'Bonjour' is an anagram of 'Nob Rouj'.
If you asked me what my favourite part of France was, I'd look you straight in the eye and tell you that it was when the ferry pulled out of Calais and I saw the fucking country fade into the distance.
If that sounds a little overboard and dramatic, that's because I'm a dramatic person prone to going overboard.
I'll start from the beginning.
We boarded the train at St. Pancras station and pulled out of London on a clear, sunny morning. The views leading out were unspectacular, the kind of vistas that I've become accustomed to in inner Britain; tenement housing, large pockets of brown soil littered with junk and concrete pillars. We then hit full speed on the fastest train I've ever had the pleasure of being on. They could safely advertise it as 'The Fucking Fast Train' and no one would bat an eyelid.
'Well, it's true, isn't it?' is what people would say.
Then my travel curse kicked in, which is my unfailing ability to be seated next to, or adjacent to, some form of child. It happened on both flights over here, and was occuring again in the form of a spoilt, fat little British turd. She was dressed all in pink, and looked uncannily like Miss Piggy. Her mother was an aggravatingly unnatractive slapper, and they spent most of the trip arguing over the same fucking thing:
'But MUMMY, I'm really, REALLY hungry!'
'Shutup, Jessica. Mummy's drinking her rose wine'.
'NnnnnghhhhGGHHHH! I'M HUNGRY! STARRRRRVING!'
Of course, the moment they'd boarded the train they'd headed off to the snack counter to buy Miss Piggy biscuits and Coke, which she ate noisily in front of us. Mentally, I pictured her choking on a biscuit and then getting sucked out of a window, but that particular dream didn't come true.
After the train passed under the Channel, we were speeding through France, and the scenery changed for the better. Rolling fields of wheat and other greenery for miles and miles unfolded to the horizon, and I was absolutely captivated. Unlike Melbourne, where suburbia starts about 20 kilometres out, Paris sort of materialised out of those green fields, and within 10 minutes of suburban buildings appearing, we had pulled into Gare Du Nord.
Then it was time for my culture shock to begin. I didn't expect everything to be written in English, obviously, but it seemed that NOTHING at the station was written in English. I thought maybe a sign for stupid, ignorant travellers like ourselves would have been in order, something like "THIS WAY TO PARIS CENTRAL, YOU TOURIST SCUM", but alas, we were left to our own devices, which were limited.
Trial and error guided us to the ticket booth, where we purchased our Metro passes, and then headed off to the hotel. I wasn't terribly chuffed about being on the fifth floor of said hotel, as I hate heights (but not enclosed ones. The fact that this had a huge glass door that opened onto nothing was what got to me), but I gradually got used to it. After dumping our bags, we returned to the street via the tiniest elevator I've ever witnessed (it fit two people, and preferably skinny ones) and headed out to look around.
To our surprise, we were literally across the road from The Louvre. We didn't go there straight away, it being too late, so we found a shitty restaurant, ate some passable fare, and returned to the hotel and went to sleep.
Our next Parisian day dawned bright and clear, so we hit the streets for breakfast. I enjoyed an omlette with a croissant, and we both had surprisingly terrible coffee. I mean, it would seem to be a reasonably easy process to make a coffee that doesn't taste like burnt ass hair. I say this because even I can make coffee that doesn't taste like burnt ass hair. We assured each other that the next one would be better.
Then, touring the streets, we made our way to The Louvre. One thing to be said about the streets of Paris is that, while I can literally feel hundreds of years of dense history as an almost oppresive weight, they've somehow managed to make almost every single building look like the one next to it, resulting in a city that conveys a palpable sense of what Paris is and what makes it unique, while looking like a Caroline Springs model community where they only had one type of building.
This did not apply to the Louvre, however. My God, it's huge. While it was used by Charles V as a residence, I can only assume he really, really liked walking, because to get from one end to the other takes at least 10 minutes. Then you go to the other side and do it all again. It has for storeys as well, which makes it rather taxing, as to see everything you need to go back and forth, up and down all day.
We started off in Egyptian History, passed through the Religious Paintings section, saw that fucking Mona whatsername thing, perved on the Venus De Milo, and then went traipsing through endless halls of paintings. It was around this point when we got separated. I can probably think of worse places to get separated from a loved one, like, say, a graveyard filled with zombies, or a scat lovers convention, but The Louvre ranks pretty close to that. I did the manly thing and walked around the upper storeys mumbling angrily to myself while trying to locate Julie, and Julie did the female thing by going straight to the pre-arranged meeting spot and standing there looking worried.
