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Everyone knows Paris is a city of romance.

Le Ville Lumiere

Nickjenkins
2003-11-20 15:21:40

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Everyone knows Paris is a city of romance. If you want to go to Paris you should go in spring, with a beautiful man or women who is madly in love with you. You can walk arm in arm through the streets and together you can celebrate life the way the Parisians do.

I went with my brother. All the beautiful women who are madly in love with me were busy that weekend so instead I substituted a short, rather scruffy, chain-smoking technical support analyst with whom I share some DNA. Not a bad compromise really.

For all the clichés though, Le Ville Lumiere is a city of romance. It's a beautiful, stately city inhabited by people who understand the meaning of living well. The food is good, the coffee is great, the architecture is fabulous, the place abounds with art and fashion and best way to consume a Sunday afternoon is to repose listlessly in a café somewhere with a paper and an espresso and watch the world go by (and, if you wait long enough, you probably will see the world go by). What better place to share the joy of living than Paris ?

Our own considerably more platonic adventure started with a first-class ride on that modern miracle, Eurostar. Whisking you efficiently from downtown London to the middle of Paris in about three hours it is the most civilised way to travel. Breakfast included a choice of either the full English breakfast or a continental option and, being still in England we opted for the former. Starting off from Waterloo at about eight o'clock in the morning we rolled into Gare du Nord at about 11am sated on coffee, orange juice and sausage and egg.

This trip then demonstrated to me how easy travelling has become. I left home that morning with a shoulder bag and a handful of change. Just before lunch time I was rolling into the capital of a foreign country with not a single solitary franc, traveller's cheque or centime in my pockets. Instead I ...