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Published: December 8th 2008
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an exotic take on Christmas
Palm trees with Christmas lights! The end is in sight! With less than two weeks before I fly home for Christmas, and only a few lectures left to go, my time in France is nearly over, apart from two weeks of exams in January. That's just crazy!
Although at the moment I can't wait to go home and I'm constantly playing Christmas songs that make me nostalgic and emotional, I can't believe how quickly time has flown here. Still, there's a bit of time left, Vicky's coming for a couple of days, and we've got some Christmas baking to do. As well as the last few lectures and a couple of exams, of course!
This week, on Tuesday, we went on another trip to the Irish pub for our customary ciders, taking a detour on he way to see the Christmas tree outside the Cathedral, and I got a bit snap-happy trying to capture Perpignan's Christmas lights. I love cities at Christmastime when they're decked out in all their lights, it makes everything look so much prettier.
Sometime during the evening at Tio Pepe's on Wednesday, Rosy and I decided to skip Friday's classes in favour of a marathon rom-com session at Katie's,
which we did. The mix of sweets, Love Actually and the deliciously mischevious feeling of missing the lecture made for a wonderfully satisfying afternoon. We followed it up with a day spent Christmas shopping on Saturday. After a wander around the Galleries Lafayette and the Christmas market, Rosy and I found a gorgeous little salon de the, which was packed to bursting inside, but we were more than happy in the private little courtyard under a heater. Although we maybe should have tried one of the 15 million (ok, slight exaggeration!) varieties of tea, we went for a hot chocolate instead. We're British after all, if we're going to have tea, it has to be tea, as in the English breakfast variety. But we didn't regret our choice, the hot chocolate, obviously made from actual chocolate, was the best I have ever tasted, even if it was hugely calorific!
To add to the warm satisfaction (and the calories), on Sunday, Rosy, Fiona, Katie and I decided to go and invesitgate the chocolate festival at the parc des expositions. It being a SUnday, buses were few and far between, and arriving at what we thought was the correct bus stop,
we were dismayed to see that there wasn't one for another hour and a half. We headed back to the house for a bit and got involved in a dubbed, originally German, Miss Marple-type programme. We had to leave before we could find out whodunnit, only to realise we'd gone to the wrong bus stop before. Luckily we were in time to get the right bus over to the parc des expo, and we were soon at the entrance, being lured in by the many chocolate aromas; the sweet smell of milk chocolate, fragrant spices, the bitter tang of cocoa. We wandered around trying various samples and buying a couple of things, but before long we'd had enough; even a small amount of good-quality samples was plenty; that combined with the crowds was too much. We had a leisurely walk back into town, and once againfound ourselves at Katie's watching another film. This time, it was Wall.E, the cutest film ever, even though there's hardly any dialogue.
Then it was back to ours for another murder mystery programme, this time our very own Midsomer Murders (or inspecteur Barnaby, as it is known in French). It was dubbed, of course,
Cider!
In the Irish pub but it was a Christmas one, and despite the whole murder thing, it was a cosy, familiar, Christmassy thing to watch.
And that was my lovely, Christmassy, three-day weekend! I can't wait for these two weeks to be over, but at the same time, I know that they're marking the end of something, so I want to make the most of them.
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