Paris sera toujours Paris ...

... la plus belle ville du monde. You may quibble about my quoting Maurice Chevalier as a scholarly reference but the enjoyment that we all derived from Mr Michael Weston's minutely planned tour of the French capital today cannot be called into question. From the moment that we arrived by TGV at 10.02 (yes, the trains really are that precise in France) to our arrival back in Lille shortly after 22.00, we were stretched and stimulated by a mere sample of what Paris has to offer. For the boys who were enjoying their first visit there was time to see the great monuments - the Eiffel tower, the Arc de Triomphe - while the more seasoned visitors will have come back realizing that merely having seen Notre-Dame is nothing compared with having examined the façade and begun to understand something of the way in which the medieval worshippers would have interpreted what was before them - huge thanks to Mr Mark Waldron for his explanation.
All the travel was by public transport and the only form that remained unsampled was the bus. The métro, the new tram-line and the funicular up the steep slope to Sacré Coeur all fell prey to our much-used travel cards as we sped from the north of the city and its modern business district down to the southern fringes and the throbbing Chinatown (Europe's largest - and it's a thriving community, not a made-for-tourists phenomenon like Soho). There are pictures in profusion but not, sadly, tonight as midnight is approaching and the blog must go to press. The boys were, as ever, excellent company. They understood that they were privileged to receive such an insight into the city - cultural, historical and, naturally, gastronomic, as dinner was the Belgian speciality of mussels and chips. Why go to France to eat Belgian food? Partly because it tastes good and partly because it provides an introduction to tomorrow's chapter: "Belgium for beginners." A demain/tot morgen.