The sales started today in Paris. Considering how uncommercial France generally is, the annual sales are actually quite impressive with 'real' reductions of 50% or so. Usually I replace my entire wardrobe during the sales, since I can't be bothered to clothes shop the rest of the year, but money's a bit tight this month :-(

I was in an irish pub with a couple of friends on sunday (the guys in the photo earlier in the blog), and we noticed that they had wallpapered with some british newspapers and we joking about the eternal DFS sofa sales - well, two of us were, the other guy was french and didn't have a clue what we were going on about. He was also puzzled by our disparaging remarks about the irishness of the pub. This was a pub in the banlieu rather than one of the Parisien irish pubs (which aren't too bad), and consequently was run by french people and full of french people. Somehow it just doesn't work (one guy was drinking an espresso for goodness sake, and they'd run out of guinness - 'keelkenny monsieur?'). It's a bit like when I was stuck in Singapore for a month or so, and you quickly realised the western food was a strange imitation of the real thing, as though the chef had seen a picture once but had never actually tried any. Fortunately the local food was fantastic, and the lack of a decent burger didn't really matter after a while.