Paris & Others

Election Update
Voting started at midnight, Tuesday 26th and runs until 7:30pm Thursday 28th. So we're over a third of the way through. I've already cast my vote and am just hoping that hundreds of students do the same. I'd adore it if thousands voted, but who am I kidding? It won't happen. Not with student apathy the way it is. As for campaigning, I'm talking to people, telling them who I am, what I stand for and what the election is all about. It's amazing how many people - even second and third years - don't know what it is, or what the positions do or are for. I hope to educate people on these things. But enough election crap....

....Paris was beautiful. Isn't it always? It was sunny and warm - in the sunshine! It was full of tourists. It was full of english people because of the rugby but we ignored them as best we could. Unfortunately we were not lucky enough to get our hands on some match tickets, but we enjoyed the rugby none the less. We found a pokey little scottish bar, called The Highlander down some little alley way off the banks of the Seine, and sat there for most of saturday watching the rugby. We even made some friends with a bunch of lads from Coventry. I say lads, two of them were about 18, the other two were their fathers. But they made the day entertaining.

I'm proud of myself. I didn't do much of the traditional tourist thing. I figured I've done that before, I can go a weekend without it. Went to the Rodin museum and the Picasso museum, but aside from that we didn't do too many tourist things. We walked a lot. A LOT!! We wandered around St Germaine quite a lot, just looking. Not looking for anything in particular but just looking. We spent some time wandering around St Paul also, and found the most gorgeous little chocolate shop. The chocolate is made in sheets, and they weigh out how much you want in little slabs of it. And some of the flavours just looked gorgeous!! My only problem though is the french prefer plain chocolate to milk, and plain chocolate just doesn't do it for me. But they had one which was Caramel Chocolate, and that was mostly milk chocolate, with little chunks of hard caramel throughout it....had to go back and buy more on Sunday morning before leaving. It's all gone now unfortunately! And we ate a lot of ice-cream. My theory being you should eat a lot of it while you're on the continent cause Ireland and England just don't have good ice cream. You don't get real ice-cream here, you get that useless whipped stuff out of a machine. I had lots of sorbet, lemon and rasperry and rose - that last one was really good - and then cookies and cream ice cream. Mmmm.

Highlight of the trip for me would have to be the Friday evening. We wandered around the city a little, ending up in front of Sacre Coeur. I love that area, you can see almost the entire city, and at night it just looks amazing. It's so wide, so vast and so full!! But when we arrived there was two guys stood on the steps playing some music and singing, so we sat and listened for a while, looking out over the glittering city. I'd have happily sat there all weekend. We saw some brilliant street performers actually, besides these two guys. We saw some jugglers - well, it was contact ball technically - we saw rollerbladers doing tricks, we heard some brilliant music around Notre Dame. The rollerbladers were possibly my favourites though, they were fantastic. It was really hard to draw ourselves away from the crowd surrounding them. I'd say we stood and watched them for over half an hour.