In one of my most masochistic acts to date, I decided to give up chocolate for the whole of November. A decision based on absolutely no tangible benefits but because life is a little bit too cushy here and I needed a challenge. It has proved easier than anticipated though, as I have replaced chocolate with champagne! A slight cold and earache has tried to hamper my fun over the last week, but a trip to see the plastic surgeon (I kid you not) and resulting prescription has put that worry aside! So another busy fortnight which started with the revival of Erasmus life, Paris style:
Just in case things weren't international enough as it was, the first weekend of the month brought a Roman reunion to Paris. Jen and Alain hopped on a plane from sunny Glasgow and Antonio flew over from Madrid. Us nouveau-Parisians welcomed our guests in the best way we know how: by taking them out drinking! We went to a bar called Apérock Café where they have (not entirely convincingly) renamed all the cocktails with a rock music theme. Hilariously my peach-based cocktail was the "Depêche Mode" and Jen's was a "Mick Shaker" ie Jagger in case you were looking for the link. Despite the terrible level of wit, the evening was a total success and at any one point there were at least 5 different nationalities in any conversation: very l'auberge espagnol!
In the lighter hours of the weekend, we did a fairly thorough tourist trail through le Gai Paris, massively taking advantage of the free for under 26s sites. Somehow a walk through the heart of the city had us in almost constant fits of laughter, and interpreting the numerous works of modern art scattered through the Tuileries Gardens we came to the conclusion that "la vie est futile" (Life is futile!) and this became a running joke for the rest of the weekend. A 3 course meal for 10€ at Le Menhir signalled the end of the night for Jen and I who are evidently too old to deal with two heavy nights in a row. After Sunday's stroll around the Louvre and the obligatory photo sessions next to the Eiffel Tower it was already time to bid farewell to the Scots amongst us. Waving goodbye to our friends I couldn't help wondering where in the world we would next meet...! Exhausted and ready to go home I was then told by Henri that we were going out to meet Miguel, Antonio and Anne Laila for dinner somewhere in the north of Paris. Of course I could theoretically have politely declined and returned home alone to my lesson plans and resident chihuahua but a steak and bottle of red with friends unsurprisingly seemed the much more fitting option!
The lure of free champagne had Charlotte and I rushing back to the piano bar mid-week with Helena this time. After being presented with an enormous bottle of champagne (Sorry dad, I'm failing you, I don't know what the official bottle-size name is), we pushed our luck about as far as possible before leaving to investigate the club in my building! Helena left us at this point, to go home and rest after a hectic week, so Charlotte and I pressed on alone. Mercifully void of topless women and transvestites this visit was infintely more successful than the last! On a night when luck seemed to be pouring from the stars into our laps, no sooner had we entered the club than we met some people who has paid a lot of money for a private table and who invited us to sit with them and share their costly bottle of vodka. (Ie classy vodka in a classy club, not a watered down bottle of Tesco value in the Rock, where VIP tables don't exist to my knowledge....) So after yet another free drink we were telling our life stories, as is a fairly regular occurence when you move to a new city, and I casually mentionned that I lived upstairs. Our new friends suddenly became very ebullient and demanded to know if I had yet been introduced to Quentin, which for the record I hadn't. Embracing our newfound carefree demeanour and having no idea who Quentin is, nor why it was so important that we meet him, we followed them to meet the man! Turns out Quentin is, at 26, the manager of the recently reopened club and an excellent person to know! He was really nice and took the time to tell us a bit about the place and it's history, and it transpires that he effectively brought his crowd of exclusive clubbers with him when he re-opened the club under the name "130".
After a brilliant night out at a cost of precisely 0€ our feet were throbbing and we were slightly wobbly on the old legs. Charlotte and I then felt very smug as the journey home could not have been easier - a mere five floors up in the lift and we were home!
