Paris Illuminations, Charles de Gaulle airport

Well, here we all are sitting in CDG airport outside Paris, waiting, waiting, waiting..... My flight leaves at 9.10pm tonight, and the last transfer from the hotel was at 10.30am. So naive little me thought "Ah well, I'll check my bags in and then find a nice coffee shop and wander round and look at the duty free etc...."

But........ They don't open the frigging booking for each flight until 3 hours beforehand, so here I am wandering around with all my luggage, and I can't even go through to the duty free area, so I'm stuck in the very unwelcoming front part of the airport, just waiting, waiting, waiting.... Had a coffee, tidied up my photos, read the paper, looked at my watch and still 3 hours to go.... Ah well, there had to be yet another adventure in store for me didn't there....????

But I've discovered some Internet access, so I thought I would amuse myself by continuing these little dalliances with my blog.

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday about Le Louvre....

At the end of the tour, the meeting point before returning to the bus was at the base of the Inverted Pyramid. While most of us were standing there, there was this big grinding noise, and everyone starts looking around, and these massive steel doors start closing, virtually closing us off from the other areas....I instantly thought bomb attack or something dastardly, but our guide (when we were eventually re-united) said it was the fire alarm, and they were sectioning off different parts of the building. It was all a little bit scary and creepy, and I was very glad to get of there eventually.

This is where we were waiting

But I found one last toilet to share with you..... this one was in the same place... in the shopping centre which is under the louvre.... I had to pay 1 Euro to use this one, but the interior was lovely... very colourful!

Last night we had our farewell dinner at a lovely little restaurant on the Champs Elysees called Chez Clement.... The food was Ok, but once again the soup was French Onion..... what have I done to deserve this...??? The main course was Poached Salmon and mashed potato and that was lovely.... and the sweet was Creme Broulette (which they said was lovely). Jonathan organised to get me something instead of teh soup, so he was offered salad.... Fine, says I.

Hmmmm... salad was literally a plate of lettuce leaves with bits of onion thrown in (I can't escape those bloody onions!) That was it... no sauce, no nothing.... French Food is really wasted on me. Give me those huge plates of meat and vegies from Ireland any day!

But after that we went on our last excursion - a ride down the river Seine on a boat to look at the illuminations.... That was just lovely.... It went for just over an hour, and the night was really quite mild, so I sat up the top and had a lovely view.... I took a heap of pics, and even did a little movie of the Eiffel Tower twinkling.... I'll see if I can upload that too at some stage, so watch this space... Here's one to start