A few weeks back, Pau and I once again hit a 1 year mark on our progression through time. To celebrate being now ridiculously old, we dressed up in our finery, and danced around the apartment. Which is a perfectly acceptable thing to do, as long as you remember to invite some friends. The theme was Movies and Music.. I’m something vaguely Gatsby, and Pau is Sandy, from Grease. (I should note that about half the photos below are taken from Pau- Thanks Pauli!) Andy, complete with Energy Dome, went as one of the members of the band Devo. Which no-one knew, so he spent the whole evening singing ‘Whip it‘ to anyone who would listen Harry Potter: Napolean Dynamite. Complete with Tatertots (a.k.a- pretty much the best birthday present I’ve ever been given) and moon boots: Adam also spent the night discovering that Napoleon Dynamite is less international than he had thought. A very beautiful fairy: Some cat-women Marylin-Marylin Manson: And Brian Molko from Placebo: And this very charming couple: (Heidi and Seal) Alice …

Day One In Paris I hope you know us well enough to guess that we left the whole ‘booking’ thing until the very last of minutes… But it turned out quite well. We came up against the option of paying x euros per person and being thrown into the smallest of rooms in the oldest of hostels in the furthest corners of paris, or paying x+ a little bit more and staying in a shoebox apartment in the 9th (the ”burbs’ in Paris go clockwise out from the centre). It was a pretty cool locale, not just in terms of location, but also in that it was one of these apartments that was originally for the maids and butlers- hidden on the hidden 6th floor (which you literally got to by pushing a wooden panel, ducking through this secret door and hiking up tiny rickety steps). Super cool! Tiny- but perfect! I’m standing in the kitchen area, which came complete with all the necessities including stove and microwave, the toilet is behind me, and the …

Last time I went to Paris (with Ashlee and Lauren), we were way too poor to even contemplate biting into ‘les macarons’…. …this time, I endeavoured to make up for that lack. I’m a little bit embarrassed to admit where my first french macaron came from: Andy had been prattling on for months about how he intended to eat Mc-arons and Mc-Donalds in France, and to tell you the truth we all thought he was talking bull. But lo! The mc-mass-produced mc-macaron: And to be honest, they’re not too bad. Better than 80% of the stuff you could find in Perth a year ago when everyone thought they should try getting on this new trend and charging 3 bucks for stale/overbaked/flavourless biscuity things. Quite mild on the flavour with the pistachio, and perhaps not so melt-in-the-mouth as possible. But they have a range of the basics- chocolate, choc/orange, strawberry, pistachio, and they only cost 90c a pop. Andy claims that they were his favourite out of all the ones we tried. But this is a …