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!