Flossing? Or Blogging? That is the question...

My boyfriend actually had the cheek to remind me last week that I wasn't keeping to my New Years Resolutions because I wasn't updating my blog frequently enough. I would just like to point out that although I have been a bit remiss with my blogging, I have been very busy over the past two weeks. Furthermore, I have religiously stuck to my other Resolution of flossing once a day, whereas dear Christopher has not, even though he said he would. So you get less procrastination, but I have a beautiful healthy smile. Everyone's a winner (except you, Chris. Go floss.)

Anyways, I do realise that the two activities are not mutually exclusive, so I'm trying to make amends for my poor time management and I will fill you in on the past two weeks. I've been out and about quite a bit! Alex and Sarah kindly came to visit me two weeks ago... I think (hope) they had fun out here! We certainly ate a lot of good food, which in my book means that we had an awesome time, no questions asked. First of all, they came to visit my humble abode here in Briey, although I'm not sure that they were terribly impressed by the sights here (i.e. my room and the cake shop). However, both of them are city folk, so I think being out in the sticks was a bit discomforting for them. It's understandable.

So I tried to make them feel a bit more at ease and we wandered off to Luxembourg City for a day trip! Although I have to admit that we didn't see a lot of the city because we had a long lunch with a generous bottle of wine and so proceeded to go sightseeing in hysterics and meandering round the funny streets. Now I'm no travel writer, but Luxembourg seems to me to be a pretty funny place. It's sort of like a place in Scandinavia which has relocated and now seems a bit lost in amongst all the crazy Frenchness which surrounds it. It's clean, prosperous and you can smell the success in the air (and in the BMW exhaust fumes), but at the same time the roads don't seem to go anywhere and everything seems a little bit confused in the same way as French towns are all higgledy-piggledy. 

But Luxembourg just couldn't contain us, so we took a horribly early train to Paris a couple of days later and had a couple of days in the Big City. But first of all I feel that I should mention the hilarious restaurant we ended up in in Metz the night before... We were feeling the idea of a slap up meal and managed to choose the poshest-looking restaurant in the area (which luckily had a 26 euro menu, as well as a 90 euro truffle menu). We wandered in a bit sheepishly to have our coats taken from us by one of the waiters, we were shown to our table only to be disturbed (in both senses of the word) by the other waiter, who was waving a big glass jar under my nose and looking up at me expectantly. I worked out that there were truffles in the jar and that we were meant to smell them and show our appreciation. Obviously. FYI, they smell a bit weird. Like burnt mushrooms. We were then presented with our "amuse bouche" - translation: "amuse the mouth", which consisted of a courgette mousse, a tiny cup of lobster soup, a cube of mysterious meat on a cocktail stick with a gherkin, and a shrimp in some pastry. This caused a lot of sniggering as I'm sure you can imagine, but it did taste good. Our starters followed, then our mains, then a waiter came round to sweep the crumbs off the table with a tiny brush before we were presented with petits-fours and our desserts. Finally we had our coffee and were able to escape, giggling like idiots, into the night. It was simultaneously the tastiest and the weirdest meal I've ever eaten. I'm obviously not cut out for fine dining. I have no photos of this evening for obvious reasons - it's very uncouth to photograph your meals like a cheap tourist.


Now to Paris! We stayed in a cool little hostel in Montmartre, the only downside of which being that we had to share a room with two Ozzies and a mystery guy who didn't tell us where he was from. They were nice people, but they stank so bad that in the morning Sarah and I thought we were being gassed...

We had a lovely wander around Paris, saw some of the usual sights, and somehow ended up in a lovely little bistro in Montmartre for tea which actually had a cheap menu before wandering into a dodgy little bar where the cocktails tasted like paintstripper because they had so much alcohol in them. All in a day's work... When we were wandering down the Champs Elysées we even managed to see the French Handball team being interviewed in the Renault shop! We had no idea who any of them were but I took a picture anyway...

I even managed to get a cheeky trip in to M&S and procured myself some salt and vinegar crisps - my God how I've missed those!


So to sum up, I hope Alex and Sarah enjoyed their trip out to see me! I certainly did :) More adventures to follow soon, I promise!


Bises,


Sophia xx