London calling

We've been in London this week, enjoying England's famously great weather. It was all a bit last minute - we needed somewhere to stay and our friend in London knew of some people that needed housesitters for 10 days. Neither of had been to England before, and as it looks like we may need to move there for jobs anyway we figured it was a good idea to go and check it out.

We're housesitting for some fellow Kiwis, in a lovely flat in Streathem Hill in the south west of London. Happily for us they have a great kitchen with gas hob and terrific oven so we have been making the most of that by making lots of bread - it's not like you have easy access to baguettes here anyway!
It was extremely strange stepping off the Eurostar into a wholly English-speaking environment after almost 4 months in France and 3 weeks staying with a French family. It almost seemed too easy! Our first shock came upon learning that a one-way tube fare here is 3 pounds, compared to 1.40 euros in Paris. You'd hope that at nearly 3 times the price of the Metro, the Underground would be a great service. But no...the trains are noisy, overheated, less frequent, and are constantly breaking down. Having experienced underground systems in several countries now, we have come to the conclusion that the Metro rocks.
So reeling from the cost of public transport, we were pleasantly surprised to find out that all the major museums and galleries are completely free (well apart from the big signs asking for a fixed rate donation, which we ignored). We made the most of this by visiting the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the Tate Modern, and the Imperial War Museum.
Of these, our favourites were definitely the British Museum and the War Museum. The British Museum houses the controversial Elgin marbles, from the Parthenon, as well as an awesome Egyptian display, with lots of mummies, sarcophagi, statues, and, most famously, the Rosetta Stone, which unlocked the secret of hieroglyphics.


Who's your mummy?

We went to the Imperial War Museum thinking that we'd spend an hour or so there and then do something else. We didn't expect to be so captivated that almost three hours went by without noticing, and that we'd have to leave at the 6 o'clock closing without seeing everything we wanted to. The museum has fascinating exhibits on World War I and II, and a gruelling but informative exhibit on the Holocaust. There was also one on spies but we ran out of time to see that. Next time!
Another highlight of our visit was a trip to Flat White cafe in Soho. As the name suggests, this is a New Zealand cafe, and serves Antipodean-style coffee at its finest. From the moment we walked in, it felt like "home", with the noises and smells of a good Wellington cafe and the fridge filled with Bundaberg ginger beer and L&P. We've only had coffee very occasionally in France, mainly because the French do not seem to know how to make a decent coffee (we are not alone in this view - a lot of NZers and Australians have found the same thing), so we'd almost forgotten what a good one tasted like. This place reminded us! The coffee was absolutely perfect, and just as good as the best Supreme cafes in Wellington.

The Borough Market has to be on any foodie's list of things to see in London. I mean, Jamie Oliver shops there so it's got to be good. So yesterday we checked it out for ourselves. It's pretty cool, very busy, with lots of gourmet stalls. It was like a larger scale version of the farmer's market in Hawkes Bay - lots of organic fruit, cheeses, bread, free-range meat etc. It felt more like a tourist attraction than an actual place to do your weekly shop, unlike the Paris markets, which, even when full of tourists, are there purely to serve the locals. I guess we'll get to know it a bit better if we come back to live.
Tomorrow we head back to Paris, although we're not sure for how long. It will be good to speak French again and rediscover some of our favourite haunts in our favourite city.
Till next time...

Life in the south continued

So having left Lyon we are now hanging out in Annonay, a smallish town in the north of the Ardèche. This is where I spent my AFS exchange year and it hasn't changed a lot in the last 10 years. It's claim to fame is that the Montgolfier brothers (inventors of the hot air balloon) lived here, and it is also famous for its paper making plant. We are staying with a family I was close to during my exchange year and we have also been seeing a lot of my host family, after a somewhat shaky start - we turned up to surprise them at their bakery and got a fairly underwhelmed reaction, despite not having seen them for 3 years. Things have been going well since then, though, and we have got to sample some of the bakery's delicacies.
The family we are staying with are the ultimate hosts, and they always have extra people around. We've been getting lots of French practice and have been enjoying some of the local Ardèche wine (and a 1976 Bordeaux) and homemade saucisson.
Our host, Yves-Marie, has also been taking us hiking in the hills above Annonay. Apart from the stunning scenery and mountain air, one of the great aspects of these walks has been the wild berries growing beside the track. Wild raspberries, blueberries and blackberries, all bursting with intense flavour and way out of the league of supermarket fruit. The blackberries didn't even have a hint of the usual sourness. Yves-Marie joked that foxes had probably peed on the fruit (while happily tucking in himself) but hey, it may have just added to the flavour!
As for the picnic after our walk...the French have a reputation for liking wine at any time of the day, and even my French high school teachers had wine with their lunch, but it did seem ridiculously French to be sitting in the middle of nowhere eating a picnic lunch and drinking Bordeaux. Gotta love the French!

