The finest chocolate and Indian movies that money can buy

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We awoke to a grey day, but still quite mild and no rain, so a trip to Parc de Monceau was still on the cards. Caught the metro using out Paris Visite cards. These are definitely the way to go if you plan on doing a bit of out and about in Paris - designed for the tourist and well worth the money, providing unlimited use of all public transport for 1,3 or 5 days. In an average day you could easily hop on and off a dozen or more metros.

We did a lap around and through the park and among other things found what looked like Roman ruins, but it was hard to know if they were authentic or not as there were no signs or explanations, which was a bit frustrating. The park was quite small so it didn’t take us long to want to move on and although we’d already seen the main tourist attractions before, the Arc de Triomphe beckoned. We took the short walk there down a very posh street to catch the metro. Our next stop was St Martin’s canal which apparently, is the new trendy place to live. The canal was nice, although a bit smelly and there is potential there, but still a bit of a way before its considered "up market" - definitely the time to buy. Not sure if I would recommend it for a visit, not a hell of a lot to see really, but the view may be better from the boats which cruise the canals.

We walked back to the apartment through some pretty cool parts of town though, lots of odd interesting shops - example, one had been decorated with flattened coke cans (standard coke on one side, diet coke on the other) and comic strips on all its external surfaces. That’s the great thing about Paris - if you venture off the main streets you will always find something new and interesting, and most likely pretty oddball. And no matter where you are you should never be more than 500m from a Metro station so it’s pretty hard to get lost (although we gave it a good crack).

Spent the afternoon and early evening around the Opera House and on the way to Les Jardin de Tuileries we indulged in some of the most decadent chocolate and citron cake and ganache chocolates on Rue de la Madeliene. This place was so posh we thought there was going to be a cover charge, but we flashed our $5 Euro notes around like the best of them and they knew we were not just your average window lickers. OK, we did share a piece of cake (which they had to cut 'out the back' out of the view of the big spending customers) and get a couple of free chocolates out of them, but you do what you have to when there are 3 of you on a budget.

The Jardins de Tuileries are a must see every time you’re in Paris…just the scale of these public spaces and buildings (Louvre, Palais Royale etc) and the madness required to conceive and build them hundreds of years ago never ceases to amaze.

It didn’t seem like we did much today, but by the time we got home we were shattered, and had clocked up nearly 150 photos.

Foot note - Forgot to mention, we walked out of our building this morning to find a queue of diehard Bollywood fans awaiting the Paris premiere of some movie 4/5ths of the world had never heard of. We thought it was a bit of a joke but by the end of the day the bouncers had moved in and cordoned off the area, the streets were packed, the red carpets out, and the girls in their sari’s were crowding on the rooves of cars going gaga and screaming for their Bollywood movie stars.

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