I eventually came to my senses and went to the right place, and we continued the tour, finishing with the awesome Statue area. Actually, that wasn't the finish, as I had to stand around the gift shop like a moron while Julied looked at shitty knick-knacks. We then had a late lunch on the bank of the Seine, where we paid AUD$13.00 for a fucking glass of Coke.
While I'm ranting, here's a question: There are approximately 64 million people in France. Even if every single one of those people had a hard-on for history and visited the Louvre, that still leaves around three BILLION FUCKING PEOPLE around the world who don't speak French who may want to visit one of the world's largest museums, so why is every description in fucking French? For example:
Mona Lisa. Peint par Leonardo Da Vinci en XVIème siècle, utilisant l'huile.
Une des peintures les plus étudiées dans l'histoire.
Translated that's a very brief rundown of the Mona Lisa, but you wouldn't know it apart from the words 'Mona' and 'Lisa' and the artist. When I read it, I translated it as:
'Hello, tourist pig. We make so much money from this painting that it funds the French economy. If you'd care to look at any Parisian on the street once you've exited The Louvre, they'll be laughing at you because you are a silly tourist tit-end, and you can't read French. If you'd care to venture further down the hallway, you can read the placard underneath the sculpture of some Roman twat that will inform you that I've parked my shoes underneath your Mother's bed. Merci, and go fuck yourself.'
The next day we rose early and walked all the way to the Eiffel Tower, where we both looked at the ridiculous queues and said 'Fuck that!'
I took some obilgatory photo's, but felt no loss at not having climbed what is essentially a French vanity project, and headed off to climb something that had real history, the Arc De Triomphe. Easily my first of two highlights of Paris, we climbed the 284 steps to the top (another small highlight being the woman who climbed behind Julie, who, upon reaching the top uttered the litany 'Oh Jesus, Oh Jesus, Oh Jesus') and took in the view. While I wasn't comfortable getting too close to the edge, I took some great footage, and then headed back down the 284 steps to walk down the Champs Elysees.
While I tried to imagine thousands of Nazi's parading down here after they captured Paris, I could only see high priced boutiques and expensive patisseries. Julie spotted the Louis Vitton store, so of course we had to browse through there. Once that quick trip through hell finished, we ambled down to the Place De Le Concorde, where, though I tried to be amazed at a three and a half thousand year obelisk, I mainly thought about how much I needed to take a shit.
We ate that night at an overpriced shitty chain of steak restaurants (in my defense, I had no idea it was a chain until the next day), where I had the most uninspiring steak I think I've ever had. It was so thin that it was impossible to have had it cooked rare like I asked, so I just closed my eyes and swallowed, because I've got a great knack for that?
The next day we went underneath Paris into the catacombs, my second highlight. Julie was naturally alarmed at being four storeys down in narrow confines, but after the kilometre walk to the actual ossuary she was calmer. Then the bones began. There are fucking thousands and thousands of people down there. Endless hallways of ancient death, and they just kept on coming. After a while, the atmosphere became strangley calming, and I just wandered through the dimly lit caves wondering who these people were and what they did in their lifetimes.
Emerging into the sun was rather life-affirming, and we retired to the hotel again to drink wine and watch overpriced movies on the tiny TV. I also drank beer. Then I drank some scotch. Then I drank wine again. Then I woke up with my head on my chest, dribbling onto my stomach.
The next day we packed up and headed off to the French version of Frankston; a fucking shithole called Amiens. Perhaps someone may disagree with me if they had been to Amiens and had a nice experince, but I hated every fucking minute of this shitty suburb, filled as it was with the most staggering amount of homeless people, shifty looking youths, general cunts and ugly shitfucks.
The hotel was a decent size, but that's about all I can say about it. However, it didn't have a fridge for me to store the vast amount of alcohol I needed to blot out this trip through Dante's Inferno, so I now freely admit now to drinking lukewarm beer to make myself go to sleep so as to avoid this fucking town.
The next day's walk through Amiens made me question why the Anzacs bothered defending it, and I can only assume that it was no doubt much more attractive in 1916. Today it is a confused town that seems to be reciving constant facelifts by adding obscene amounts of cream coloured paving and frosted glass, but seeing as though you can't polish a turd, it just has a patina of falseness. The coffee was fucking terrible, too.