One night when I came home from work I put on the TF1 news and noticed that it was coming live from Place de la Concorde, broadcasting a live concert commemorating the fall of the Berlin wall. I was exhausted but have a natural inquisitiveness and pull towards big events and after all the luck I've had so far in Paris, I was feeling a bit cocky and decided to head on down. It is, after all, only at the end of my road. Only problem is that my road is longer than Morestall Drive for example, a fact I sometimes forget. I probably thought I'd bump into someone fabulously famous and spend the evening sipping free Moët. Alas literally the second I arrived, the last note of the concert sounded and the crowd dispersed. A well deserved reality-check? Yes. But I did have a sneaky sense of excitement walking in the opposite direction of the mass exodus of the Place.
Last weekend I went on my second French voyage of the year so far. This time, however, it was not to discover a new city. In fact, the complete opposite - I went to Nantes to visit my grandma and the rest of the French family. It was really nice to spend some time alone with Mémère as she is affectionately known in the family (despite it's negative connotations in French!) and also a welcome break from the ambulance sirens of the Rue de Rivoli. On Saturday we went to the countryside and had a big family lunch - a slightly surreal experience owing to the absence of mum and dad, but luckily I survived the pressure of total french family immersion and I don't think I made too much of a fool of myself, linguistically or otherwise. The meal was beautiful and definitely adhered to my newfound level of life: fresh lobster, duck and lots of champagne. By Sunday lunchtime I was already excited about returning 'home' to Paris. If home is where the heart is, then Paris can certainly claim this title! Well OK, it can share the postition with my beloved Ciren, but I can genuinely see myself living here in Paris for a long time.
On the train home from work on Monday with Charlotte, a tactical eavsdrop informed us that we were sharing the carriage with a player from Marseille football club. This was particularly exciting for Charlotte who, for some unfathomable reason, supports l'OM! Anyway, not working on Tuesdays means that Monday night is the new Saturday night... sort of! A friend from Ciren was over for a few days looking for a job and somewhere to live. Having gotten tired of waiting at home, with a degree but no work, he decided to come and ride out the recession living in Paris! In a depressing time like this when even friends that have been working a year or less are being made redundant it seems like a great idea! So I met up with Tom and his friend Theo and we somehow ended up in an Irish pub and participating in Monday night pub quiz! It was good craic (!) but the lax rules on cheating would have had Bill in a cold sweat! Iphones everywhere and people joining teams willy nilly. Good fun and I would like to go back as I love pub quizzes and we're all allowed a little bit of home comfort, but it had nothing to rival the institution that is Bill and the Nelson pub quiz! I then continued my night by heading to Helena's flat to celebrate Tobias' birthday. Another highly international night, I walked the 10minutes home with a group of people and managed to hold conversations in four languages in that short time!!
I've got a busy fortnight coming up with lots of parties, visits, concerts etc... Obviously I'd rather stay in my flat alone every night with a cup of a tea, but a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do to stay socially afloat in Paris!
Sunday, 22 November 2009
Monday, 9 November 2009
The Parents Come To Stay
After Matty's visit a little down time was in order, to get over the excitement of our linguistic escapades,alas a call from Helena on Saturday morning inviting me to a Brazilian restaurant cum nightclub with a plethora of Italians proved a little too difficult to resist. So as we dined on South American cuisine with what can only be descibed as an eclectic group of people (Nationalities included Italian, English, German, Greek, American and French), the other half of the room started to fill with night time revellers. Slightly odd atmosphere for eating in but brilliant nontheless. After our rather costly prawns, Helena, Tobias and I simultaneously hit the cocktails and the dancefloor with mixed results. I like to think that my latino dancing was Strictly Come Dancing worthy but I severly doubt this now I think with a lucid ie sober mind. Getting home at 4am obviously ruled out doing anything constructive for the rest of the weekend, except of course the now complusory Sunday Lunch Flunch for general mutual sympathy (ow my head hurts so much) and night de-brief (Did I really spend half an hour practicing my newly acquired Norwegian skills on some unsuspecting Swedes? Answer: yes Natalie, of course you did.)
