If you thought Paris was pretty normally then you should see it now, in the run up to christmas. The city of lights now has christmas lights every where. Christmas markets have popped up left, right and centre, the largest being at the bottom of the Champs Elysées, lining both sides of the road with amazing foods and mulled everything. 

Mulled wine always reminds me of skiing and is my absolute favourite winter drink so the discovery of these christmas markets was beyond exciting. The mulled wine is also the perfect antidote to the fact that it is absolutely pouring with rain and freezing cold. I also discovered tartiflette for the first time, which to be honest I don't know why/how I didn't know about before. It's like a creamy, cheesy, onion, bacon carbonara but with potatoes. It's heaven. I was so inspired I even made some myself at home. 

Here's me chilling with the big guy himself:

Can we just acknowledge for a second the inside of Printemps? This is the christmas display to end all christmas displays. All the other shops should just go home right now. I don't know who is in charge of their interior decoration or displays but hats off to them because this is a christmas masterpiece. It even had a light display that happened every hour. WOW. 

On another note, can we please acknowledge the ridiculous-ness of the Chanel window display? I can't remember when I last got my sandals out on christmas day for a walk in the snow. Just bizarre. I understand they probably have a largely foreign client basis who probably do wear sandals on christmas day but still I think the Chanel window dresser could learn a thing or two from Printemps itself or even its neighbour Dior (left). 

L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N...
The weekend following the attacks, after days of closure (the first closure since its opening in 1993), Disneyland reopened. Everyone knows Disneyland is the happiest place on earth, and with Paris probably one of the unhappiest places on the earth I figured it was a pretty good place to spend a day. In a world of magic and imagination, a world away from the horrors of the real world.

There are very few people travelling to Paris at the moment which meant there were very short queues at Disney, which meant more rides. It's just one of those places that is timeless and unchanged by what is going on in the rest of the world.
*If anyone from Disney reads this and wants to offer me and internship don't hesitate to get in touch, as you can see I am very passionate/borderline obsessed about Disney.

 This time I did both the parks. I have never been in the Walt Disney studios park before and its great. I think disney and there more recent animations are hugely inspiring and each film is pushed to the next level. In this park you begin to see this next-level technology being applied to disney rides too. The Ratatouille ride is a really cool 3D experience where you feel completely immersed in the story and it just makes you think where will theme park rides go next. There is a lot of construction happening at Disney, remakes of rides, and it just makes me excited to see how they will modernise and update things, how they can re-interpret and give new dimensions to their stories.

It is in winter season at Disney so there was fake snow, ice sculptures, even more fairy lights than normal, even more magic. I have visited Disneyland in every season now except spring and with 7 months still left in Paris I think probably I'll be able to tick this off the to-do list.

I am writing this post some months after the attacks of November 13th. For a long time I didn't know how to address what had happened. Even now its hard to know what to say. I was fortunate that being in Paris was the closest I was to the attacks, and that no one I know was seriously affected. You can't imagine that human beings can committ such attrocities, bring such terror. But life must go on, and Paris and the french people have taught me that.

The attacks happened the weekend my parents where in town, just before my birthday. What should have been a weekend of celebrations was scary, and sad.  When these kind of horrific thing are happening on the news it's very easy to not take much notice of them. Until it directly affects you and is happening half an hour from where you live you can't understand the impact and devastation that they cause. The people of France are brave and courageous, they banded together to support one another and to carry on with life, but it was truly a horrible and scary time to be living in Paris. In a way I think it was almost worse for people in other places, seeing everything unfold on the news, the 24/7 coverage of the horrific events. In Paris, people were determined to get on with life and to not have their joie de vivre defeated.

The day after the attacks we bought champagne to celebrate my birthday. A lot of the shops were shut and the streets were very quiet, we felt a bit stupid buying champagne. However  the man in the shop summed it up perfectly, he said "we must continue to drink champagne, we must continue to live, and we must not let them win". I am proud to live in a city that remains so strong in the face of terror, a city of people who continue to dine "en terrace", and who support each other in saying they are "même pas peur" *not even scared.

