Articles from this Category
19 September 2009
This morning Marie took me to the northern part of Paris around Gare du Nord (the northern railway station). The area is a hotchpotch of people from Africa, Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent living in more rundown conditions than the Paris we know and love. The markets were incredible and far cheaper than in […]
18 September 2009
Above: Lacy undies? No, the Eiffel Tower. As Paris isn’t entirely new to me, there was any pressure to do the touristy things. Instead it is quite nice to do the day-to-day activities … very soon the familiar become strange! In this case it is swimming … Paris seems to be well-equipped with council swimming […]
17 September 2009
One thing I haven’t done in my previous visits to Paris is the Pere Lachaise cemetery which is home to the remains of many famous people. From a quick googling, I found that it was best to approach from the rear entrance if one is interested in finding Oscar Wilde’s grave … not totally unexpected […]
16 September 2009
We travelled back to Paris today. It was an early morning wakeup, It was dark at 7am as Loix is in the west of the country. 1.5 hours on the bus followed by 3.5 hours on the train followed by another bus ride within Paris meant that the day disappeared 🙁 It would have been […]
15 September 2009
After a miserable wet morning, the sun finally shone and we cycled to Ars … yes, in full it is Ars-en-Re. It is only about 7km each way this time. Ars has a church with a black-and-white spire, so I call it the church of St Michael Jackson. It was probably a white spire which […]
14 September 2009
Ile de Re has many cycle tracks … they seem to have been converted from the old narrow roads once the new roads came in, but I could be wrong. They link the different villages, taking cyclists through bays, salt pans, vineyards etc. Today we cycled to St Martin, which was about 9km from our […]
13 September 2009
Today we zoomed down somewhat towards the South West to La Rochelle in the French bullet train, TGV. It was the first time I’ve ever travelled in a high-speed train. The higher speed wasn’t too obvious apart from the more blurry scenery. From La Rochelle, we travelled to the village of Loix on Ile de […]
12 September 2009
Today we left Porto with the feeling that we’d one day come back to Portugal. It is one corner of Western Europe that is still affordable on a New Zealand income (or no income in my current situation). The price of many things are on par with New Zealand. Fruit and ice cream in particular […]
29 August 2007
From our base in Toulouse, we had the day for tripping around the area. We chose to drive out to Carcassonne, over an hour outside the city. We started our drive with a look through the fence of the Airbus factory. Having captured no worthwhile photos yesterday, we felt compelled to swing past the factory […]
28 August 2007
Condom I never thought I’d see Catholicism and contraception come together! But it kinda did at the pretty little town of Condom, about an hour from Marmande, which had the Cathedral at its centre. By the way, the French call the rubber thingey preservatif instead of condom, and there is no relationship between the name […]