We just did 3 nights in Paris. I was hoping to fit in Marseilles...but we just couldn't :( we ate snails though, and had Berthillon gelato on Ile Saint Louis looking out over the Seine and it was pretty lovely.

The 9 year old's favourite attraction in Paris was a man sitting on the bank of the Seine playing his flute to a bunch of swans, who gathered around him. Notre Dame = alright. Man playing flute to swans = AMAZING

Our hotel was in a super shitty area and the streets were covered with piss and vomit though. And I was bitten by an insect. I screamed when I saw it, and my husband squashed it with a book and it burst and lots of blood came out. I don't know what it was. :/ It's nice to see the 'real' side of a city....I guess...

Still never been to Paris, even though it's like two hours from here. French friends informed me that it reeks of piss everywhere in Paris, though

yeah i think i'd go for the countryside or strasbourg or something

your younger son sounds cool vixnix. :beatup:

I want to retract my previous statement about wanting to eat Spotted Dick. What I meant to say was Spotted Dog.

You see in the Aubrey Maturin Series Jack is always having Spotted Dog (a pudding I believe) served up for his banquets with the officers. Spotted Dick, on the other hand, was one of his sailors who had a very pimply face.

I want to eat pudding, not penis, spotted or clean. I swear.

Yeah the fact that Paris needs public urinals to persuade Parisian men to stop pissing on the ground kinda grosses me out. I had just finished stepping over the vomit and piss on the street one morning when I read an email from my Dad about how he doesn't want to visit Paris because of the public urinals and I was like huh, well, it can only improve this situation though.

It was better over by Bois de Boulogne....I think probably in any city if you move out from the centre a little, it all gets a bit nicer. And certainly on the Ile Saint Louis and Ile de la Cite it was very clean. I think we were just in a shitty area, in this sort of no man's land between the 6th & 7th, not really anywhere.

I speak such shitty and limited French I just felt so ashamed of myself the whole time I was there, too. We went to a chain restaurant close to our hotel, because we have kids and we don't like to disturb people at nice restaurants, and I asked (en Francais, certainement) whether the maitre d' spoke English and he said huffily

"A little", so I asked in English for a table of four, and he asked where we were from. I said "New Zealand" and he considered that for a moment and then said "Ok. You can stay."