So I was glad when we hopped on a train and headed down to Villers-Brettoneux. This was what I had come out this far to see. The Anzacs played an explicit role in the defense of this town, giving the Germans a right fucking thrashing. We caught a cab out to the Australian War Memorial, which is so majestic but sad that I was almost moved to tears. Hundreds of graves lie in lines amongst immaculate gardens, and the actual memorial lists the known fallen. Like I've noticed before, trying to absorb so many names becomes a fruitless exercise as it's impossible to fathom what the Great War was like and what they endured.
From what I can tell, this massive monument is paid for by Australian taxpayer dollars, and I for one am glad that we do so.
After that we waited for the fucking train on the fucking station for a fucking hour so we could go back to that fucking town to have some fucking food and go back to the fucking hotel so we could get up the next fucking morning and get the fuck out of fucking Amiens.
Before making our exit, though, we dined at an Irish themed pub for dinner. In a great cultural nod to Ireland they served food and alcohol, two things that are apparently novel enough in Ireland to warrant opening an Irish themed pub in fucking sinkhole of a town in Northern France.
It was here that I had the special MYSTERY ingredient! The special MYSTERY ingredient may have been in the pepper sauce that tasted like water with a peppercorn it it, or it could have been the red stuff that might have been Cayenne Pepper or Paprika or crushed Panadol tablets with red food colouring. Whatever the MYSTERY ingredient was, I had an allergic reaction to it when we got back to the hotel. My face went as red as a lobster and became all puffy, and I freaked the fuck out because of course this kind of thing happens when you're in the middle of ShitTown in FuckoLand where no one speaks any English.
I managed to calm down once my face became less puffy, then spent an anxious night tossing and turning, counting the minutes until this nightmare ended. Reassuringly, the coffee was still fucking terrible the next day, and it was with total glee that we made it to the station to endure another facet of travelling by rail in France, that of WAITING FOR HOURS. How we laughed.
We had to change trains at Boulougne, which is where I wish we had stayed, as it looked beautiful, and then we puttered onwards to Calais. Only a few days before I had finished reading Bill Bryson's tour of England, and he had started at Calais as well. In his book he relates seeing the ferry terminal, but having no idea of how to reach it as it is surrounded by car parks, oil refineries, building sites, roundabouts and... I don't know... fucking dinosaurs or something. I had foolishly intended to walk there, because like the rest of France there was not one one single fucking sign telling you how far it was to anywhere or how to get there, but Julie intervened and we caught a cab.
The ferry was quite nice, and the sight of France fading into the distance made me orgasm with unadulterated joy. The white cliffs of Dover were a welcoming sight, and to celebrate I delivered an uppercut to a French guy and spat in his beret. (Actually, no one in France wore a beret. At all.)
Then we boarded yet another fucking train, and soon after the guy I christened 'Cider Goon' got on. He was about 20, I guess. He had eighteen cans of cider with him, and one open and on the go. He informed us that he'd already drunk 8 litres and had real trouble generating a single thought. The discussion was exhilarating, especially after we'd been talking in Australian accents and he asked if we were born in Chiswick.
Then after what seemed an eternity, sort of like this blog entry, we entered Victoria Station, and our French journey was at an end.
The coffee was shit, the hospitality was shit, everything was overpriced, Amiens was a cesspool, the majority of food sucked and I had an allergic reaction for the first time in my life. I may not have had the most awesome time, and it may not sound like it, but I'm really glad I went.
Still annoyed by that Little Miss Piggy fat shit, though.
If that sounds a little overboard and dramatic, that's because I'm a dramatic person prone to going overboard.
I'll start from the beginning.
We boarded the train at St. Pancras station and pulled out of London on a clear, sunny morning. The views leading out were unspectacular, the kind of vistas that I've become accustomed to in inner Britain; tenement housing, large pockets of brown soil littered with junk and concrete pillars. We then hit full speed on the fastest train I've ever had the pleasure of being on. They could safely advertise it as 'The Fucking Fast Train' and no one would bat an eyelid.
'Well, it's true, isn't it?' is what people would say.
Then my travel curse kicked in, which is my unfailing ability to be seated next to, or adjacent to, some form of child. It happened on both flights over here, and was occuring again in the form of a spoilt, fat little British turd. She was dressed all in pink, and looked uncannily like Miss Piggy. Her mother was an aggravatingly unnatractive slapper, and they spent most of the trip arguing over the same fucking thing:
'But MUMMY, I'm really, REALLY hungry!'
