Moving on up, and eating bad food

Salut from Paris! Or, more accurately, from my sofa at home in Coventry. Technical issues prevented me from uploading content for the past two weeks, so I'm publishing my backlog now while I'm visiting home.

The past fortnight has been a bit of a blur really. I've started, completed and sent my UCAS application for next year (all in the space of a day, just before the deadline...do not follow this example!!), moved to a new job and a new apartment (more on this later), and returned to England, as well as the standard combination of work and language school. Très fatigant!

Last week, I visited a lovely area of Paris which I've never been to before, Saint-Germain-des-Prés. After a pleasant stroll around Jean-Paul-Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's former stomping ground (mysteriously titled Place Sartre-Beauvoir) and a visit to the titular abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, founded in the 5th century and rebuilt in the 11th, and site of Descartes' tomb, we stopped for a café crème at an adorable café called Le Bonaparte. Yes, Les Deux Magots may be the obvious choice in that area, but it had Napoleon's name in the title so I couldn't say no.

This week marked my first visit to a French restaurant (sort of). I'm now living in the Latin Quarter (the historic/student area) as opposed to the 15th arrondissement (in the expensive environs of the Eiffel Tower). Apart from the fact that it's my favourite area in Paris, there are actually affordable things there, so it's a win-win! Or so I thought. Giddy with the sense of possibility at the number of eateries close by with €15 and €10 three-course set menus, I visited a French restaurant with a friend from language school, and quickly found out two things: 1) If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, 2) You get what you pay for. The ambience (and price) of the resaurant were lovely, the food not so much. Between us, we had a "vegetarian" starter which turned out to be very non-vegetarian indeed, some tasteless soup a l'oignon, a dish of skate drenched in mustard with a gag-inducing texture, boeuf bourguignon with lumps of charred, rock solid beef, and surprisingly redeeming crème caramel and tarte aux pommes. We basically paid and bolted.

Picture this sort of thing on the inside, although of course I forgot my camera again. 

 Fine dining apart, the Latin Quarter is the bomb for food. The 15th was more "€20 brunch" than "€2 crêpe when you're drunk at 1AM". There are restaurants of every nationality, and within a 5 minute walk of where I live, there's a Monoprix, a McDonalds, and an M+S Food, so it's perfect for an uncultured swine like myself.

So. Many. Stolen. Photos.

Also this week, I visited Cinema L'Arlequin, to watch National Gallery, a documentary about the National Gallery (surprisingly). Pros: I learned a lot, the cinema was lovely (it's famous for its screenings of Soviet-era films!), and I smuggled in a bottle of wine. Cons: The documentary was 3 hours long, and it felt like it. I've never left the cinema at midnight before, and I don't intend to again. Also it was in English , so if anything, I understood too much!

Of course, the biggest event has been moving jobs and apartments this week. After a hellish journey in which my suitcase gave up and broke, I'm now in my very own tiny Parisian studio in the 5th arrondissement, in a building from the 1600s. Yes, it lacks central heating, double glazing and decent fire escapes, and the number of insects I've seen is horrifying (they live in the wooden beams and thrive on the humidity), but it's perfect to me. Everything is so efficiently compact, I have a little café table in my kitchen/living room where I can sit by the window and drink coffee brewed in my cafetière, and a window box for planting flowers in the spring. I'm living the Parisian dream, or rather, I will be once I return to Paris and attack the entire apartment with bleach.