Arrival in Paris

So I arrived in Paris last Thursday night and stayed with some family friends for the first two nights. My mum came with me for the first weekend and during the 2 days we spend with the friends, we were given a whistle stop tour of Paris. On the first day we went to the Musee D'Orsay which holds a fantastic collection of Impressionist artwork including works by Van Gogh, Monet, Degas and Renoir. Having never been particularly interested in art, I was really surprised to find that I liked a lot of the work in here. The following paintings in particular:



Essai de figure en plein air (vers la gauche) by Claude Monet
















Les petits pres au printemps by Alfred Sisley











Our friends live in the 7th arrondissement so we spent our time exploring the area near them, including the Jardin du Luxumbourg. These are beautiful gardens which in nice weather are packed with people sitting everywhere on the green plastic chairs provided - it was a very French scene.

The next day in the morning, my mum and I explored the oldest department store in Europe - Le Bon Marche. It is an upmarket department store, but on nowhere near the same scale as Harrods. It does not have the same extravagance and pretensions as Harrods. It was fun just pottering around and seeing all the beautiful things. Le Bon Marche has a wonderful food court. Everything is beautiful packaged and presented This is something my mum and I noticed, all greengrocers lay out their produce so that it looks so appetising and fresh. I felt like a little child, getting so excited by how amazing everything looked, especially all the bread!

I've been eating very well since being here, of course, the fresh bread is too tempting and all the cheese. But also the desserts and sweets. My sister told us to go to La Duree, a famous macaroon store. Oo they are the mot beautiful macaroons I have ever seen!




I'm going to have to be careful to resist all of these treats.