France has been a strange country, and I never really got to grips with it. I certainly appreciated the ease of living, with the pleasant division between work and not-work (with the latter being far more important), the beautiful buildings, the utter lack of aggression and of course the wine!

I wanted to follow that with what I *won't* miss, but nothing really springs to mind. Maybe bureaucracy, although once you get used to it and permanently carry a gas bill it doesn't become quite so painful.

Anyway, au revoir Paris. Next time I see you it'll be as a tourist who strangely knows his way round....

Hard to see in this pic, but it's a little cocktail glass

The resident of the flat below came up to say that her bathroom was awash with my shower water, and once she had let me get dressed I popped down and indeed it was. Fairly badly too. I went back to my apartment and looked under the bath, and it was damp but not really waterlogged, so I wasn't totally sure it was me, but I wouldn't have been surprised if it had been.

Then started the back and forth of wills to see who would actually make any effort to sort out the problem - the lady from downstairs didn't normally live there, and so she didn't really have to do anything, but I wasn't keen on arranging for the plumber myself as if it didn't turn out to be me, I'd still be landed with the 50€ call out fee. I called the owner of the flat below and she stood fast and refused to call a plumber, and unfortunately I don't have the inexhaustible stubborness of the french, and gave in.

I asked the nice guys at the deli downstairs if they knew a plumber (I must blog about them one day actually - they're fantastic, and do a kind of portugese/italian fusion of food), but they didn't. Then I tried my landlord, who lived in the flat opposite mine, and he took everything in hand and sorted it all out (I bet you can't say that about many landlords! He even speaks french to me slowly!).

It turned out the way to handle it is to call the building's syndic (a building management group). They get out their plumber who decides where the water is coming from, and after that all the insurance gets sorted out.

The guys came round and re-did the bath sealant and then left. Without asking for money. I'm sure a bill of some kind is going to pop up, but at the moment I'm a bit bemused what has happened. I still think the problem hasn't gone away really, but when in France it's best to do the French thing, and just ignore anything else that happens - the plumber came, sealed and so whatever happens from now on c'est pas mon faut...

So, after admitting my ignorance, for those that don't know what confit de canard is, it's duck that's really slowly roasted, and then stored in it's own fat which preserves it. Usually it comes in jars or tins. All you have to do is stick it in the oven for 20 minutes, and voila, perfect meal. For some reason the french love to serve it with fried garlicy potato slices, which makes it a rather fatty meal, but it's one of the best, honestly.

Anyway, the picture you see here is how confit is sold in my local supermarket. No frills, just a bag of duck in solidified fat. All for 3 euros! I looked on the internet to find out how long I should reheat it, and some chef was spouting on about the joys of cooking duck, and said that the easiest way was to buy confit IF YOU COULD AFFORD IT! Oh, you poor people out there in the civilised world, so it looks like you're not only missing cheap wine (cheap enough to use as mouthwash), but also cheap duck!

There is a downside though, my apartment now smells strongly of duck fat, and all my cutlery is also now covered with a thin layer of duck fat which seems to take multpile washes. Also I'm now showing a good layer of duck fat too, which would be useful if I intended to bob around on ponds, but not so hot in super skinny Paris....

It was certainly a surprise to me when I got here - I'd just arrived and had several job interviews with the majority in French. Looking back I realise how insane that was, since even now I'd find it tough to sound comprehensible at an interview. At one company they sat me down in a dungeon of a room with just a PC, and told me I had twenty minutes to answer the question.

I scrolled down the list of questions and was pleased to find I understood all of them - both the french and the questions themselves. However, getting the answers out was a near impossible task - I bludgeoned together vague french phrases, and slipped in a few anglaisms where I completely failed to come up with a french word.

However, what really slowed me down was the french keyboard. Most of it is the same, in fact a cursory glance and you won't spot the differences. The differences are all around the edge - the M has risen a level, the A and Q are swapped, and the Z and W also - this actually gives your keyboard a french accent believe it or not, since everytime you write we, it comes out ze, which is funny for all of a minute.

So things went terribly slowly, and it got even worse when I had to write some programming code, since the brackets and other arcane symbols us programmers use are all in total disarray. They came back into the interview room, and I'd managed only a handful of the questions. The phrase 'I'll get my coat' came into my mind...

Why am I going on about this? Unfortunately it's just a precursor to something so banal that now I'm regretting even having started on this.

Type gmail into google, but forget you're on a french computer, and it comes out gmqil. Try it and see what google thinks you should be spelling. I laughed, but I'm a nerd and allowed to...

Just to wrap up, it actually only took a day or so for your fingers to get used to the different keyboard layout. Surprising when you think that your fingers are all trained to press in the right place without looking at the keyboard much, and that they can change their training so easily. Now that I'm fluent on a french keyboard, I prefer it to an english one, if only for the reason I no longer have to press shift to get "

Bike's still stolen and not replaced yet - this month I've had the pleasure of using a carte orange ticket and taken the metro everywhere. Especially appreciated today as it snowed in an extremely wet kind of way - one of those snow showers where if you don't have a brolly it gives you an ice cream headache without the ice cream (I had a brolly though, but amazing how many people didn't).