A fairly uneventful week of work ensued and the following weekend Zuzanna held her 'mojito party'. Having sent her mother, sister and even dog to sleep in the office for a night Zuzanna took advantage of an empty appartment to invite us round to indulge in cocktails, conversation and even a bit of dancing towards the end! Once again I met some nice new people and even had a farily inspiring conversation with one of Zuzanna's friends who is in the process of becoming a sport's jounalist. He told me that I must follow my dreams, once again fuelling my idea of music journalism... On the way home, Henri and I once more filled the streets of Paris with our dulcet tones, this time I hasten to recall, it was a co-written masterpiece entitled "La Motte Piquet Grenelle" the name of the nearest metro station. Quite why it felt so necessary at the time remains somewhat of a mystery to me, but what I do remember is that we had lots of fun at the time singing away at 3am so it can't all be bad! The best thing about living where I do is that practically every night bus goes through Chatelet, so on our first sighting of a bus we climbed on and it took me almost to my front door - how's that for service!
Last week was fairly dominated by the visit from the folks - ie mum and dad. The devoted and wonderful daughter that I am, I trotted off to Gare du Nord on Sunday to meet them off the train (not before having my vital Sunday Lunch Flunch of course...!) In what seemed to be an exercise in making me look like a bad human being, just as the train pulled into the station a man collapsed onto my foot. Instead of wowing the crowd with my astonishing first aid skills (of which I have approximately none) I stood still with a perplexed expression on my face until some woman nearby came running over and did all the stuff your supposed to do when someone collapses onto you. Aparently watching Casualty for a decade isn't enough preperation when it comes to dealing with a medical emergency! I collected the old dears and got them safely to their hotel and we commenced our tourist tour of my part of town. We had a lovely dinner in a traditional french restaurant (Le Menhir) and I even made a complete fool of myself ( Could you believe it?!) standing outside Mr Actor's flat pointing, until dad casually said "That's not him leaning out of the window looking this way is it?!" So much for my cool, disinterested exterior. Over the two follwing days we did the sights as you would expect (including the strawberry millefeuille patisserie!) and spent a surprisingly entertaining hour queuing for the Musée d'Orsay on Tuesday morning - the perfect location for a spot of people watching! We saw a he-she teenager and a woman dressed in what can only be described as a vintage wedding dress amongst many others. In this particularly norwegian era of my life (!), it was fitting that we went for a coffee with dad's friend Rob who was in town on business with the norwegian company he works for. Mercifully I restrained, for once, from trying out my linguistic skills. It was lovely to have the parents here for a few days, and I don't just mean because they took me out for dinner three nights in a row! (Although that was great!) And my greatest achievement during their visit, was eating frogs' legs for the very first time!
Shock horror, on Friday last week I went to the Virgin Megastores on the Champs Elysées and nothing, absolutely nothing of interest happened. I merely walked in, looked around a bit, bought some DVDs and left again. This is most unsatisfactory and I hope it doesn't happen again. On my way home I did come across a lot of television cameras outside one of the big hotels on Rue de Rivoli and I aimlessly stood around for a while hoping to catch some excitement, however it has recently become very wintry over here and I got cold and bored so I left! In the evening Ollie sent me a message saying he was bored and we decided to share a bottle of wine and catch up with each others' news. He has, after about a month in Paris found somewhere to live, but has been staying in an apartment a stone's throw from the Sacré Couer so I went there. On the metro on the way home I bumped into Mr Swedish man from Favela Chic (the Brazilian club)! The poor soul looked traumatised when he recognised me as if I might start depserately trying out my norwegian again. But I was very well behaved and for the second time that week refrained from norwegian waffle! It never ceases to amaze me when in a city of 2.4million inhabitants plus tourists, it is a fairly common occurence to bump into somebody in the street or metro! Saturday started like any other, with a beautiful strawberry millefeuille. I am definitely addicted and moving back to England could prove problematic...! Another lazy day was followed by an evening of humiliation and fun...
