Yesterday we oriented ourselves, spending the day walking around le quartier latin and rediscovering the places we visited the first time ’round — almost five years ago to the day. Our under-used legs complaining, we ate a pleasant picnic then watched a movie at l’Odean cinema before heading back to the hotel to book dinner at Nos Ancestres Les Gaulois (Our Ancestors the Gauls).

A feast! This caveau-style restaurant on l’Ile Saint Louie serves a veritable Gaulish banquet in a traditional style: an enormous basket of raw vegetables; wine by the jug (help yourself from the barrel); a buffet of mixed salade; salami and cured meats with an enormous knife for slicing. (Just remember the feasts at the end of an Asterix and Obelix comic at you’ll have a good idea — although our musician was a lot better than poor ol’ Cacophonix.) And that’s just to start!

We were basically full when the main course arrived — flame-cooked meat served on lettuce with an enormous baked potato. At this point a white-haired, guitar-toting musician arrived; for the next hour we clapped and danced and laughed at his antics.

After mains came cheese, and ‘though our bulging bellies protested we HAD to taste the various soft cheeses (like Camenbert, but lots of different flavours), all served on a heavy wooden chopping board with a sharp, simple knife. It hardly looked like we’d touched it at all when the friendly staff replaced it with the next and final course: a giant basket of fresh fruit. I sliced up a kiwi-fruit, but left the bananas, peaches, apples and other fruits alone. A highly recommended experience — they even have vegetarian options for the meat-shy.

Today we’ve organised ourselves, as tomorrow morning we’re on the fast train to Strasbourg. I think that is the key — we’re not going to get to another city and wonder how to get to our hotel or hostel!!

It was a bit of a mission getting to St Pancras International, as the Jubilee line is out today (and the Northern line closed at that station) and we had to get a bus to another station and then walk from Euston, but once there we settled in with a small group of friends and had some food (and champagne) at the (somewhat posh) St Pancras Grand restaurant. (I had mackerel, then trout — still loving my seafood.)

At three we said our teary goodbyes, boarded the Eurostar and headed under the Channel. A short trip — perhaps our shortest — but in three hours we were at the magnificent Gare du Nord. A metro to St Michel, then on to our hotel … where was it again? Realising that we should’ve probably printed out those details first, we tried in vain to get some sense out of an information terminal before walking into another of the hotel chain and asking for help.

Except of course that a “chain hotel” here in Paris is still pretty much independent, and so it wasn’t like the manager could just look up our reservation on a central computer system or anything (which I think is what we were expecting). Lucky for us he was nice, and rang ’round a few of the other hotels … but it wasn’t until we arrived here that we realised the problem — we were looking for “Fox” when the hotel was booked under “Mason”!! Oops.

We’ve resolved to actually know where we are headed (and how to get there) when we arrive in Strasbourg, and every place beyond that. But we’ve got a nice couple of days here in Paris to unwind and sort all that out.