Day Twenty Three- Last day in France

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Had our last day in France today, I have loved being here but I won’t be as sad to leave it as I was England and Scotland. I think this is probably due to the amount of work it takes to have conversations with people and navigate our way around!

Because we’ve had to wake up super early for the past couple of days, and have had some pretty late nights, we decided not to set an alarm today and sleep in. We also decided that for our last day in this beautiful country we’d stop being tourists and do as the locals do. So, we left the bnb at midday and headed to Sacré Coeur Cathedral, to see how the locals pray. On the way up we stopped into a few cute little stores to have a look around, and even pushed past some tourists dumbly standing around at souvenir shops! (So far the pretending to be a local thing was going pretty well).

Sacré Cœur is beautiful, and in my opinion almost as amazing as Notre Dame. From recollection it’s a lot taller, but Notre Dame is a lot longer and wider. Overall, 10/10 prayer space. Although, there was a sign saying no talking and no photography, which I completely understood as it’s a sacred space for prayer, yet they have coin machines where you can pay to print out your own Sacre Cœur themed coin? I think if it’s that sacred that you aren’t allowed to even whisper, then it should be too sacred for coin machines. But, I could be completely overthinking it and completely misguided.

After Sacré Cœur we headed back down to Montmartre, and stopped to get a takeaway crepe on the way (i filmed it being made, so watch out for that one in the video!). We then headed straight to the cinema, where we thought it would be really fun to watch a film in French. This was firstly because we were trying to act like locals, and secondly to improve our French comprehension skills. It was actually really cool! We watched The Incredibles 2 (or, as it’s called in France, Les Indestructibles 2), and found that we could understand quite a lot of what was going on (although, this could be due to the fact that we’ve both seen the movie in English). I’m really glad we did it, as I feel like a lot of visiting a new city is just visiting the main, MUST-DO attractions, instead of actually experiencing some of the language and every-day culture. The cinema staff did double check with us that we knew the movie wouldn’t be playing in English, which was slightly embarrassing.

When the movie finished it was 4:30pm, and we decided to head over to the Hard Rock Cafe for an early dinner as we haven’t been to any so far on this trip, and apparently it’s a multi-national company- you’re supposed to collect all the tee shirts! However when we got there, sat down, and read the menu, we found it was all super-expensive and super-American, which is not what we wanted for our last night in France. We wanted some proper French food, although neither of us knew what that was apart from escargot and frogs legs. So we left the Hard Rock Cafe and walked around for a while, trying to find a place that served more than just steak tartare and penne. We couldn’t find anywhere, and by 5:30pm we were so tired of looking for food we decided to just have a drink and set out a plan of attack. We found a nice little restaurant, ordered a Bellini each and a basket of fries, and accidentally stayed there for 2 hours (plus another Bellini each). At 7:30pm we knew we had to find something substantial, so we once again went walking up and down the street. I was determined to find some French food, so when Trudi pointed out a nice looking burger joint I was a bit hesitant. But, I saw on the menu outside that they had a smoked duck burger, and for some reason duck remains in my head as classically French, and I was starving, so we ended up going inside. The burger was great, not exactly the epitome of French cuisine but then again, I have had a lot of pastries in the last eight days.

We headed home after this, ensuring we passed by Moulin Rouge on the way (we had tried to get tickets for this but they are super expensive!! So we admired from afar). Once home, we drank the rest of the rosé whilst watching some French shows, packing up all our stuff and cleaning the apartment for our departure tomorrow. Off to Belgium in the morning!! Staying there for one night only, and going there purely to do a chocolate tour. Hey, when in Rome...

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