Paris-Brest-Paris

The big ride starts tomorrow, so we took a trip out to St. Quentin En Yvelines where the ride starts and finishes. Today was the bike registration day so everyone was out to show off all their bikes; now if you think that Matt's recumbent is a bit strange you should have seen what came out of the woodwork today!!

On Tuesday we head out to Brest (the halfwaypoint) to have a look at the route and maybe see a few cyclists along the way; we will of course be cheering on the Aussies as well! Will post more bike-related photos then :)

The City of Lights

Paris has lived up to all of our expectations and more, such a beautiful city! Although there has been the odd occasion where we haven't been so sure...

Things we don't necessarily love about the City of Lights:

- Public toilets - ew ew ew, pretty much disgusting!
- Crowds everywhere, we're almost embarrassed to be tourists ourselves, can't get away from the likes of us
- French keyboards; no QWERTY system here, no, they've gone and made it impossible for me to touchtype - it's taken me 40 minutes to type this so far...seriously
- Bit smelly in some places and lots and lots of graffiti

Things we love and would come back for time and time again:

- Boulangeries, oh la la, delicious, can't get enough of the sweet stuff
- The city at night. We had our first experience of it last night and it was beautiful! The Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe were magnificent!

- The parks at almost every corner, so well maintained and picturesque, perfect for our ham and cheese baguette lunch breaks
- Cafe cremes and cafe glaces - Matt is officially a coffee addict!

- The French people, they've been so so friendly, hard to believe that we haven't come across an arrogant one ... yet

- Waiting less than 4 min for a train at any given time on any given metro line

- Seeing the Mona Lisa up close and personal

I suppose I could keep writing, but that's our list for now; we haven't seen everything yet, so don't want to get too carried away! Tommorow we're venturing out to Versailles to have a look at the bike inspections for the ride Matt was going to do (Paris-Brest-Paris), and early next week we leave for Brest itself. We've arranged to hire a car and have been trying to familiarise ourselves with the road rules - it's definitely going to be an experience!The language barrier hasn't been quite so bad, for me anyway, Matt has been doing most of the talking, which is great! Although we did go to a bar and up Matt went to order - deux bieres et un 'shephards pie' s'il vous plait - to which the barman replied - you're sitting right over there aren't you - in the broadest yorkshire accent you ever heard...hilarious!

Au revior!