Bonjour Paree

We have arrived safely in our new home, Bastille in Paris.

It's a cool little area. Not 'bourgeoisie' at all. It's very multicultural and there are some cool boutique stores and loads of little restaurants.

Our apartment is teeny, but has french windows, white walls and wooden floors - I think it's really cute.

The worst bit is the bathroom (which incidently has a shower so small you actually can't bend over in it- bad luck if you drop something) because it is placed at the end of the bedroom and the door isn't really a proper door so you get a good view from the bed. So everytime I go to the loo I get a running commentary from Pies!

Here's the link to our apartment:

http://www.parisattitude.com/apartment.asp?numProduit=1336

We woke up the other day to the sound of someone drilling through the wall in our living room. Seems they have decided to renovate the stairwell and corridors. But all the little old ladies in the building came out to berate the builders en masse so it seems we have reached a stalemate situation and now our building looks like the picks attached.

We are close to the Place de la Bastille. On Saturday we left after lunch to go out returning a few hours later to find the Place (which is huge) had become a huge Gay Pride dance party. There were thousands and thousands of people and big screens and music and flags and the whole area had been closed off to traffic. We went out to dinner in St Germain and when we came back around 11.30pm everything had completely disappeared - aside from the odd piece of rubbish or rainbow flag you'd never know it had happened.