Clearly Paris is too sophisticated to celebrate Halloween, so on 31st October amongst the crowds on the Rue de Rivoli were scattered a few ex-pats sheepishly skulking down the street in varying degrees of fancy dress. Thanking God for small mercies, I wasn't alone in my quest to walk down the street as Helena (ie nurse with giant, inflatable syringe) and Tobias (alias the Doctor in full scrubs with effective fake blood smeered everywhere) met me (whiskers, black ears and even a tail peaking out from beneath my coat) outside the flat. The metro journey was odd and certainly filled the daily humiliation quota. At the other end we met up with Robin Hood (Zuzanna) and Cleopatra (Berengere)! The party was at Charlotte's flat next to the Eiffel Tower and it was a brilliant night, everyone mixed really well regardless of nationalities and levels of previous acquaintance. Clearly I am too old these days for fun and games late into the night and by 1am I was fast asleep on Charlotte's bed clutching her chihuahua! Sunday lunch flunch was, as ever, an excellent place for recollection and laughter the next day!
Lastly, no natzinparis blog update would be complete without a champagne ridden soirée or a bit of cheeky networking/blagging. On Wednesday the 5 lectrices from university went out for a meal at Le Menhir, the French restaurant in which I ate my first ever French Onion Soup with my parents the week before. After a nice meal Charlotte and I decided to eschew good sense and head to a bar. I'd like to say we chose a piano bar on Rue de la Huchette but there wasn't really much of a choice in the matter. The doorman Sergey, practically picked us up and dropped us at the bar. After one glass of wine, we were ready to leave until someone offered to buy us another. Somewhat half heartedly we accepted and then he introduced us to his brother, who as it happens was the owner of the bar! An evening of unlimited free champagne ensued and come 3am, after a slightly surreal tour of the greek restaurant opposite, 2 marriage proposals, and job offers coming from all angles we realised it was far too late for Charlotte to get home on the metro! So, she came and crashed at my flat and a mere 4 hours later we were up and getting ready to go to work. It was the hardest day of work to date!!
Essentially the moral of this blog entry is that I am an inherently bad person, I am partying a little too hard for a mature graduate (!!) and I have succeeded in increasing the stereotypical image of my French life by eating frogs' legs and french onion soup. Très bien!
A fairly uneventful week of work ensued and the following weekend Zuzanna held her 'mojito party'. Having sent her mother, sister and even dog to sleep in the office for a night Zuzanna took advantage of an empty appartment to invite us round to indulge in cocktails, conversation and even a bit of dancing towards the end! Once again I met some nice new people and even had a farily inspiring conversation with one of Zuzanna's friends who is in the process of becoming a sport's jounalist. He told me that I must follow my dreams, once again fuelling my idea of music journalism... On the way home, Henri and I once more filled the streets of Paris with our dulcet tones, this time I hasten to recall, it was a co-written masterpiece entitled "La Motte Piquet Grenelle" the name of the nearest metro station. Quite why it felt so necessary at the time remains somewhat of a mystery to me, but what I do remember is that we had lots of fun at the time singing away at 3am so it can't all be bad! The best thing about living where I do is that practically every night bus goes through Chatelet, so on our first sighting of a bus we climbed on and it took me almost to my front door - how's that for service!
Last week was fairly dominated by the visit from the folks - ie mum and dad. The devoted and wonderful daughter that I am, I trotted off to Gare du Nord on Sunday to meet them off the train (not before having my vital Sunday Lunch Flunch of course...!) In what seemed to be an exercise in making me look like a bad human being, just as the train pulled into the station a man collapsed onto my foot. Instead of wowing the crowd with my astonishing first aid skills (of which I have approximately none) I stood still with a perplexed expression on my face until some woman nearby came running over and did all the stuff your supposed to do when someone collapses onto you. Aparently watching Casualty for a decade isn't enough preperation when it comes to dealing with a medical emergency! I collected the old dears and got them safely to their hotel and we commenced our tourist tour of my part of town. We had a lovely dinner in a traditional french restaurant (Le Menhir) and I even made a complete fool of myself ( Could you believe it?!) standing outside Mr Actor's flat pointing, until dad casually said "That's not him leaning out of the window looking this way is it?!" So much for my cool, disinterested exterior. Over the two follwing days we did the sights as you would expect (including the strawberry millefeuille patisserie!) and spent a surprisingly entertaining hour queuing for the Musée d'Orsay on Tuesday morning - the perfect location for a spot of people watching! We saw a he-she teenager and a woman dressed in what can only be described as a vintage wedding dress amongst many others. In this particularly norwegian era of my life (!), it was fitting that we went for a coffee with dad's friend Rob who was in town on business with the norwegian company he works for. Mercifully I restrained, for once, from trying out my linguistic skills. It was lovely to have the parents here for a few days, and I don't just mean because they took me out for dinner three nights in a row! (Although that was great!) And my greatest achievement during their visit, was eating frogs' legs for the very first time!
