Regrettably I have no compilation for you this week, but hopefully today's expression - "it caught me short-trousered" (i.e. off-guard) - should make up for it.
Auld Lang Syne, etc,
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