After almost 6 months I finally got to see one of my favourite Frenchies Mathilde, and her hilarious family whom I stayed with all those months ago during my first week in Paris. This year Mathilde has studied for and (succesfully) passed her bac (final school exam) and now started a bachelor of Arts at the prestigious Sorbonne. Needless to say ,we had difficulty trying to find a time so meet up but with me leaving in about a week and a half I become desperate. Fortunately Sunday morning she invited for round for breakfast. It was so incredible, they were impressed by the ‘little bilingual’ I had now become. Mathilde is one of the bubbliest people I know and insisted we speak English as she needed to practice for her upcoming oral. I had tears of laughter rolling down my cheeks throughout the morning as we reminised and compared our countries. Her parents, speaking somewhat of a franglais, also joined in on the conversation the best that they could, including her father, Franck, remembering some rather interesting English vocabulary I had taught them at the start of the year, goodness know why; check out chick (that is a tricky one for French lips to get around) and, their favourite, door bitch. Anyway it was such a shame we didn’t catch up more as I also walk out their front door with a smile plastered across my face!
Afterwards I rushed over to Bastille to line up with Anneliese in the 2 degree cold, desperately attempting to snatch up last minute ‘Swan Lake’ tickets. Unfortunately a good other 80 people had the same idea in mind and after almost 40 minutes waiting, we gave up, knowing there of course that we had no chance. We decided to head up to Printemps and Galerie Lafayette, two prestigious department stores in Paris, to have a peek at their Christmas windows. It seems it was the year of marionettes with the windows filled with the colorful dancing puppets and a flock of little French children with their noses squished up against the cold glass, with their mouths open in awe.
As we were battling our way through the crowd I found myself being hugged by an old man dressed as Santa Claus. I turned towards Anneliese with a look of help across my face. Santa turns to Anneliese grinning and slyly says ‘Look, your friend is trying to pick me up.’ Yes, as I have said many a time, some Frenchmen just can’t help themselves.
Sunday evening we had reserved a table at a fancy French restaurant called La Procope, the world’s oldest café/ literary café, a place we once stumbled upon whilst following beautiful melodies floating out from little alleyways during Fête de la Musique. Unfortunately when we stumbled across it that night we has mistaken the front door for the back so when we approached the restaurant on this fateful night it appeared that it was closed (as we were at the back door). We decided to go for a walk and come back, we did this twice until at 7:30 we thought we would try knocking, inside the door finally opened and we wandered through. The place was enormous! Like an old mansion house with an endless number of rooms! Finally we saw clients at tables and a fancily dressed waiter who ushered as to the reception room, when we told them that we had a reservation at 7 they looked down at their watches and raised an eyebrow, it was now 7:40. Thankfully our table on the upper floor by the window was still there. They took our coats and soon here we were in this fancy restaurant overlooking a Christmas lit street below. It was magical. The food and wine was equally good. I firstly gulped down an absolutely delicious pumpkin soup, followed by almond and honey trout (I wasn’t entirely sure how to use the special fish knife the waiter had given me to avoid the bones, so I improvised) and then finished with an oh so french crème brulée. It was a divine evening.
