The Scottish/ French Wedding... In Paris!

Hey Everyone!

I returned from my trip away on Wednesday after eight or so hours of being absolutely bored to death in the car… Paris was astoundingly gorgeous!

We began the long journey up to where we were going to be staying for the three nights on the chilly Sunday “morning” (This is put into inverted commas because the time we were up at is neither morning nor night!… Well…. Technically it IS morning… but not in my books! I’d rather stay up to get to THAT hour then sleep and be woken for some ungodly reason… And of course, this was the worst… What we thought to be nine hours of travelling up ahead…Who would want to drag themselves out of bed for that : P).

At 4 in the morning, I was gently awoken and given a glass of apple juice (Apple juice is more efficient at waking you up then a cup of coffee… And it‘s healthier… And tastes better! : P)… Soon to be followed by “Madeleines Coquilles” (They’re a type of French breakfast cake, that’s in the shape of a boat) in the darkness of my mom’s and dad’s room… Okay, so it wasn’t exactly an ordeal to be woken at four but nonetheless I was hardly going to be ECSTATIC : P.

We were all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed by five o’clock… and ready to fall back to sleep again in the car : P… Well, Venetia and I were anyway ^_^. It was a while later when I woke up again and from then on I just kept dozing in and out of consciousness : P… The car’s my favourite place to sleep ^_^… Venetia on the other hand has no option whatsoever… As soon as she knows that we’ll be in there for longer than half an hour, vwoop, she’s gone : P.

Venetia really just has a thing about sleeping… If you intend to wake her up at eight in the morning, you may as well just go ahead and poke/prod her at seven so that she can “finish her dream”… For some reason Venetia’s ALWAYS woken right in the middle of her dream and she must not be disturbed again until she’s finished… I, on the other hand, gladly jump up out of bed… realise this was a bad idea when I get dizzy and am forced to flop back onto the bed, lifting myself more slowly the next time… This is a daily routine for me : )… When will I learn -_-…

In case you haven’t noticed yet… I’ve changed the smiley faces! Yes, they don’t have the line noses anymore, now just the eyes and the expression-filled mouth! : ) They just look so much cuter… Aww!

I get distracted easily… : \

Once we arrived, our trusty “sat-nav”, brought us down to a cute little dead-end of a street… I was engrossed in my headphones so I didn’t notice the conversation in the background, however I did happen to notice that we’d driven down a little cul-de-sac (Haha! I just realised what this means literally in French… Cul (Backside) de (Of) sac (Bag)… Okay, it’s not actually funny… except for the backside bit… Heehee!) and the woman in the satellite navigator decided in her usual tone that “You have reached your destination!”. After switching her off, we drove around the round-about once more and then I don’t know what happened because I was listening to music… and got distracted… We somehow found our hotel! Yay!

No more having to listen to Gadget miaoing… for at least another three days! Yes, we brought Gizmo and Gadget with us. Gizmo is such a good little traveller, who just sleeps the whole way and doesn’t make any noise whatsoever… GADGET on the other hand… He’s just… so miao-ny! : P

I was all hyped up and ready to do something when we arrived but since my mom had been the one to have to drive eight hours straight was a little tired, so we just relaxed and hung out… for a while! My mom’s like a machine though! Coming from England to France, she drove seventeen hours… Without sleeping! Now that’s skill : P. So later on in the night we took a drive up to the Eiffel tower : P. I’ll get back to this later ^_^.

On Monday, we had a lovely lie in… And after a good three hours of having curlers in my hair, doing my make-up and already ruining one pair of my tights with a “ladder”… We were ready to hit the road! We left an hour early, not wanting to be late, since we didn’t know where the wedding was being held and couldn’t trust the sat-nav anymore. Thirty minutes later we arrived in the centre of “Milly-la-Forêt” and began driving around to find the wedding and a decent parking… It was easy enough… My mom saw a bunch of Scottish lads in kilts and so we knew the general direction : P.

Once we found our parking… Absolute disaster struck… Venetia noticed that the heel of her shoe had broken… And this being a bank holiday, no open shoe stores were in sight… We tried and failed to fix it and the bride was about to arrive, so Venetia just went! All was well, as we did get it repaired on the way to the party though.

It was the most gorgeous marriage ever! Virginie looked absolutely stunning in her wedding dress and Joe fitted the part perfectly in his kilt. There was even a bagpipe player!! It was a French/Scottish Wedding… In Paris (or close enough to Paris ^_^)… just in case you didn’t read my previous post… or if it’s not obvious : P.

