A not so grim Lille

Recently a friend of mine and The Boy's (let's call him Mr P) suggested a last minute trip to Lyon - something which turned out to be impossible but evolved into a wannabe spontaneous bus trip to Lille, a French town near the Belgian border.

Attempt number one saw The Boy and I drag ourselves out of bed unreasonably early -for us that is- after a shift at the pub and dash around the 16th arrondisement hunting for anywhere that would let us print our bus tickets on a Sunday. Obviously we failed.

Nevertheless we dragged on our backpacks onto our exhausted bodies and set off with Mr P to the bus station and the first experience of French bureaucracy we've ever experienced in living here. Sent from counter to counter, to a printer and another counter we were swearing loudly and ready to stow away on any bus to any destination with its baggage hatch still open. Again, we failed. Ten minutes after our bus was due to leave we were still running from one end of the station to the other trying to find out what we had to do to be allowed on the bus.

Cue pleading to be allowed to change our tickets followed by a metro trip to Rue de Lappe in Bastille where we proceeded to eat and drink our sorrows away.

One week later and the three of us set out again, a little hesitant to return the site of so many bad memories but a little more prepared for what lay in wait for us.

A balk at the entrance to the bus stop by The Boy, and only two counter changes later and we finally had our precious boarding cards in our hands. Three hours later we jumped off the bus into a chilly and grey Lille; realising too late that the town is pretty much deserted on a Sunday afternoon.

We walked the cobble-stoned streets trying to find something, anything, to do, and failing that another place to eat and drink. Here we had success, and stumbled out of our restaurant into the beautiful streets of Old Lille (Lille Vieux) with full and happy bellies, making it home.

Needless to say I woke the next morning hating the world, and especially the cleaner who kept knocking on our hostel room door to wake us up I walked out into Lille with my cranky pants firmly in place. But I made my first wonderful discovery - in Lille it's possible to get a large takeaway coffee with milk: the kind that would see you strung up in Paris. And fully caffeinated I made my second discovery - Lille is a beautiful city.

Walking the streets of Old Lille

The main green. Ironically also home to Cafe Oz

According to my trusty Lonely Planet guide (yes the one I swore I would hide at the back of my cupboard) old Lille was built in the "Flemish style". I don't actually know what that means but walking the old town the streets were narrow and cobble-stoned and the buildings looked like they were straight out of Medieval times. But they played home to chic clothing boutiques, coffee shops and patisseries, restaurants and even pubs.

Breakfast and two coffees out of the way the three of us trundled out of town towards the Citadel, built by King Louis XIV, only to discover once we got there that it was closed for renovations and also played home the Europe's Fast Response Military Unit. But the walk in the grounds surrounding it was amazing. Green and lush, full of ducks and ducklings - it is spring after all - swimming in the marshy moat and most exciting of all for me rabbits. But my calls of "bunny" and dashes towards them went surprisingly unappreciated by the poor animals. The Boy and Mr P were also in their element and spent their time inspecting every trail into the foliage we passed.

Garden walk near the Citadel

We emerged a lot muddier and thirstier than when we arrived, and sought out a funky pub where even the bartenders were drinking champagne behind the bar and a tree made out of wine bottles greeted you at the door to have beers before setting off in pursuit of our final few sites, dinner and finally the bus stop for the trip back to Paris.

The main square of the city

Final verdict? If you ever find yourself in northern France, or France in general, or hell even Europe go there. Lille is awesome. Just don't catch the bus.

A blog about caca

After 9 months of living in Paris there are still days when I am very much a tourist here.
And now that tourist season has well and truly descended on the city of lights I've discovered on my daily walks and exploration of the city that there is one very obvious way (beyond the tell tale sign of a camera hanging around the neck) of picking out the tourists from the natives: simply watch out for who watches their feet while they walk.

Like many other heavily populated cities the majority of people in Paris live in an apartments. Consequently it also seems nearly everyone here owns a small dog - and the evidence of their existence is left all over the city. But combine this with the distracting beauty of the city and you have a disaster just waiting to happen - because the streets here are quite literally paved in shit.

And like so many others who come to Paris I had to learn the hard way to not be distracted by the beauty of the city and to watch my feet as I walked. Hence the trend: newly arrived tourists walk the streets ogling the sights around them and so can also often be spotted wiping the soles of their shoes on the kerb while cursing loudly. Regular visitors or those who have been here long enough to know better are the people who charge down the street with their eyes fixed firmly on the pavement, the better to dodge the bombs left behind.
But it's the true Parisians who amaze me, strutting down the street (more often than not in heels) playing on their phones or chatting easily with what I can only presume is an in-built radar allowing them to side step the mounds lying in wait without a second's hesitation.

During my first few months here I was disgusted by what I considered to be blind disregard for fellow citizens. Wouldn't simply picking up after their dogs be better for everyone concerned? But then The Boy and I began to embrace the mess and became child-like, jumping over the mounds or yelling out "poo", or even better "caca" - the French for poo -  at the top of our lungs as we strolled along the boulevards.

Even better, thanks to a sick dog in our apartment building we even have our very own caca spot on the interior stairs up to our apartment which has been well and truly embraced. Living on the sixth floor means regularly having to huff and puff up more than 100 stairs, and being lazy backpackers we are The Boy and I normally curse the whole way up. But once the initial smell disappeared this spot became loved as a mark of the fact we were nearly home, and huffed poo calls would echo down the stair well to each other.

In a similar way we've come to accept the fact that our regular streets will always be lined with caca, and if that means we get to hop, skip and jump around Paris while yelling out like children then these days that's just fine with me.

Until the next time I get bombed that is...