'Shutup, Jessica. Mummy's drinking her rose wine'.
'NnnnnghhhhGGHHHH! I'M HUNGRY! STARRRRRVING!'
Of course, the moment they'd boarded the train they'd headed off to the snack counter to buy Miss Piggy biscuits and Coke, which she ate noisily in front of us. Mentally, I pictured her choking on a biscuit and then getting sucked out of a window, but that particular dream didn't come true.
After the train passed under the Channel, we were speeding through France, and the scenery changed for the better. Rolling fields of wheat and other greenery for miles and miles unfolded to the horizon, and I was absolutely captivated. Unlike Melbourne, where suburbia starts about 20 kilometres out, Paris sort of materialised out of those green fields, and within 10 minutes of suburban buildings appearing, we had pulled into Gare Du Nord.
Then it was time for my culture shock to begin. I didn't expect everything to be written in English, obviously, but it seemed that NOTHING at the station was written in English. I thought maybe a sign for stupid, ignorant travellers like ourselves would have been in order, something like "THIS WAY TO PARIS CENTRAL, YOU TOURIST SCUM", but alas, we were left to our own devices, which were limited.
Trial and error guided us to the ticket booth, where we purchased our Metro passes, and then headed off to the hotel. I wasn't terribly chuffed about being on the fifth floor of said hotel, as I hate heights (but not enclosed ones. The fact that this had a huge glass door that opened onto nothing was what got to me), but I gradually got used to it. After dumping our bags, we returned to the street via the tiniest elevator I've ever witnessed (it fit two people, and preferably skinny ones) and headed out to look around.
To our surprise, we were literally across the road from The Louvre. We didn't go there straight away, it being too late, so we found a shitty restaurant, ate some passable fare, and returned to the hotel and went to sleep.
Our next Parisian day dawned bright and clear, so we hit the streets for breakfast. I enjoyed an omlette with a croissant, and we both had surprisingly terrible coffee. I mean, it would seem to be a reasonably easy process to make a coffee that doesn't taste like burnt ass hair. I say this because even I can make coffee that doesn't taste like burnt ass hair. We assured each other that the next one would be better.
Then, touring the streets, we made our way to The Louvre. One thing to be said about the streets of Paris is that, while I can literally feel hundreds of years of dense history as an almost oppresive weight, they've somehow managed to make almost every single building look like the one next to it, resulting in a city that conveys a palpable sense of what Paris is and what makes it unique, while looking like a Caroline Springs model community where they only had one type of building.
This did not apply to the Louvre, however. My God, it's huge. While it was used by Charles V as a residence, I can only assume he really, really liked walking, because to get from one end to the other takes at least 10 minutes. Then you go to the other side and do it all again. It has for storeys as well, which makes it rather taxing, as to see everything you need to go back and forth, up and down all day.
We started off in Egyptian History, passed through the Religious Paintings section, saw that fucking Mona whatsername thing, perved on the Venus De Milo, and then went traipsing through endless halls of paintings. It was around this point when we got separated. I can probably think of worse places to get separated from a loved one, like, say, a graveyard filled with zombies, or a scat lovers convention, but The Louvre ranks pretty close to that. I did the manly thing and walked around the upper storeys mumbling angrily to myself while trying to locate Julie, and Julie did the female thing by going straight to the pre-arranged meeting spot and standing there looking worried.
I eventually came to my senses and went to the right place, and we continued the tour, finishing with the awesome Statue area. Actually, that wasn't the finish, as I had to stand around the gift shop like a moron while Julied looked at shitty knick-knacks. We then had a late lunch on the bank of the Seine, where we paid AUD$13.00 for a fucking glass of Coke.
While I'm ranting, here's a question: There are approximately 64 million people in France. Even if every single one of those people had a hard-on for history and visited the Louvre, that still leaves around three BILLION FUCKING PEOPLE around the world who don't speak French who may want to visit one of the world's largest museums, so why is every description in fucking French? For example:
Mona Lisa. Peint par Leonardo Da Vinci en XVIème siècle, utilisant l'huile.
Une des peintures les plus étudiées dans l'histoire.