At five o’clock in the evening, we set off to the next destination, which was about twenty minutes drive away, setting the sat-nav we were off… and got completely lost! We were taken to a lonely road… in the middle of nowhere, so we set back to the closest village, stopped in at an open pharmacy and were soon off again with directions, being ten minutes late finally we arrived at the “Manoire des roches”.

We parked a little way from the main building and walked the rest. Ushered into a large tent type thing, we were filled with the talkative environment and the warmth of the outside fire warmers… I “google-d” that to try find the correct word for them but the majority of the pictures were of kettles… So I hope you know what I mean… I don’t mean kettles : P!

It was brilliant seeing everyone again. Venetia tried an escargot for the first time in her life! You see the guy with the tray of little aperitifs walked past and offered us some, so of course we happily accepted… I played it safe and chose a ham and cheese looking thing…

Whilst Venetia picked out a pastry filled with - at that moment - unidentified green stuff… She took a small nibble into it, thinking that it was just spices or something… Realised that there was more to it and asked me whether or not I thought it was “escargo”, I replied “nah!“. Of course, believing that it did have a strangely close resemblance… Then the man beside us, peered over, looked at it and said in a very certain voice “Oui, oui. Escargo, escargo!”. Venetia smiled at him, looked at that fateful, bite-sized snack, that she had been oh, so afraid of trying before in her life… Brought it up to her lips… and ate it! Then she was on a quest to find more : P!

Yes, it was quite a night! After a few hours of mingling and pretending to be an airplane with a four year old called “Markus”, everyone started dispersing into the grand manor/ hotel. Venetia and I thought that what we were just at was the majority of the night… So we’d been nibbling on any snacks that where unfortunate enough to pass by our way…

We even found ourselves having a long conversation with Ciaron right by the place where they continuously placed new trays filled with yummy goodness… So when I overheard my mom saying “We better start making our way over to the tables then.” I felt the crumb-covered fried chicken catch in my throat… What?! There was MORE food… Uh oh! Seeing as it was my first wedding ever, you can’t blame me, SOMEONE should have said something : P!

Venetia and I made our way over and into the dining area, to find our mom already sitting down… I thought, cool, I must be seated beside her! I went over and looked at all of the name cards only to feel panic rising! My name wasn’t there! Nor was it on any of the tables near her… I saw a group of young adults/ teens further down the room. My heart leapt into my mouth! I’m a very shy person and as I came closer and closer, dreading what may lie ahead, I realised that they were all engrossed in deep conversation… FRENCH conversation! I walked around and there it was a neatly written “Bianca”… I glanced at the empty chair beside me and relief rushed over me as the name “Venetia” came into vision.

I shook the whole of the first meal, my hands just wouldn’t stay still! Later on though I felt incredibly silly for being so worried/shy. The night was fabulous and the meals were incredibly tasty! I didn’t converse much with the brother and sister to the left of me… I did try start a conversation but it sort of ended abruptly… So most of the dining was spent talking to the girl next to Venetia who spoke perfect English, Celine. I did speak a little bit of French with her though and just as I was ready to burst into a French frenzy all of the meals where finished and people were getting up and walking around… I regret not having spoken more but there is always plenty of times to speak French whilst living in France, I suppose : P.

Oh! Whilst we were in the middle of a lovely duck dish, Markus came over and decided that his stuffed-toy dog wanted to sleep under our table… He is so cute! So off he went and came back above about a minute later to say that his dog had to be woken up in two minutes… A few minutes later he ran off to the table his parents were at and came back with a miniature sized pillow and blanket and decided that he wanted to sleep under our table too, so off he went… It was incredibly cute, even if he did brush past Venetia’s and my leg’s and give us heart attacks…

There was a champagne fountain and the cake was the most incredible cake that I’ve ever seen! It was the Eiffel tower with the Loch Ness Monster underneath it! Absolutely amazing! And it tasted awesome too : P! Afterwards there was dancing… My dress could twirl so it was awesome… Even if I didn’t dance… much : P.

All in all, the night was the best ever! There was even games and a slideshow during dinner… It was great : )! The whole wedding and the party lasted eleven hours and we left before it ended! So at two A.M. we headed back to then hotel and were glad to be welcomed to our beds.

The next day we had to be up relatively early, to be ready for the brunch at 11:30. I wore heels and skinny jeans and rather regretted it when I got there because all of the little children were playing football and running around the forest… The ball came towards me and so I kicked it without thinking and really, really hurt my foot : P… But the pain went away after a few seconds, so all was well : )!

