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I never found time to write about Paris when I was there, even though I had internet the whole time. I don’t even have a hostel to blame as I was staying in my friend Astrid’s flat right in the centre of the city. So I’ll have to blame the flat itself – she lives on the 6^th floor and has no lift. No way I could blog after that.

I know it’s an odd thing to say as a tourist but the biggest problem with Paris, was the tourists. There were so many, it was ridiculous. It was hard to move around, on the street I heard more English than French and seeing anything remotely touristy was out of the question. The Notre Dame had not one but two queues, one for the main floor and one to climb up the tower and both were about 4 hours long. They stretched the length of the cathedral itself. I didn’t get near the Eiffel tower. I did see it in the distance, although I couldn’t see it from every window in the city which was just another let down from Hollywood.

Everything else was beautiful. What I mostly did was walk around and get lost amongst all the amazing boutiques and boulangeries and other French B shops. Astrid showed me around her favourite places in Paris, the best of which was a beautiful mosque/restaurant/spa where we had strange little cakes and more couscous than I thought existed in the world. They were terribly nice to us too, even though we stayed 5 hours, I was dressed like a dirty hobo (ah travel) and Astrid’s friends kept talking loudly about gay sex. The worst thing was when she took me to a sex book shop. I’m too traumatised to say what I saw there but there were 3D glasses involved. *shudder*

We also went to that famous graveyard that Oscar Wilde is buried in and got completely lost.

I love old grave yards, they are always beautiful and interesting. My favourite is one in Clare where my granny is buried because it’s very higgledy piggledy with grave stones shoved in at all angles. They had a very bad engraver in that village around the 1860′s it seems, there are lost of misspellings and even better, corrections. He stuck in small letters above words with an arrow to indicate where he’s left it out, he sometimes started the letters really big and then had to get smaller and smaller to fit them in. Maybe he was a discount engraver, 20% off per fuck up.

Wilde’s grave was covered in kisses, lipstick and graffiti. I sort of didn’t want to touch it. Some of it was funny but mostly it was slightly wrong quotes from his work. We tried to have a picnic but got attacked by such a persistent wasp that I had to surrender my Orangina and run away.

When I was wandering about on my own one day I stumbled on the Saint Germain Des Pres, a gorgeous old church where I was lucky enough to find a choir practising some old Latin hymns. Have a listen:

 

Paris is beautiful but I don’t really understand why it’s they say it’s city for lovers. I mean, it certainly is, you can’t go down the street without seeing a dozen foreigners snogging in stripy t-shirts but it didn’t seem more intrinsically romantic than anywhere else. Maybe the Paris tourist board just had a good campaign. I did like the city though, and I’d love to come back when it’s a bit calmer.