Translated that's a very brief rundown of the Mona Lisa, but you wouldn't know it apart from the words 'Mona' and 'Lisa' and the artist. When I read it, I translated it as:
'Hello, tourist pig. We make so much money from this painting that it funds the French economy. If you'd care to look at any Parisian on the street once you've exited The Louvre, they'll be laughing at you because you are a silly tourist tit-end, and you can't read French. If you'd care to venture further down the hallway, you can read the placard underneath the sculpture of some Roman twat that will inform you that I've parked my shoes underneath your Mother's bed. Merci, and go fuck yourself.'
The next day we rose early and walked all the way to the Eiffel Tower, where we both looked at the ridiculous queues and said 'Fuck that!'
I took some obilgatory photo's, but felt no loss at not having climbed what is essentially a French vanity project, and headed off to climb something that had real history, the Arc De Triomphe. Easily my first of two highlights of Paris, we climbed the 284 steps to the top (another small highlight being the woman who climbed behind Julie, who, upon reaching the top uttered the litany 'Oh Jesus, Oh Jesus, Oh Jesus') and took in the view. While I wasn't comfortable getting too close to the edge, I took some great footage, and then headed back down the 284 steps to walk down the Champs Elysees.
While I tried to imagine thousands of Nazi's parading down here after they captured Paris, I could only see high priced boutiques and expensive patisseries. Julie spotted the Louis Vitton store, so of course we had to browse through there. Once that quick trip through hell finished, we ambled down to the Place De Le Concorde, where, though I tried to be amazed at a three and a half thousand year obelisk, I mainly thought about how much I needed to take a shit.
We ate that night at an overpriced shitty chain of steak restaurants (in my defense, I had no idea it was a chain until the next day), where I had the most uninspiring steak I think I've ever had. It was so thin that it was impossible to have had it cooked rare like I asked, so I just closed my eyes and swallowed, because I've got a great knack for that?
The next day we went underneath Paris into the catacombs, my second highlight. Julie was naturally alarmed at being four storeys down in narrow confines, but after the kilometre walk to the actual ossuary she was calmer. Then the bones began. There are fucking thousands and thousands of people down there. Endless hallways of ancient death, and they just kept on coming. After a while, the atmosphere became strangley calming, and I just wandered through the dimly lit caves wondering who these people were and what they did in their lifetimes.
Emerging into the sun was rather life-affirming, and we retired to the hotel again to drink wine and watch overpriced movies on the tiny TV. I also drank beer. Then I drank some scotch. Then I drank wine again. Then I woke up with my head on my chest, dribbling onto my stomach.
The next day we packed up and headed off to the French version of Frankston; a fucking shithole called Amiens. Perhaps someone may disagree with me if they had been to Amiens and had a nice experince, but I hated every fucking minute of this shitty suburb, filled as it was with the most staggering amount of homeless people, shifty looking youths, general cunts and ugly shitfucks.
The hotel was a decent size, but that's about all I can say about it. However, it didn't have a fridge for me to store the vast amount of alcohol I needed to blot out this trip through Dante's Inferno, so I now freely admit now to drinking lukewarm beer to make myself go to sleep so as to avoid this fucking town.
The next day's walk through Amiens made me question why the Anzacs bothered defending it, and I can only assume that it was no doubt much more attractive in 1916. Today it is a confused town that seems to be reciving constant facelifts by adding obscene amounts of cream coloured paving and frosted glass, but seeing as though you can't polish a turd, it just has a patina of falseness. The coffee was fucking terrible, too.
So I was glad when we hopped on a train and headed down to Villers-Brettoneux. This was what I had come out this far to see. The Anzacs played an explicit role in the defense of this town, giving the Germans a right fucking thrashing. We caught a cab out to the Australian War Memorial, which is so majestic but sad that I was almost moved to tears. Hundreds of graves lie in lines amongst immaculate gardens, and the actual memorial lists the known fallen. Like I've noticed before, trying to absorb so many names becomes a fruitless exercise as it's impossible to fathom what the Great War was like and what they endured.
From what I can tell, this massive monument is paid for by Australian taxpayer dollars, and I for one am glad that we do so.
After that we waited for the fucking train on the fucking station for a fucking hour so we could go back to that fucking town to have some fucking food and go back to the fucking hotel so we could get up the next fucking morning and get the fuck out of fucking Amiens.
Before making our exit, though, we dined at an Irish themed pub for dinner. In a great cultural nod to Ireland they served food and alcohol, two things that are apparently novel enough in Ireland to warrant opening an Irish themed pub in fucking sinkhole of a town in Northern France.
