Paris Day Two

A lovely cold crisp day greeted our first foray into the streets of Paris. Not long after leaving the hotel, I got to watch Larissa in action again speaking fluent French to purchase our travel tickets for the week. Situated just off the Champs Elysees, we're perfectly central and getting places is a doddle. It's great fun travelling around on the Metro and watching my lovely new wife communicating in French (something I've always known she could do, but have never seen).

After a chinese lunch in the St. Paul district we jumped on a double-decker train (blipped here, with Larissa doing a bit of research) to the Seine and then on to the Eiffel Tower. It is a lot smaller than I imagined, but impressive nonetheless. We sat on a park bench for a while with a cold beer taking photos and enjoying the whole experience, especially the rather sureal sight of a newly wedded Japanese couple, all on their own, asking people to take photos of them in their finery. Obviously, asking any old tourist to take a photo is just asking for disappointment and so I stepped in and took some decent ones (courtesy of my blip training) for them to treasure.

Walking around the streets is completely enchanting, coming as we have from Oman where such a thing is not possible (or nearly as enjoyable even if it were!). We stopped off for an obligatory crepe before heading back later in the evening to enjoy a bottle of wine in the lovely hotel we are staying in. An excellent feature of the hotel is a lightning fast free wi-fi service which, with the help of my Asus netbook, means I can blip happily away whilst Larissa is writing her new 'life as a married woman' journal!

As we sipped our wine, surfed and wrote our journals, one of the guests was playing a beautiful piece of music on the piano. I sneaked a look at the music he was playing when he stepped out for a cigarette. Mozart's Sonata in G Major is now on the shopping list.