Bonjour from France 21-22 September

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the delay in posting but I finally have started.

21 SEPTEMBER

Around 1:30 pm on the Friday before we were due to fly out of Sydney, we received a text (and an email) from British Airways advising us that our flight was being delayed by 5 hours. Having this delay from Sydney meant that we would miss all our connecting flights in Singapore and London.
Thank goodness for Leesa at Flight centre in the Canberra centre. Leesa managed to change our flights to Qantas for the next day which left from Sydney, flew to Dubai then London and then to Paris.

Declan and Liam dropped Brad and I off at Jolimont Centre. Some tears (ok, a lot of tears from me). Caught the bus and waited for about 4 hours until our flight to Dubai. It was a great flight, the air hostesses were fantastic. They couldn't do enough for us.

On the bus to Sydney (after having a few tears)

We waited in Dubai airport for about 2 hours and then boarded our flight to London. Arrived at London and had about a four hour wait in Heathrow Airport. It was long and we didn't have any English money and we were so tired. The flight from London to Paris was quick and very short (about the same from Canberra to Sydney).

Our plane, double decker (we were on the top deck)

22 SEPTEMBER
Arrived in Paris and had no trouble going through customs.

Caught the RER train to near our apartment and walked for about 25 minutes (it would have taken about 15 minutes but we got lost a few times). We turned up our street, OMG, there were so many people in our street. It turned out that it was some Jewish celebration and our apartment was in the middle of the Jewish area.

Our street - Rue de Rosiers

We were met by a lovely lady who could speak English very well and showed us to our apartment. There was scaffolding around our apartment as they are 'updating' the outside which was a bit disappointing. Then we had to carry our bags up four flights of stairs. Now these stairs are very steep and narrow. It was very hard with our bags. We arrived at our apartment, which was very small but nice.

Brad is on the stairs above where our apartment is. Look down and you can see the ground.

It was about 3:30pm, once we had settled in for about half an hour we decided to go for a walk to see what attractions there were nearby. We walked and found some many amazing places. We went to Saint Paul-Saint Louis church which was only about 10 minutes away. It was beautiful.

Inside St Paul-St Louis church

St Paul-St Louis

There are so many yummy pâtisseries in Paris. Here is one with lots of macrons in the front windows. YUMMO! I tried to have a chocolate eclair a day, it was a difficult task but I did succeed.

yummo

We also walked around and found we were only 10 minutes (the other way) from the Pompidou.

Paris is amazing. I have realised several things about people who live in Paris:

• they like to ride bicycles and motor scooters (not at the same time of course)
• it appears they smoke (alot)

Brad and I had dinner at a small cafe (crepes) and then came back to the apartment and went to bed around 8:00pm (we both didn't sleep much on the plane). The bed was so comfortable and there wasn't much noise around (the windows are double glazed and we faced a court yard). 

That is all for the 21-22 September.

Pauline