Monday morning in Paris was, rather surprisingly, the day in which I turned a quarter of a century old.

To celebrate this grand and unpredicted aging, I lay in bed for half the morning while Andy fed me nibbles of macaron. Which I suspect is how all birthdays happen if you live in Paris. We played ‘guess the flavour’, and discovered that Andy, who may have just been letting me win because I was birthday girl, was incapable of differentiating between ‘wasabi’ and ‘lychee-rose’.

We eventually rolled out of the apartment, stopped for a brief moment of posing with the grandness of our foyer, and headed into the world…

Where, as birthday girl, I was allowed to have second breakfasts. Which was so filled with sugary almondness that I felt a strange desire to climb some mountains….

… the closest option for doing so in Paris seems to be Montmatre…

We headed up to Sacre Coeur past a bunch of men who seemed insistent on tying things around our wrists. They blocked both the entrances to the steps so that you couldn’t possibly go around them.
As we went through one of them grabbed onto Andy so I placed my hand on his grippy little claw and said something like ‘Please take your hands off him’.

And got punched as a reward! Which seems a bit counterproductive if you want me to buy your trash.

I hope you notice that after this run-in, I was still ALPHA enough to ‘BAM’…

..And to resume my natural ‘catapult’ position (favoured by all Alpha Males).

Here is Andy above the city, although due to me being unable to make the focus less fixy because of lack of skill, it is mostly only Andy.

But you probably like Andy anyway.

We checked out the Cathedral, but were good little children and didn’t take any photos. Last time around (2009), Lauren was ‘naughty’ and took several photos in a ‘NO PHOTO’ cathedral (I think it was even Sacre Coeur). From that time on whenever we encountered bad weather or other trip obstacles, we knew it was because Lauren had incited the wrath of (the) god(s).

We wandered around the mount for a bit..

We took double advantage of the whole ‘not being in Germany thing’ by eating 1) fish and 2) foreign food.

The sashimi was amazing- with the tuna and salmon melting into your mouth.

These seemed to be some sort of Japanese/French fusion item- meat on sticks including (on the far right) a weird thing with meat and cheese combined. Not particularly offensive, but also not particularly amazing or oriental.

We didn’t have anything pressing to do in the remaining few hours, so we kept walking in the direction of the Arc de Triomphe and Champs Elysees.

(I apologise for Andy’s Moustache. It was ‘Movember though…’)

Our final stop before the airport was the lovelock bridge.

(Sorry fishies)

Ah Paris, you looked and tasted so very good!