Richard

So, I'm back on the road - in Paris. I started off yesterday arriving on a tiny plane from Edinburgh (only about 20 people on board). The massive grey Charles de Gaulle airport was deathly silent, and I managed to get to the gare and find a train for the centre of Paris. I was due to meet my friend Erika at the Gare du Nord, but she was having her hair done and I had to wait around for a while at the station.

She soon arrived though, and we walked to her studio flat (a French euphamism for tiny flat) and dumped my stuff. We had picked up some cakes on the way, so before I'd even taken my shoes off I was tucking into the good stuff. We had to scoot over to Porte Maillot to meet another friend who was arriving from Beauvais airport, then went out for dinner. Erika was getting a few admiring French glances for dining out with two men on Valentine's Day - this is Paris after all.

The next morning, Tim and I set off to wander around in the light drizzle, and covered a fair proportion of the touristy stuff (it was his first time in Paris). The top of the Eiffel Tower was closed because of the strong winds, so we continued our ramblings, stopping off for a few cakes - it's got to be done. By 4pm we'd walked so far it was all we could do to stumble onto the Metro back to Chez Erika and flop on the sofa. Fortunately, a Japanese dinner revived us, and we went to a tiny bar near the Sorbonne, full of glamorously smoking students watching the rain drip through a crack in the ceiling...