A Nice Weekend in Paris

[fuchsoid]

The weekend in Paris was lovely, one of the nicest weekends away I have ever had, I think. The weather was beautifully warm and clear, so was completely comfortable in sandals and a shirt, with no jacket. Friday evening was positively balmy, and we wandered pleasantly around Canal St Martin, eating sushi and drinking beer until about 2 am. Saturday (after the obligatory run up to Monoprix for exotic biscuits and drinks) was spent in a rather vain, but fun, attempt to locate an alleged festival of the Bastille quarter, which seemed to consist of a single shouty man in the middle of a side-street. Nonetheless, we spent a lovely sunny day, walking miles through the Marais and Bastille, stopping at intervals for huge salt-beef sandwiches, steak/frites, beer and the obligatory cheery bollocking from a waiter for getting my genders muddled up when I ordered said beer (that's la biere) and ending up in the local bar, where at about midnight, the noisy jazz band decamped and marched off down the street to the canal, still playing. Sunday morning consisted of a late breakfast collected at the little food market up the road (with delicious black muscat grapes) and eaten in the same local bar (who let you bring in food if you buy coffee), then culture, with a repeat visit to the Musee des Arts Decoratif, where the fashion exhibition consisted of 70s (surprisingly wearable) and 80s (horrible) couture, and their regular themed exhibition was about animals, and included the single most awesome thing I have ever seen in a museum - a tiny silk coat tailored for someone’s pet monkey in the eighteenth century. Behold its amazingness;




and here's another scenic, Paris-type picture, of one of the canal locks in the sunshine;




Now I'm off to hospital for Joint School*, but I'll post a few more pictures when I get back.

*Of course, the first rule of Joint School is you do not talk about Joint School, so I'm afraid I must be silent on this one.