Afternoon Delight

Yay, one of our classes was cancelled - yippee an afternoon of mid-week freedom - we were off to Paris for lunch! I must say Paris is so much nicer now that the majority of tourists have gone home, the roads and restaurants were so much quieter, amdittedly it was raining. You could feel the city breathing a sigh of relief. We went to St. Michel for a bite to eat, there are streets full of little restaurants here and it is always a hard decision to decide where to eat, with the restaurant owners selling thier various meals. Lunch time here is so much cheaper to eat, we got a 3 course meal for 9Euro is a quirky little 'tourist' french cafe and it was all delicious I have been really slack at taking pictures recently so some of these are old ones from times I have gone before! I' getting complacent with 'normal' life here in Paris so I don't feel the need to take photos the whole time like I used to!
After lunch, it poured down with rain (it really storms here, I was expecting drizzly rain!). I was in desperate need of some books to read, with no TV it is quite hard to just chill at night, there is a famous english bookstore (mainly 2nd hand) in Paris called Shakespeare & Company. It is gorgeous, they have an upstairs loft area where you cna sit and read your new purchases over a hot coffee. They have walls and walls of books and while I think they are expensive for 2nd hand books, english literature is very hard to come by in France! I bought 3, you cna actually come and sell them back to the bookstore once you read them although I am sure they cut you down on the price! (once agian a pic stolen from the net...will get a real one on the weekend!)
After our purchases, we went in search of a recommended (Lonely Planet Paris) chocolate shop where we could get a warm drink as it was still miserable and rainy. The hot chocolate was exactly that, it was so rich, you needed muscles to stir it and the spoon came out with more chocolate on it than in the mug, I could feel it going straight to my thighs! After meandering slowly back to the RER, we were off home, if only we had more afternoons off....
A little picture of a 'monkey's wedding', you can barely see the rain, but look at all the acorns on my acorn tree!