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Well you can’t live an hour’s flight away from Paris and not go and watch the formidable All Blacks! So three days in Paris it was. We arrived Friday afternoon and managed to catch the train into the city and then get onto the metro to the stop closest to our hotel. Given this is the first country we have been to where English is not their first language we were quite impressed with ourselves for getting the tickets and making it to the hotel without getting lost! Doesn't help that the ticket machines are all in French.

For the first two nights we stayed in the Mecure just round the corner from the Moulin Rouge, so nice and handy to everything in the Montmartre area, with lots of café’s and bars around. We quickly discovered though that Paris is quite the expensive city with a pint of beer costing around 8 eruo, which is about £6, do double the price of what you pay here in the UK. But if you can find a wine shop they have nice bottles of red for about 5 euro. We were looking for somewhere to have dinner and decided to have a drink in an Aussie bar – ha the best thing about an Aussie bar in Paris is there are no Aussies in it!! However we ended up forfeiting dinner and ended up staying there for a few more hours talking to a couple, she was from Sweden and he was from South Africa.

Saturday 18th November
Well as we headed to breakfast I actually ran into Mike Jeffcoat who I used to work with at BNZ. He was over with his wife for the game as well - Small world that’s for sure. We walked around the city and caught to metro to most of the famous tourist sites. Sacre Coeur church, which is on the highest peak in Paris, Arc de Triomphe, Moulin Rouge and of course the Eiffel Tower. All the buildings and churches are so huge and magnificent, they are so detailed with intricate statues and carvings all over them, makes you wonder how they managed to create so huge beautiful building without the tools we use today, let alone how long it must have taken them!

Arc de Triomphe is absolutely massive, so much bigger than I thought it would be, a truly beautiful building though. But oh my god, I can see why you are not insured if you drive a rental car around it – crazy drivers! There are now lanes and people are literally centimeters away from other cars, they don’t indicate and just drive where they want, which includes stopping at any sec to give way.

With the day nearly over, it was time to get back to the hotel, get on our AB gear and head to the match. We went via the Moulin Rogue at night to take some pictures with all the lights on, if definitely looks more impressive when it’s all lit up at night. We took a slight detour and went via the Eiffel Tower again so we could see that all lit up at night too, we had perfect timing too, although we didn’t know it at the time but at 7pm they switch on all the blue flashing lights for about 30mins, quite an impressive sight! However the queues to get to the top were no better than they were at 3pm that day so we gave that a miss and headed to Stad De France, it’s only about a 15min ride on the train.

Stad de France is huge - seats about 85,000 people, and the atmosphere inside is amazing. We had booked great seats and had a couple of kiwi’s either side of us to help cheer the boys along. There is something to be said about supporting your country when they play overseas, a totally different experience to watching them at Mt Eden.
And although the French gave us a run for our money at times we won which made being there even better!

Sunday 19th November
After a bit of a sleep in and a traditional French breakfast of croissants, cheese and ham and a egg you boil yourself to have with soldiers we checked out of the hotel (it was packaged with the rugby tickets) and went up to a boutique style hotel in Clinchy for the night - the Metro makes it so easy to get around, if only Auckland had something similar we wouldn’t have traffic problems. We headed to the Louvre, which is just HUGE. You could spend all weekend in there and not see it all, but we saw the Mona Lisa and that’s the main thing we wanted to say we had seen in there The building itself is like a huge piece of art!

Then we headed to Notre Dame which wasn’t too far from our hotel. As it was Sunday they must have had Sunday Mass which was quite nice to see and hear with the choir singing. Again, another huge magnificent building with stunning massive stain glass windows everywhere inside. Hands down beats any cathedrals we have in NZ.
We continued to walk around the streets checking out all the little stalls on the side of the ride selling art and souvenirs until our stomachs got the best of us. I love the crepes you can get in Paris, savory or sweet they hit the spot! Nutella does a roaring trade over here and seems to be available with anything you want to eat, especially in crepes with ice cream or banana.

Then it was back to the hotel for some R & R, I watched ER all in French – they are at least a season ahead of us as Abby was heavily pregnant in this show, while Steve surfed the net on his PSP.

Monday 20th November
Well time to get packed and head to the airport for our flight home. Since it was a Monday we decided to go via the Eiffel Tower again and see how big the queues were, and finally they weren’t to bad, so after waiting about 15 mins we were in the lift on our way up. Can't say I enjoyed the lift ride up - quite scary really as it goes so high, and then just keeps going up and up, I was glad to reach the top and get out! Of course the views from the top are amazing, although quite overcast and very windy when we were there. Paris really does spread out for miles and it’s mostly flat with the odd few clumps of corporate building dotted here and there. The city doesn’t have any houses, it’s all apartment style living in 3 -4 story white coloured buildings with little rout iron balcony coverings. It’s not till you get out by the airport that you see stand alone houses.

All and all we really enjoyed out long weekend, such a cute lovely city, so much nicer and cleaner than London central.
I was surprised though that I didn’t see any handbag dogs – I expected to see lots of chic French woman with designer bags just for their pouches!

Xmas is just around the corner, and Steve and I are heading to Helen’s (used to work at BNZ) for the day/night for lunch and dinner and no doubt lots of xmas cheer! Whilst it is getting colder over here, I don’t think we will see any snow on xmas day, as they say we are having a mild winter so far. Fingers crossed we might get some up in Edinburgh over New Years.