And so the adventure begins...

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My entry begins with a slightly unnecessary rant about sandwich fillings.

Okay, so sandwich fillings might not be the most relevant subject matter for a travel blog, but believe me, after getting up at the crack of 5:30 after not much sleep and waiting around at Lewes station with a heck of a lot of luggage, the last thing I want is to buy my breakfast and find it chock full of ingredients that I a) don't like and b) didn't order. Namely, pepper and margarine. Seriously. So they're slightly strange things to dislike, but that's hardly the point. The point is, I was tired, I was hungry, I wanted an egg and tomato sandwich and the overpriced station café failed to correctly label my selection as "tomato, egg, a generous sprinkling of pepper and copious amounts of butter"

(There is a little relevance to the above moanfest. It at least conveys how happy I was about leaving this country)

Let's leave the ranting for now. The sandwich incident was a while ago, and I am now writing from an extortionately (by Malagasy standards) priced internet café in Ambositra with the world's slowest connection and a foreign keyboard. Life is good! And I don't mean that sarcastically.

But anyways, back to Wednesday 3rd...

After an uneventful train journey to London Waterloo (I could segue into a mini rant about the station's lack of places that accept card, but I'm genuinely very happy right now, so don't feel the need) and finally finding a café that sold nice food, we found our seats on the Eurostar for yet another uneventful journey, this time headed for Paris.

Last time Matt and I got the Eurostar it took us directly to Disney, no fuss, no pain. On this occasion our lack of spatial awareness or general common sense saw us floundering around Gare du Nord for at least half an hour looking for a cashpoint, a ticket machine, an idiot's guide to finding our way around...

We eventually discovered the painless way to travel: the Paris metro, and soon after realised it's actually impossibly easy (how's that for an oxymoron) to navigate the entire city in this fashion. More on the wonders of the metro in later entries...

Our hotel, the Touraine Opera in Montmartre, was a cosy little place right round the corner from a metro stop (this of course didn't deter us from taking a wrong turn and wandering the streets for a while) We didn't waste much time here, preferring instead to "explore" (read: 'wander the streets aimlessly looking for familiar sights) the area. We'd heard about (courtesy of the Rough Guide) a good seafood restaurant so we attempted to find our way there and, to be honest, didn't do a bad job at all. We passed the Moulin Rouge on the way (speaking of which, why 'red windmill?' Answers on a postcard please) which was very pretty all lit up, despite having a fast food place and giant Coca Cola sign next door. We successfully found our restaurant of choice "Le Winch" without much incident, other than getting locked into a cashpoint booth down the road. What followed was one of the best meals I've had in a long time (Bob, if you're reading this, you're right. French mussels rock). The restaurant may have had weird toilets (the kind where the light goes off when you close the door and you're plunged into darkness until you locate the lock) but the staff were friendly, the food was amazing and the bill was far cheaper than we'd expected of a decent Parisian restaurant (including a complementary aperétif!)

We left the restaurant shortly before 11 and headed back home via the Moulin Rouge, where we realised our hotel is conveniently situated round the corner from Paris's red light district. Countless shops with lit up signs advertising "SEX SHOP!" "SEX SHOW!" "SEX BOOTHS!" "EROTIC MUSEUM!" (I kid you not) We never did make it to the erotic museum. Maybe next time...

Deciding it was too early to go straight to bed, we stopped off at Bar Blablabla (once more, I kid you not) for a drink. We ordered a mint cocktail. We got a large measre of spirit with mint leaves. Explains the high prices...

More on Paris later, and eventually I will have updated enough to write about Madagascar. Possibly...

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