The Paris diaries: famous book stores, gothic cathedrals and how not to panick on board.

A bunch of days before our flight departed to France, The Gentle One and I had a funny idea: in order to keep as many of our honeymoon trip memories alive, wouldn´t be nice to write them down as they happened? I mean, not LITERALLY as they happened (because that would mean stopping every five minutes in the middle of some busy Paris street to write about remarkable things, which would be weird even for us...) but at the end of the day, while memories did still fresh enough.

And so we did! For five days we both did our best to put our grain of sand on our travelling diary.

Sometimes we won, sometimes we failed. But the important thing is we collected many beautiful and hilarious moments I can now share with you. Of course there are some very personal in that journal I can´t write in here, you see, but even so I hope you enjoy the rest of it. (Please, notice that the original journal was writen in Spanish, so I will try my best to translate the precise expressions. Excuses in advance for any idiomatic innacurancy).

So here you go:

 The Paris Diaries, day 1.

After a long, long time taking flights at unearthly hours, we reached the airport at ten in the morning! The Gentle One did a little victory dance and all. Like a real dance, I mean. I pretended I didn´t know him until he finished, which is reasonably easy if you always carry a book with you to stick your nose in. Anyways, our flight didn´t depart until twelve o´clock, so we had time enough to have proper breakfast at the airport while waiting. Once the plane arrived, we both started feeling some anxiety (we´re nervous flyers) but it all faded away as soon as we got a glimpse of the strange cabin crew...

There are some words about it The Gentle One wrote himself on the plane.

(Please, excuse our exhausted faces, this is the results of an entire month of rest deprivation...)

" Why is Jean Reno explainig the safety procedure to us? I was panicking as usual when I looked at the screw guy just to discover he is Jean Reno! I turned to wife to make sure I am not suffering from a psychotic attack when I saw she was smiling at me and nodding at the guy. "Yes", she said, "he looks a lot like him". And then she took her travel pillow, closed her eyes (always makes that to stop panicking during flights) and let me alone with my amazement. And Jean Reno".  

Unfortunately, we didn´t take any picture of him. Mainly because we´re pretty sure it´s not allowed. But we arrived to Paris at two o´clock, local time, and after getting the train to reach our hotel, we left our luggage and run to Île de la Cité.

  Notre-Dame was awesome, just as stunning as we anticipated.

We spent an hour there, looking at every single corner of the place. Afterwards, we had a short walk to Sorbonne´s original building (whose hall looks exactly the same as the one at the University of Bucharest´s faculty of letters!) we payed a short visit to Shakespeare & Company. That was quite dissapointing. I knew of course it wasn´t the original shop, but I hope it kept something of its literary atmosphere. Unfortunately, the place is now oriented to "alt/indie people" but paradoxically their book selection is mainly based on poorly quality best-sellers... Kind of a nonsense, I think. I suspect they make a living from tourists, rather than from bookish people, as it was all busy with postcards and other memorabilia. The Gentle One just defined it as "a cross-over between a magazines shop and a Starbucks" and I am afraid he´s right.

After the library fail, I thought we needed to eat something to cheer up a bit, so we moved to the Latin Quarter where we had some yummy traditional food. I think I could live of crêpes and cheese.

FOREVER. Well, or mostly until I start looking like the fatty pals at Wall-e and I am not able to move anymore. And even so...