Today I had the most enjoyable day of my stay in France…I left Paris. I really wanted to see some of the French countryside and as I hadn't done my CouchSurf in the Loire Valley I decided to jump on a train and head out. My tour organiser (Hayley) had suggested Giverny, the village where Claude Monet lived and painted. The seventy five kilometre trip to the town of Vernon took forty five minutes by train and once we were out of the city and in the country the ...

I was going to have a lay day today as I should have been going to CouchSurf in Saint-Pierre des Corp in the Loire Valley, but after a meltdown last night when I surfed the net to arrange my transport to Cinque Terre (which didn't look that far on a map) and discovered that I'd either need to take a seventeen hour overnight train journey, changing trains three times or get back to Paris (a two hour train trip from Saint-Pierre des Corp) then a one and a quarter h...

I wanted to see the famous (or should that be infamous) Moulin Rouge, immortalised in Baz Luhrmann's musical of the same name, so headed to Montmartre by my favourite mode of transport, the Metro. There was also a beautiful church near Montmartre, called Sacre Coeur, that I was told was worth seeing. While waiting at Gare de l'Est where I changed trains, there was lots of whistle blowing (not the trains) and police running around the place, not sure what was happ...

After taking the tiny rickety lift to my room in Paris, I was excited to be staying in building which I guess was probably a couple of hundred years old. Why did I think this? The ceiling had crooked beams which look like and optical illusion in the photos, but they really were that crooked…and the doorway was so very low. I loved the black and white wallpaper, bright green paint and purple curtains. And turns out I was sleeping, not only in the same room, but ...