Ici le Gare du Nord

When C first started learning French, he had the Linguaphone course. He still quotes some of the dialogue from it on occasion, and one of the lines he frequently uses is a telephone conversation when someone has rung the train station looking for information. The dialogue starts something like this - "Bonjour, ici le Gare du Nord, les renseignements" (information).

Yesterday we had a very brief trip to Paris. We were lucky to get a non-stop train directly from the airport to the Gare du Nord. As our onward train left from the same station, we just spent an hour in the locality. We had lovely coffee and pain-au-chocolat in a corner bakery for our breakfast (not even having had time for coffee at the airport as the flight boarded early), and bought some sandwich rolls for lunch, which we had almost straight away! We'd seen two little nearby green patches on the map in my guide-book; the nearer one turned out to be a tiny little park in front of  the church of St. Vincent de Paul. We sat on one of the benches, enjoying the sunshine and our sandwiches - and then it was time to head back to the station to get the train again.

A big plus was that we put our watches an hour ahead yesterday, giving us a slight adjustment to daylight savings starting today; we just never bothered changing them back again when we arrived home at 10.30 local time last night.

Today was so beautiful and sunny that even though we were more than a little tired, we headed over to Farmleigh for a walk in the morning, and I hope to be back during the week with a few photos from there.