Grawble...

Ach, today is not a good day. Although it is better than last night. I found myself struck down with some vomity bug and it was as much fun as, well, spending an entire night boking... I think I'm ok now, though I still feel rougher than three bags of gravel. Very coarse fucking gravel.

Anyway, on a note which is slightly lighter than that, I'm still in Paris. It's really quite nice here, I think I could get used to it...

Got here on the 23rd, booked into the hotel, which turned out to be miles out of town. But it didn't matter, it was a lovely place and the Metro is so very reliable here that you're never actually far from anywhere.

The Metro is a funny thing indeed. I was a bit wary of it at first cos it appears to be just a bus on tracks in a tunnel. Sparks come off it and if you look though the window while turning a corner, it's not unusual to find your lunch begging for release... Also, there are the weird people who populate the metro. Once you're in the station, you can travel as long as you like, until you get bored. This means it's a wonderful place to find the homeless, nutters, beggers and buskers.

Now - when I say buskers, I don't just mean people strumming away in the stations. No, there are buskers who spend all day climbing into different carriages, play a coupla tunes and then come around trying to get money off you. The guilt factor is incredible.

When we arrived here I was a little let down because there was not a single accordion playing ANYWHERE! But it was all ok cos we hopped on a metro a coupla days later and there was a guy playing the accordion right next to me. Be careful what you wish for is the moral of this particular tale...

For Xmas, myself and Sarah for saw a day of boredom and misery watching cartoons in French. It started badly, admittedly. We awoke to find Love Actually on TV. In French, bien sur. What a disaster!

But it got better. Sarah gave me the Black Books box set and I gave her the new Rufus Wainwright album and a coupla other things I'd picked up on my travels.

Then we decided to go for a long walk to the Eiffel Tower, assuming, of course, that everything would be closed and the Metro wouldn't be running. Au contraire, the whole of bloody Paris was open for business. Très bizarre, n'est-ce pas? But fortunate also.

So we spent Xmas day on top of the tower, drinking soup and feeling vertigo.

Then we went to the aul Louvre on My Day. It's a very impressive place and no mistake! Saw the Mona Lisa (funnily enough, today I saw a bookshop called Mona Lisait. I chuckled...) and was unimpressed. It's a lovely picture an' all, but there are so many bleedin' tourists around it with their cameras that you can't get close at all. There's an awful lot of hype around it. No, for my money the best bit of the Louvre is the fantastic Egyptian exhibition. So much incredibly cool stuff... I learned that Ramses II was a fat bastard, fond of his pies. And I also learned that there are only so many pictures of Jesus a man can look at before he starts to really hate the guy.

It's not like he was that great looking even.

That evening we dicided we'd go check out the Moulin Rouge. Got there and discovered the cheapest seats in the house were €70. I blame Ewan McGregor.

So we went to an Irish pub, got ripped off for a while, went for dinner (I had snails - strange, but nice in their crustacean way) and missed the last metro home. Now, I'm sure there are people living in certain parts of Paris who don't worry too much about missing the Metro, but they don't live out in Boulogne, where our hotel was. There was much being grumpy, much swearing, much walking and many arguments along the way. But we made it home having walked the length of Paris so we can say without lying that we have seen the whole city...

Then yesterday (before I started feeling sick) Sarah went to the Centre Pompidou and I went to L'Espace Dali. Sarah had fun seeing genuine paintings by The Master and I had fun looking at things The Master designed and had his minions make copies of. He signed them afterwards, of course. There's an area in the museum where you can buy limited run signed lithographs of some of his work for in and around loadsa money.

Oh, before I forget, I want to mention (more to Paul than anyone else, but hey, I'm not one to keep the wrapt millions out of the loop... Snigger...) you can buy Sandman Graphic novels here for under €17 and they are HARDBACK. They are absolutely beautiful and the only thing that's stopped me buying them is the fact that my Frech is just not good enough for me to enjoy the surreal, philosophical musings of Mr. Gaiman. I'm not happy about this.

Today I was going to see the Pharon exhibition in the institute for Arabic studies- another Egyptian thang- but the queue was enormous! We had to queue for about an hour for the Eiffel Tower, but this was double the size! So I decided to leave it.

Also, my ongoing quest for a scrap-book is yeilding no results. These continentals just don't seem to have them. I tried to explain the concept to a woman earlier and her face assumed the position of one who is trying very hard not to scream, "Oh my God! You've got a rabbit on your head!!" Not that I did, but I may as well have...

I'm killing time now until my train to Barcelona. It's an overnight train and it doesn't leave til about 10pm - lotta killin involved!

My time here is almost thru, I only paid for an hour and it's gonna cut me off unceremoniously pretty soon. I'll try blog more from Catalonia so I don't end up writing one of these marathon chunks of text every time - but so much has happened!