This weekend marked the ‘last’ time we’ll be at the French house for a while.. great food, great friends, great memories to take with us!

So here, in order of appearance are: Cheese cake, Caramel and butter something-or-other (apparently Dave did too much charming, he can’t remember the name of this one), Bebe.. something something.. with caramel.. he also can’t remember this one (we’ll call it ‘death by pie’ for now), and finally Coconut Macaroons. So any of my lovely French friends out there (or Swiss – Aude, Maryline?).. feel free to enlighten me if you know what it is that we’ve bought here (but not the ingredients.. that, I don’t need to know).

Below is the outcome of about 1.5 hours (not kidding) standing in the hot sun, rummaging through boxes and boxes of old wooden letterpress type. Being the kind of people that we are – we couldn’t leave until we’d uncovered every ‘w’ ever made, in search of one that would fit in that spot perfectly. In fact we were so dedicated that we even checked through every ‘m’ as well, in the hopes that one could pose as a ‘w’. We didn’t have much luck, so modified the best ‘w’ we found.

By the end of our search we were completely and utterly covered in decades-old French filth.. it was so worth it!

So anyway, while we were there we took a trip out to a beautiful town called Vézelay, where we managed to stumble upon an antique shop that had boxes and boxes of old timber letterpress letters just lying around on the floor. I agree that this might not be so exciting for most people, but I have been dreaming of this day for a long time… and wouldn’t you know it, now that the time had come, I had no idea what I should spell with my new found letters! We ended up just getting our names, but I might think about it a bit harder for next time we’re out that way!

While we were in wandering around Sacre Coeur in Paris, we found this beautiful store selling all different coloured ‘ball’ fairy lights. It’s called ‘la case de cousin paul‘. While they do sell ready-made sets in certain colours, you can also browse the store with a basket in hand, and pick out the colours you would like to have on your string of fairy lights! All the different colours make for such eye-candy.. I literally had to be dragged out of the store. Luckily for those of us that don’t actually live in France, they have a website in which you can drag and drop your favourite colours onto a string of lights, and they’ll ship it to you. Brilliant!

I just thought I’d share a couple of photos of some old posters that were exposed in one of the metros in Paris. We had specifically planned the trip last weekend just to catch up with some family who were there over the weekend, but managed to extend our stay to 3 nights which was perfect!

On Thursday night we got ourselves caught in one of the most incredible storms I’ve ever seen.. it came up so suddenly that all we could do was just stop in the middle of the footpath while we were pelted with rain and bits of debris and hope the wind didn’t just sweep us off our feet . We were also hoping it wouldn’t pick up any stray coffee tables or chairs and throw them our way. We eventually managed to run into a restaurant (with staff desperately trying to hold down their awnings and tables) completely saturated and freezing.. far too much excitement if you ask me!

The rest of the holiday was much less dramatic I’m please to say!