Admittedly I feel a bit guilty since my trip to work is all of two metro stops, but I have to get my daily quota of 1.9 trips a day to make it worth the carte orange ticket - surprisingly the carte orange isn't much of a bargain vs the regular carnet of 10 tickets, although it is an awful lot less crinkled up purple pieces of paper in the pocket (and inevitably laundry).

And you still can't complain about the price overall - I was in London over xmas (and again just after new year), and the single ticket for the tube is now £4!!! What's that, 6 euros per trip? Unbelievably outrageous price, although still pale compared to taxi prices over there - I think taxi seats are now classed as real estate in the UK, and a trip across town is seen a short-hold lease....

http://www.peuplade.fr

The idea is that you sign up, answer a few questions about yourself, and you and your details appear on a map. Your neighbours can then get in contact if they want to, and local events can be announced etc. It looks like an internet dating site, but without the dating, if that makes sense.

It already seems incredibly popular, and in my neighbourhood there was already loads of people signed up. I didn't totally understand the questions that I was asked, so my responses were a bit lame - perhaps if I put some effort into it I could meet some people from around here which might be nice (my user name is TrickyNicky if you want to hunt me down). In the picture above, I'm the red balloon, and it seems that I live on a very dull street, since I'm the only one signed up. Well, that's one way of looking at it, the other way could be that everyone on my street has a life and doesn't need to sign up to sites like this :-)

This was a day I'd been anticipating to be honest. In fact the moment before I turned the corner I said to myself 'I bet my bike's been nicked', and voila, it was! Not actually psychic though, as I say this to myself every morning! Since moving to my petite studio, I've had to lock my bike outside. Slowly it's been stripped of various bits such as lights, bells, and pump (pretty stupid to have left that on there admittedly). Any day I was expecting it to be gone, or at the very least with it's wheels trodden into a useless L shape.

Even more annoyingly, you can't go and buy a cheap nicked replacement in Paris either. Unlike Britain, which has a thriving bike recycling business (not as in aluminium, if you hadn't been reading very carefully), here you can't get a second hand bike for under 100€. Fortunately you can get brand new bikes for 70€ from supermarkets and sports shops. No, it doesn't make sense to me either.

The Eurostar back was interesting - the general feeling of a journey totally depends on when you're travelling. For this trip, it seemed mostly french and british expats returning home - not many tourists at all. The train struggled on the UK side, and the announcer took great pleasure in explaining it was the British network at fault. A guy sitting near me practically exploded with smug indignation at this, and was probably a bit disappointed that an anti-british food comment couldn't have been worked in (train delayed to pork pies on the track perhaps). He seemed to take great pains to do this when the announcement was being said in French, although I'd already clocked him for being definitely not-french. I assume he must be an uber-francophile of some kind.

More signs of it being a french dominated train were seen at the boarding, with what can only be described as near panic as people tried to board quicker than everyone else. People wheeled their giant cases up and down the isle, bouncing anyone else out of the way, before re-wheeling them back again against the frantic traffic. At one point two little boys fought each other all the way down, screaming at the top of their voices. Their mother called after them, calling them her petits chatons (kittens), an odd expression for boys, and with my poor french it could equally have been petits châtains (chestnuts), or more likely petits shits (shits).

Getting off the train was the same as boarding - you could easily have assumed there was a fire further down the carriage (if it wasn't for the fact that once off the carriage, everyone stopped in front of the door to adjust luggage, coats and petits shits). The earlier mentioned francophile did a wonderful job of hurdling several suitcases before being finally repelled by a fur coated octegenarian (experience counts). Inwardly I'm sure he was still very happy at becoming a naturalised Parisian, while externally he managed his well-practiced french tuts and huffs - very impressive, hopefully if I get to be like this one day, I'll have sufficiently good enough friends who will shoot me.

The timer on the cellar light had a ridiculously short fuse, and several times we were plunged into darkness and had to scrape along the walls to find the (unlit) light switch. Pascal wanted to show me something in particular, although it meant dashing down a corridor for a brief look before having to dash back again before the lights went out.

It was a tunnel leading even further down than the cellar, and was an entrance to the Paris catacombs! The catacombs near the Denfert-Rochereau metro are fairly well known, since tourists can enter them, and more significantly since they've been used as an ossurary after the cemetaries of Paris started to overflow. For about a kilometer the tunnels are lined with skulls and thigh bones (well worth a visit, especially if you tell your guests it's really a mass grave from the revolution).

Less well known are the rest of the catacombs - some 300km in length! A friend first told me about them five years ago, as a flatmate of his was a 'cataphile' and regularly explored the miles of tunnels. Totally illegal, with a 60€ fine if you stumble into a policeman down there (which is sooo likely of course). There are websites (apparently - go google) with maps and other hints & tips for the wanabee cataphile.