It's November and it's 20 degrees. This weekend I had my best friend staying with me, and her boyfriend's friend who is from the States, but currently studying in Europe. He had never been to Paris so this gave us the perfect excuse to be tourists and enjoy the autumn weather.
I know that proper Parisians have probably never been to the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe, or at least not to just go and stare at it, but there are worse ways to spend a weekend. Plus, you less like a loser taking selfies at the Eiffel Tower than anywhere else because everyone is doing it.

On the way back from Disney on Saturday Hermione and I were wrongly accused of shoplifting.

Having headed home from Disney earlier than expected we went into my local Monoprix (Denfert-Rochereau) trying to buy popcorn to eat with the scary movie we were planning to watch. They didn't have any popcorn (or we couldn't find it) so we went to leave the supermarket empty handed. As we're about to exit the store the security guard ushers us to the right. We think he wants us to use the next set of doors so go to leave through these doors but he indicates to continue going right. This happens past four sets of doors until he ushers us into a tiny cupboard at the edge of the store where he begins shouting that we have stolen makeup. I stood there in complete disbelief and shock while this huge guy demands that we empty our bags and then our pockets. We tip out the contents of our bags: minnie mouse ears, a disney autograph book, empty water bottles, my metro pass, headphones, a scarf. I explain that we've been at Disneyland all day and he continues to shout at us, convinced that we have been in the makeup aisle (which we hadn't been) and stolen makeup. I recount to him exactly where we had walked in the store and confirmed that we hadn't been anywhere near the makeup aisle. Good job i've been living in Paris for a few months because defending your innocence is not something they teach you in school! 

After he could quite clearly see that we hadn't stolen any makeup he begrudgingly let us go without even so much as an apology. I don't think anything this outrageous has ever happened to me before. I don't think that I look like a shoplifter and I have certainly never stolen, or tried to steal anything from a shop. The fact that he was so agressive and then did not even apologise when he had quite obviously wrongfully accused us shocked me and I will never be shopping in that Monoprix again. 

Everyone knows that Disneyland is the happiest place on earth. So what better place to spend a happy halloween? I am always excited when I go to Disney, the magic of it all never gets old for me and I am always running like a little kid as soon as I get off the RER at the Marne-la-vallée station. My little sister hasn't been to Disney since we went to Florida and that must have been over 10 years ago so she was also beyond excited although not to the point of running like me. Can you believe i'm going to be 22 in 2 weeks? I can't. 

Disney on halloween was amazing. The decorations were amazing, there were giant pumpkins everywhere, and Disney charm was just basically put into autumn. I'm going to start this post by sharing with you what was super magical and fabulous and what makes me fall in love with Disney all over again everytime I go back. Then I feel I have to open up about what I am noticing to be less magical as I get older and wiser. 

Disney is just kind of other worldly. They manage to create these environments where you suddenly don't feel like you're where you are anymore. They just bring their stories to life and I am ashamed to say that seeing Mickey Mouse in the parade bought actual tears to my eyes (or maybe it was because the sun was bright and I forgot my sunglasses?). I love that at Disneyland you just see so many different kinds of people there, from different backgrounds, styles, age groups, families, couples, friends etc. I saw an old man in a Mickey Mouse 1988 sweater with his ears on basically running to a ride with his wife in tow and I thought that is the kind of man I want my husband to be. They didn't even have kids with them. They were just enjoying the magic of Disneyland. It's also amazing that all of this was started from one little cartoon mouse and one man with a big imagination. I know people often criticise Disney for epitomising Americanisation but I think if it teaches you to dream, and to work hard to achieve those dreams then what's wrong with that? 

Also my sister is often too cool to smile in photos but at Disney even she is beaming from ear to ear, so that can't be a bad thing. 

Disney on Halloween was magical and amazing BUT... and there is a but, because as much as I love Disney there are some things I feel I need to bring to light to be honest about the experience. 