Shock horror, on Friday last week I went to the Virgin Megastores on the Champs Elysées and nothing, absolutely nothing of interest happened. I merely walked in, looked around a bit, bought some DVDs and left again. This is most unsatisfactory and I hope it doesn't happen again. On my way home I did come across a lot of television cameras outside one of the big hotels on Rue de Rivoli and I aimlessly stood around for a while hoping to catch some excitement, however it has recently become very wintry over here and I got cold and bored so I left! In the evening Ollie sent me a message saying he was bored and we decided to share a bottle of wine and catch up with each others' news. He has, after about a month in Paris found somewhere to live, but has been staying in an apartment a stone's throw from the Sacré Couer so I went there. On the metro on the way home I bumped into Mr Swedish man from Favela Chic (the Brazilian club)! The poor soul looked traumatised when he recognised me as if I might start depserately trying out my norwegian again. But I was very well behaved and for the second time that week refrained from norwegian waffle! It never ceases to amaze me when in a city of 2.4million inhabitants plus tourists, it is a fairly common occurence to bump into somebody in the street or metro! Saturday started like any other, with a beautiful strawberry millefeuille. I am definitely addicted and moving back to England could prove problematic...! Another lazy day was followed by an evening of humiliation and fun...
Clearly Paris is too sophisticated to celebrate Halloween, so on 31st October amongst the crowds on the Rue de Rivoli were scattered a few ex-pats sheepishly skulking down the street in varying degrees of fancy dress. Thanking God for small mercies, I wasn't alone in my quest to walk down the street as Helena (ie nurse with giant, inflatable syringe) and Tobias (alias the Doctor in full scrubs with effective fake blood smeered everywhere) met me (whiskers, black ears and even a tail peaking out from beneath my coat) outside the flat. The metro journey was odd and certainly filled the daily humiliation quota. At the other end we met up with Robin Hood (Zuzanna) and Cleopatra (Berengere)! The party was at Charlotte's flat next to the Eiffel Tower and it was a brilliant night, everyone mixed really well regardless of nationalities and levels of previous acquaintance. Clearly I am too old these days for fun and games late into the night and by 1am I was fast asleep on Charlotte's bed clutching her chihuahua! Sunday lunch flunch was, as ever, an excellent place for recollection and laughter the next day!
Lastly, no natzinparis blog update would be complete without a champagne ridden soirée or a bit of cheeky networking/blagging. On Wednesday the 5 lectrices from university went out for a meal at Le Menhir, the French restaurant in which I ate my first ever French Onion Soup with my parents the week before. After a nice meal Charlotte and I decided to eschew good sense and head to a bar. I'd like to say we chose a piano bar on Rue de la Huchette but there wasn't really much of a choice in the matter. The doorman Sergey, practically picked us up and dropped us at the bar. After one glass of wine, we were ready to leave until someone offered to buy us another. Somewhat half heartedly we accepted and then he introduced us to his brother, who as it happens was the owner of the bar! An evening of unlimited free champagne ensued and come 3am, after a slightly surreal tour of the greek restaurant opposite, 2 marriage proposals, and job offers coming from all angles we realised it was far too late for Charlotte to get home on the metro! So, she came and crashed at my flat and a mere 4 hours later we were up and getting ready to go to work. It was the hardest day of work to date!!
Essentially the moral of this blog entry is that I am an inherently bad person, I am partying a little too hard for a mature graduate (!!) and I have succeeded in increasing the stereotypical image of my French life by eating frogs' legs and french onion soup. Très bien!
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