So, this was an entrance to the tunnels - it was amazingly atmospheric. The light seemed to stop right there at the entrance, making it literally a black hole. Not that we went in, that'll wait until we're drunk and stupid one night...

Click here for a cool item from the BBC news website;

It shows how many british live abroad, where we all are, our ages etc. The main map has a button that changes the size of each country proportionally with how many of us have invaded. I think it's proportional as a percentage of the countries total population as the US barely changes while France bloats up (although still nothing compared to Spain, which is going to burst and spray cheap sangria everywhere).

There's about 200,000 of us in France, mostly working age (not like the Eastbourne of Europe, otherwise known as Spain). Coming the other direction there's only 100,000 french in Britain, so it looks like we're winning!

A lot of people had been invited, and one of the invitation requirements was to bring a 10€ present which would then get randomly redistributed. Back home in Brit this was called a bran tub, which I can only guess stemmed from the days when we could only afford to give each other gifts of bran, a healthy tradition at the very least. Being Paris of course, rather than bran the gifts were things like champagne flutes and pretty cups. There was a surprising number of magnifying glasses, which I guess is a french thing only because when things get incomprehensible it's usually their fault.

There was an additional rule - we were given numbers to dictate who drew their present from the pile first. Once you had opened your choice, you were given the option to swap with anyone who had aleady picked a present. In other words if you were last in the queue, you pretty much had the choice of anything that was there, while if you were first you had to make do with losing the cool present you'd randomly picked and getting the Kinder egg santa that clearly didn't cost 10€.

It worked quite well, until competition for various presents got quite heated. Many protests about the rules were heard (there was only one rule, which is less than Fight Night, not that you could tell the difference). I picked a bizarre pink thing, and attempted to swap it for some chocolates and it didn't go too well. The host had to charge over and literally wrestle the chocolates from my victim's hands while ignoring cries of 'he didn't choose before ten seconds were up' (a new rule that had suddenly emerged).

This morning, while recovering from a hangover, I decided the chocolates would be breakfast, and after taking a big bite (they were cup-cake sized xmas things), I found it to be quite tasteless. I then took a closer look at the label - they were candles in the shape of chocolate cakes. How sick and twisted is that!

I tried Everest however, hoping to get some nice mountain views, but instead got this;

Nobody on the peak unfortunately, but at least the weather's clear...

Firstly, hello Fiona! - When you find out friends from back in the UK are reading your banal blitherings, suddenly there's all this pressure to write something good! Oh well, perhaps just a hello will do instead :-)

Big event of this week was meeting the British ambassador John Holmes at the embassy. A friend (in the IT dept allegedly, despite training in picking locks and fast-track French lessons) has come to the end of his tour of duty there, and is heading back to the UK. The ambassador has a little drinks do to say goodbye, and my mate was able to invite a few of his non-embassy mates.

We were in the building next door to the main embassy, which is partly the residences there although I'm not quite sure what else as the only times before has been the footmen's party, which tends to be a drink to oblivion type party. So no coherent memories in other words. So, the other day we were all dressed smartly, and the surroundings were fabulous, and the ambassadors two labradors seemed very at home with amuse gueules...

So we all had a little chat, and it was all very nice indeed (no tea though).

Otherwise, it's been a quiet week. From today it should pick up a bit - tonight is clearing out the above mentioned friend's fridge of booze and a general lads night out on the town. Tomorrow is a blogger's party, which is the first I've been to (must find my cardigan with elbow patches and pipe), then a friend's housewarming party on Saturday, and finally the usual tennis on Sunday.

One of the big reasons I love going to Düsseldorf is the nightlife and beer. Parisiens seem to want to drag out a glass of wine for the entire night, while Düsseldorfians have perfected the conveyor belt method of keeping a full glass of beer in front of all night! A waiter or waitress constantly patrols the bar with a tray full of 20cl glasses of beer. As soon as you've finished one, they swoop down and quickly replace it with a full one. No wasting time with receipts and additions, as they just make a mark on your beer mat, and at the end of the night count the number of notches to make the bill.

There were a few times when we felt a bit ashamed of the fact that our beer mats were becoming more notches than mat, but it seemed we were in plenty of good company. There were even a few people who were onto the second or third beer mat.

Food is good too, although kinda heavy and meaty though. There is meat *everywhere*, even to the point of the vegetarian dishes still having meat in them;

The picture is a bit blurry, but in the small print under Vegetable soup are the words 'with beef'. Of course, what kind of vegetable soup could respect itself in Germany without beef in it! So, for the entire time there we were fairly stuffed, but no complaints.

Finally, just to be infantile, here's a bar we found called the 'Bastard', which amused me greatly, although as you can see my brother didn't appreciate being photo'd in front of it...