It was super busy. Unsurprisingly, because halloween fell on a Saturday in half term, it was completely packed which meant that the queues for rides were ridiculously long. You can also now only get one fast-track an hour, meaning you have to do more long queues and get to do less rides (boo)

Also, on the Disneyland website they had been advertising a Halloween Soirée on the 31st October from 5pm 'til 1am. A ticket for this cost 40€. We paid 69€ for tickets to go to the park all day, thinking this meant we could stay until 1am. We were rather shocked when at 7pm, not possessing the special evenings tickets and hence the stupid orange wristbands we could not go anywhere in the Disney park but the exit. We couldn't even go into the gift shops on the way out, they had staff guarding all the doors! Whilst I understand this means they can have twice as many paying customers on the day this was SO frustrating for us who had to cut short out time at Disney having paid almost twice as much as those people who arrived for just the evening. Staff were so unsympathetic when I tried to explain that it had not been at all clear on their website that a separate ticket was needed for the evening and I do plan to write a proper complaint email to Disney about the whole shambles of a system. 

It didn't ruin the magic of the day though although I am not sure I would rush to go on a special day again because Disney is magical whatever day of the year!

​This week I had my lovely littlest sister here visiting me. It was her half term week (unfortunately the week after mine) and I had quite a busy week at uni so she did a lot of entertaining herself but it was still so nice having her here. 
On Thursday I had an interview with a digital communications agency (will do a post on my search for internships soon) near Versailles so I decided it would be a great opportunity to visit the Chateau. I have been to the gardens before but never into the palace and I have always wanted so that I can see the splendour for itself. 

Versailles is just so imposing when you approach it. The gates are so gold that they don't even look like they are real. I still don't know if they are actually real gold (?) It's great because if you're under 26 and an EU citizen then entry is free which I think is an amazing way to get young people seeing art and culture and it's obviously great for me as a student on a budget. (I'm sorry that this photo is ever so slightly not straight, I wasn't quite on centre and it's really annoying)

The architecture of Versailles is amazing. Everything is so luxurious and splendid and extravagant and oh the symmetry..! There is not enough symmetry in modern buildings. I know that sounds stupid but I just think when you can look directly down the middle or up at something it's so impressive that they were able to build it so precisely and perfectly without any technology or machinery. Modern day building all have flat ceilings and flat walls (probably a huge generalisation) and they just don't have all this intricate detailing and lines that you find in older architecture. 

Versailles is so ridiculously gold and luxe that you can understand why the starving people of 1700s France got a bit wound up and decided to overthrow the monarchy. That said, it makes for great viewing for tourists of the 2010s so I am grateful to the people of France for having suffered so that I can filter the life out my photos and exploit their instapotential using hashtags like #luxe #architecture #interior to get to more than 12 likes. 

Having been inside of Versailles, I am even more glad that they didn't let Kim Kardashian and Kanye West get married there. It has enough history of its own and it would have ceased to be the palace of France if they had married there and would have become 'the place where Kim and Kanye got married'. Although it would be a stunning wedding venue so I can't blame Kim for wanting to get married there. 

The gardens are just as stunning as the Chateau, to be honest. I think they look nicer in the summer because all the flowers are out but the trees are all gorgeous red-heads at the moment so that was equally beautiful. I don't remember appreciating the colours of autumn as much as this last year but this year every time I go outside I'm like 'wow I want to instagram that tree'. See here for the Tuileries in Autumn. The one problem with instagramming autumn photos is knowing whether to #autumn or #fall. You have to be considering the american audience but then also considering the time difference. So for example if you #fall in the morning, Americans will be asleep and you won't get 12 likes. It's a real art. (I'm sure my sister who somehow gets at least 70 likes on each post with no hashtags is laughing/cringing at me right now). 

There is even symmetry in literally the entire grounds of Versailles. Stunning. They must have some seriously great gardeners. 

It was actually quite nice to escape Paris for a day. I recently decided I really quite fancy a trip outside of Paris to a random provincial town. Paris is beautiful but its also nice to see some large open spaces and some air. I plan to go to Bois de Boulogne Park this weekend to take advantage of some open space and the beauty of autumn before all the leaves disappear.