It was here that I had the special MYSTERY ingredient! The special MYSTERY ingredient may have been in the pepper sauce that tasted like water with a peppercorn it it, or it could have been the red stuff that might have been Cayenne Pepper or Paprika or crushed Panadol tablets with red food colouring. Whatever the MYSTERY ingredient was, I had an allergic reaction to it when we got back to the hotel. My face went as red as a lobster and became all puffy, and I freaked the fuck out because of course this kind of thing happens when you're in the middle of ShitTown in FuckoLand where no one speaks any English.
I managed to calm down once my face became less puffy, then spent an anxious night tossing and turning, counting the minutes until this nightmare ended. Reassuringly, the coffee was still fucking terrible the next day, and it was with total glee that we made it to the station to endure another facet of travelling by rail in France, that of WAITING FOR HOURS. How we laughed.
We had to change trains at Boulougne, which is where I wish we had stayed, as it looked beautiful, and then we puttered onwards to Calais. Only a few days before I had finished reading Bill Bryson's tour of England, and he had started at Calais as well. In his book he relates seeing the ferry terminal, but having no idea of how to reach it as it is surrounded by car parks, oil refineries, building sites, roundabouts and... I don't know... fucking dinosaurs or something. I had foolishly intended to walk there, because like the rest of France there was not one one single fucking sign telling you how far it was to anywhere or how to get there, but Julie intervened and we caught a cab.
The ferry was quite nice, and the sight of France fading into the distance made me orgasm with unadulterated joy. The white cliffs of Dover were a welcoming sight, and to celebrate I delivered an uppercut to a French guy and spat in his beret. (Actually, no one in France wore a beret. At all.)
Then we boarded yet another fucking train, and soon after the guy I christened 'Cider Goon' got on. He was about 20, I guess. He had eighteen cans of cider with him, and one open and on the go. He informed us that he'd already drunk 8 litres and had real trouble generating a single thought. The discussion was exhilarating, especially after we'd been talking in Australian accents and he asked if we were born in Chiswick.
Then after what seemed an eternity, sort of like this blog entry, we entered Victoria Station, and our French journey was at an end.
The coffee was shit, the hospitality was shit, everything was overpriced, Amiens was a cesspool, the majority of food sucked and I had an allergic reaction for the first time in my life. I may not have had the most awesome time, and it may not sound like it, but I'm really glad I went.
Still annoyed by that Little Miss Piggy fat shit, though.
posted by Elfin at 8:23 AM
1 Comments:
Ah, mon sweet petit garcon, I am so glad you went.I never did as I was brought up to despise the French (english schooling will do that). Like the Norman invasion wasn't enough, they continued to covet the English throne up until the death of Charles De Gaulle (that should of course be spelt Gall). Fuck them for everythingexcept, I love that there is no English anywhere for the Americans..they deserve that.
The upside of your visit is that by the time you return, you will hopefully have come over to my view of the world and tourism in the 21st century. You can see it all better, on TV or DVD. You don't have to go there and put up with other tourists. Not only that, you also live in one of the best countries in the world so why fucking pay money to leave it ?
There are people who want me to go to new York, can you imagine me there ? full of fucking Americans and clouds of ignorance hanging over the city. You have had a taste of why I will happily go to new Zealand or just about anywhere in Australia (except towns with two words in their name of course). Also, I saw a lot of it before the Americans and the advertising companies and the multinationals got hold of it...lucky me.
You may wish to now support Spain (like me) in Euro 2008 and hope that they beat France in the final, 8-0.
I hope and think you will enjoy the next couple of weeks a lot more which of course, allows me to reflect on my next two weeks....can it really be time to do the wooden floors again ? (no, it was this week).
School holidays loom and too cold for pool...hopefully, I can play host to a little friend for each of our own children and doll out 15 bloody hotdogs a day.
You should try and find time to do the museums in london...British,War,Victoria and Albert ...probably full of tourists (but not many french people)
It is a long weekend here so I imagine we will be off
somewhere exciting in the four wheel drive...Chadstone or Southland perhaps.
I just made myself a very nice coffee.
Don;t forget a post card to Nanna and Dangrad, 28 KASHMIR CRESCENT,AMIENS, 3199
Please update your blog soon as it is wonderful reading...more pictures and say hello to Steven "peter Pan" barker for us.
I hope Julie is enjoying herself and it isn't too much of a boys club for her.
I need you and Steve to look for a couple of SACD's for me there please but more about that later.
love to all and talk soon...Dad
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