The first installment of a typically scattershot travel diary of our recent nine day trip by train to Slovenia and back, in which we contemplate the thought of having to auction off our internal organs and discover that our Lord Jesus Christ takes after his father...
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Saturday 12th July
* 350 euros for £318, an exchange rate of about 1.1? Er, this isn't going to be cheap. Oh well, it's all booked now. Onto the Eurostar - adventure here we come!
* So, what's different about Paris since last time I was here, two years ago, during the riots? Fewer broken windows and "evil cricketers" patrolling the stations. More hairdressers' salons on rue Strasbourg and automated bike hire stations everywhere. The driving's as bad as it was - we're barely two minutes out of Gare du Nord when we witness a driver nudge another car along with his bumper to squeeze into a parking space. There may still be a man dressed as a penis in the Place de la Bastille - we're not about to take a detour to find out.
* Hotel Beaune is in the Antiques Quarter on the Left Bank - apparently. Bumbling around puzzling over our two different maps without much of a clue, we swallow our pride and ask directions to the rue de Beaune. The polite smile at my hesitant French and response in English is certainly familiar from my last visit. It's like an initiation test - once you've proved yourself prepared to make the effort, you're deemed to have earned the right not to suffer any more embarrassment.
* Our bumbling continues even when we've found the hotel, though - unable to open the troublesome lock, we call the receptionist for whom it opens first time. Sod's law.
* We drop our bags and, being cultured types, immediately head out to the Louvre. It'd be rude not to - it's almost directly opposite the hotel across the Seine, after all. We don't actually go in, though - it's early evening and we're hungry. Man may not be able to live by bread alone, but he can certainly live by bread alone easier than by a hasty glimpse of a sixteenth-century portrait of some woman with a weird mouth.
* Where to eat, though? There's too much choice, even if not everything on the menus we pass appeals - the horse steaks, the boiled calf's head, the snails I watch one woman pushing around her plate.
* We eventually settle on Bistro d'Eustache, by the Forum des Halles gardens and in sight of the St Eustache Church, enticed in by a formule menu of starter and main course for a very reasonable 18 euros. Our aperitif looks like blended blackberries, but I'm glad I don't mistake them as such - they're roe eggs and a mouthful is very salty on its own (that would be why there's fresh bread provided too, then...). We may not be quite ready for boiled calf's head, but we do at least go native in choosing French onion soup and terrine for hors d'oeuvres. My main course of steak au poivre with gratin dauphinois is absolutely superb, eaten under the watchful gaze of a scruffy sparrow waiting expectantly under our pavement table. Our mistake is to not realise that the fact the drinks menu comprises only wines is actually for the wellbeing of our wallets - the decision to go off-piste and order two pints of wheat beer comes back to bite us in the arse when the bill arrives to reveal they're 8 euros each. I've heard of things costing an arm and a leg, and I'm seriously thinking I may need to sell off a kidney. Here, it'd probably get bought and promptly served up in a garlic sauce as a local delicacy.
* At Le Garde-Robe, a boutique wine bar where the air is so thick with the smell of fromage you could cut it with a cheese knife, our delicious hand-selected bottle of white comes in an improvised ice bucket fashioned out of an industrial-sized catering tin can. I knew God moved in mysterious ways, but had no idea that his son was a gherkin magnate.
* Perhaps we should have got our vin a emporter. The pedestrian-only Pont des Arts, spanning the Seine between the Louvre and the Left Bank, is clearly the place to be on a Saturday night. Random music, a throng of friendly revellers swigging out of wine bottles and a man selling beer from a polystyrene crate - it's like being back at Glastonbury...
* A tramp pauses to peer in the window of a particularly glitzy antiques shop around the corner from our hotel. Whether his expression is of wonderment, incomprehension or disgust I can't tell, and he shuffles off on his own into the night.
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Next time: the lap of luxury, animal love and Munich's answer to Xylophone Man.
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