Life in the south

Here's a bit of an update of what we've been up to since leaving Paris.
We were really looking forward to going to Lyon, as we remembered it as being a great city. Unfortunately, it didn't really live up to expectations. I guess we'd been spoilt by Paris.
We arrived there on a Friday and quickly went out in search of some lunch. There was a busy pedestrian mall near our hotel so it seemed like a good bet to find a bakery. We walked, walked some more, and some more, and couldn't find a bakery that wasn't part of a rubbishy chain. In just one street near us in Paris there were at least 3 in the space of a few hundred metres, and all of them sold good bread. In Lyon we ended up having to get a sandwich from La Brioche Dorée, aka the McDonalds of bakeries.
But hey, we thought, Lyon is reknowned for its food. Surely we'd get a good meal for dinner. Wrong! (See our food blog for details). We returned to the hotel feeling dejected but telling ourselves that the next day would be better.
And it almost was. We did spend a pleasant afternoon in the Fine Arts Museum and were starting to re-appreciate Lyon's charm. Then dinner struck in the form of a very average pizza meal in an Italian restaurant. We figured we were on safe ground with pizza, as it's hard to screw up but they managed. Surely the next day...
The last time we were in Lyon we ate at a nice little restaurant next to the stunning Fouvière cathedrale. The restaurant had a cheapish lunch menu, the food was great, and there's an awesome view across the city. Having had some less than average food experiences so far on our visit we figured we couldn't go wrong with this place again. This time around there was only one choice of mains - lamb leg. This sounded great but when presented to us turned out to closely resemble a NZ meat-and-three-veg roast dinner. It tasted fine but, and this may be picky, we expected something a bit more adventurous in the so-called gastronomic capital of the world.
Lyon is famed for its covered market and we planned to go there in the afternoon to pick up some food for dinner. We'd checked the opening hours and planned our visit around those. It was across the other side of town so we took a tram to get there, only to find out that it was closed. Unfortunately in France, supermarkets close on Sundays. Normally you can get around this problem by buying something from a dairy and buying a baguette but it seemed that, of the few bakeries Lyon has, all of them were closed for the summer holidays. Even most of the dairies were shut for summer as well.
Paris is said to close down completely in summer but you can still always find a place to buy a baguette. Not wanting to spend any more money on average restaurants we needed to find some cheap food for dinner. We finally, after walking several blocks, found a restaurant selling takeaway crepes outside. Great. Cheap, light tea. But again, not a success. No matter where you go in Paris, if you buy a ham and cheese crepe you'll be served a crispy, buckwheat crepe with a slice of ham and melted gruyere. The crepes we received were soggy, plain crepes filled with a mouth burning mixture of cheese sauce and cubes of ham. Mmmmm.
I'm sure there are good places to eat in Lyon, but take our advice - don't go in the middle of summer when they're all shut.

Our Quartier

Having left Paris after 3 months, we feel like we have had a really good taste of life in the city. The fact we enjoyed it so much was largely down to the area we were living in, so here is a bit of a tour of our quartier!

We were living in the 12th arrondissement of the city in the Bastille area, named after the infamous prison that stood here until it was demolished shortly after being taken by the people on 14 July 1789, the start of the first revolution. The prison site is now a busy roundabout with a monument to the 1830 and 1848 revolutions in the center. Incidentally, all three revolutions (1789, 1830 and 1848) occurred in July. Not a good month to be a despotic ruler in Paris.



A canal (Canal St Martin) runs from the Seine, under the Place de la Bastille and up to the north-east of the city. On the way it goes through 8 locks, finishing at a level 24 meters higher than the Seine.



Our street is rue de Charenton, a very old street that runs off the Place de la Bastille.





Since the 1700s this particular area has been a center for furniture making, and there are still a huge number of furniture makers and restorers here. The biggest concentration is in the Passage de Chantiers, which runs between rue de Charenton and rue Faubourg St Antoine.



Across the road from us, we have the National Ophthalmologic Hospital, called "Quinze-Vingts" after a regiment of musketeers that was based there.

Further down is The China Club, a very cool bar in the style of a colonial era gentlemans club.



If you are wondering about the warning sign next to the club, "Aveugles" means "blind people." The combination of ophthalmologic hospital and French driving is a potentially dangerous combination.

Down the road a bit, we have one of our local bakeries. It's not actually very good, but it looks cool so here is a pic!




A couple of blocks from there, we have the Marché d'Aligre, a fantastic market that is open until 1pm every day except Mondays. This market is one of the cheapest in Paris, although the quality can be a little variable. With a bit of effort it is easy to find good quality produce at some excellent prices. We became regulars at one stall during cherry season, and the stall holder always made sure that our "kilograms" of fruit were a little bigger.




Just next to the market is the Baron Rouge, a very old-school wine bar/wine shop where you can buy wine straight out of the barrel, or just have a glass or two up at the bar. Very nice friendly atmosphere and great wine! (For Wellingtonians: the proprietor is a close replica of Rumble)



Across the road from the Baron Rouge is Moisan, an organic bakery. The baguettes are slightly more expensive here (1.10€ instead of 0.80€) but are worth the extra money.

A short distance along that street we have one of Paris's many little urban green spaces, Square Trousseau. On the corner next to the square is a bistro of the same name which is apparently one of the better ones in Paris (bit pricey for us though).





There is also a good example of a typical Parisian apartment building:



Heading north from the market, we come to rue Faubourg St Antoine. This is a busy shopping street with a number of chain stores...



...and our local supermarket:




The reason for the crowd of people standing outside is that they were on strike at the time. The reason? Apparently there was not enough space between the ends of the isles and the checkout counters for customers to queue properly and the customers were taking out their frustration on the staff. Welcome to France!

Back towards the river a bit, we have the "Viaduc des Arts" and the Promenade Plantée. This is an old railway viaduct that has been cleverly converted into a dual purpose space: on the top they have put a planted walkway, and in the arches underneath there are a number of workshops and shops with things like art, jewelry and designer furniture.



Our quartier has a great mixture of society, from working class to bohemian bourgeois (or bobos as they are popularly called), from old people who have always lived in the area to young families, from North African immigrants to Kiwi OErs. It's very easy to live there and if we get the chance to come back and live in Paris, we'll look for a place in the same area.