The city of lights- round two

---

A long weekend in London at the end of May Beth convinced me to go to Paris for the weekend again. So I missed the man being stabbed on my bus and made trip number two to the city of lights. This time I remembered a phrase book, and also my handy skills- which came out frequently during the trip.

This time we took the very slow route seeing as we were on a very tight budget. We went with an obscure tour company that we found in the TNT magazine, and were somewhat concerned that when we turned up there would not even be a am tour leaving from Victoria Station (at 7am in the morning). Beth had a bit of a shock when I called her when she was due to be leaving the house and she wasn’t awake yet. She thought I was joking, which was of course entirely plausible seeing as that is something that I might actually do- but I was not actually in any state to be joking at early in the morning. So it was a last minute rampage for her around the house to get everything sorted.

We joined the tour, and we were extremely lucky to score a Canadian tour leader who was just fresh off her Topdeck training and was temping for a while before she started with Topdeck (good tour company, as opposed to random budget that we went). She was very good- and so we got a fab tour including night bus tours, a cabaret, a trip to the Palace of Versailles and Sacre Coeur- which was a lot to pack into a weekend.

Highlights included:

• Finding crazy milk on the ferry, and then crazy cows in Paris.
• Fashioning a spoon out of a coke bottle with a pocket knife (that was given to me by my brother before I came over.
• Discovering that boo-tay is the French word for bottle, and using it rather (too) frequently.
• Realising that the Cabaret was made up of a tits chorus, and an arse chorus.
• Convincing everyone to buy the 11.8% Maximator beer before the cabaret, and then watching everyone gag.
• Fashioning a washing line in our cabin out of string a hook and my pocket knife.
• Cracking up that our Asian Australian tour assistant asked the other tour leader where his fake tan was AND grinned almost constantly AND that I had a dream that I pashed this strangely tanned grinning Australian!

I also ran into Metro, who appears to join the ranks of our pets that have faked their own disappearance/death and eloped overseas. I stalked him for a while and took some photo’s -he didn’t much but I think it is just because all that French snobbery has rubbed off on him.

---

Photos

Boats on a fountain
In the orangerie

Boats on a fountain
In the orangerie