After eating, I went back outside and hung around with the four little people “building” a house on a large, mossy rock… This is where my French came in handy, I had long conversations with them, not being afraid of being wrong. I understood absolutely everything that they said and they understood me, so it was a really nice feeling : ).

I turned to Markus after conversing with a pretty, little French girl and spoke to him in English. She looked up at me wide eyed and asked if I spoke English, I was ecstatic! She hadn’t noticed that I was a foreigner other than when I spoke English!! Aww! I was so happy!

After a few hours of being at the place, we decided to say our goodbyes and leave. When I told the kids that I’d been hanging out with (Their ages varied from two to about five years old) that I had to go, the smallest one that hadn’t spoken very much to me and only in a very quiet voice, stood up and said “Où?” (Where?). I almost melted inside because it was just the cutest thing! When I replied that I was going to Paris he smiled and said very proudly “Moi, j’habite à Paris!” (Me, I live in Paris!). When we were ready to get into the car, his dad lifted him up to my height and I received a kiss on the cheek, aww!

With the sound of crunching gravel and dried out leaves being driven over, we drove off. Half an hour later we were invited into the large city that Paris is with all of it’s traffic.

It was gorgeous as ever. In every single direction you looked in there was at least one old building with it’s mass detail. Our first sight-seeing stop was the “Notre Dame Cathedral”. We spotted it and then had incredible difficulty getting parking close enough to it. A while later we stumbled into an underground parking and began our long walk toward the Notre Dame. When we arrived at our destination, it was absolutely stunning, in it’s entire glory, unbelievably gothic with all of the detailed yet expressionless faces of the 5,000 gargoyles looking down upon us (Which is 2,800 less than that of the organ pipes : P).

We walked around the whole of the cathedral, trying to take in all of the detail, that had once been worked so hard on by great artists to get. The very first construction of the hulking building started almost 900 years ago in 1163, incredible!

After spending a while gazing up, the dark began to set in as did the chill in our bones. So we set off across the road to buy some winter-gear. Whilst we were in the shop, we heard two girls speaking English, the one with a distinctive accent. Venetia asked her where she was from and sure enough it was South Africa. We told her that we were born in Zimbabwe, had a quick conversation and were off again.

We went into the Cathedral for a few minutes to see what it was like and then decided to head off to our next short-stop, the Eiffel tower. We had seen it the first night that we had arrived, the weather wasn’t too bad, so we decided to accept the chance to see it. It was so international, there was so many languages drifting about in the air, truly lovely : ).

After we came out of the Cathedral and began the walk back to the car, “PLONK!”… a raindrop fell on my head… and then on Venetia… And then my parents noticed them too… Suddenly it was pouring! We quickened up our pace and even ran for a while, whilst have extreme fits of laughter. Stopping under the shelter of a sticky-out bit in a building a street or so away, hoping that it would die down… Of course, it didn’t! We continued going, since we were all already drenched and then thinking that we were close to the underground parking lot… We realised that we were actually lost!

Finally we found our way to the right street, rain still falling heavily upon us and to the door to get in. By this stage my asthma had taken over and even though my legs were freezing with the ice-cold rain saturating my jeans the top half of me was unbelievably boiling. As soon as I got into the dry, warmth, I pulled off my jacket and whipped out my inhaler from my bag that had been lying peacefully in the car. After a few puffs, I was fine again and relieved of the comfort of the car.

We drove around to the Eiffel tower but decided not to get out, since all of our clothes were wet and the rain was still being persistent. Instead we took a slow drive past and even saw the twinkles for the second time. The first time was when we were pulling up on the road directly in front of it on the first night. It was like magic, perfectly timed magic!

Afterwards, we drove to the “Louvre” but thought it would be a waste not to get out and go see it, so we braved the cold. It was alright the rain had subsided just in time : ). The pyramid was absolutely brilliant and the Louvre was superb! My mom got some cool pictures there. Even after seeing everything the Eiffel tower is still my favourite, it was even lighted with a purple-blue glow. Stunning!

On Wednesday we got up at a reasonable hour and came back home. Despite all the fun that I had in Paris I missed my little town so, so much! Home sweet home : D.

The drive up to the house was just so exhilarating! The space! My place! The animals were more than happy to be back… I love home : ). I really missed my double bed and my stylish black mosquito net! And everything else ^_^.

Okay, I’m going to have to leave you all now. I’m being kicked off my OWN computer… Again! Sorry that this post was so long!

Catch you all soon! Looking forward to hearing from you, leave me comments ^_^.

- Bianca : ) (The CUTE smiley ^_^)