Paris Perspectives

My friends Virginia and Genie of the two very popular Paris photo blogs Paris Through My Lens and Paris and Beyond have both very kindly featured Growing Berries on their blogs this week and I've been thrilled to receive lots of new Francophile visitors. To welcome all my new guests, I thought I'd better put away the laundry and get out some pictures of Paris.


Luckily I've joined a Paris walking tour this year and every other Friday while Florence is at Halte Garderie, I get to spend the day in Paris with my friends discovering the sites from a new perspective, courtesy of our incredibly knowledgable French guide, Jacques. Last Friday we enjoyed a walk in the last of the summer sunshine through Paris' Latin Quarter. We started at the famous Sorbonne, but quickly started ducking down alleys and side streets to discover a world you would never know existed behind the busy Boulevards Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel.


Apparently Jacques is not afraid to have his tour groups step past the occasional privé sign. This building is now part of the University of Paris Descartes campus.

Some of my friends on the tour take copious notes. I take photos and don't always listen properly so I can't quite remember what makes this building special. I do know it is much older than the rest of the nineteenth century campus, possibly once a nunnery and definitely used as a meeting place by the early leaders of the French Revolution.


Cross the Rue des Écoles and you arrive here.


One of the last remaining medieval buildings in Paris (if you don't count the churches) and now the Musée de Cluny.


Cross some more streets, turn a few corners and you end up here. Rue Saint André des Arts. If you look left you're just a few steps from the hustle and bustle of Boulevard Saint-Michel but turn right and you head down a quiet street full of must try restaurants.

Le Christine on Rue Christine. Need to find out if the food here tastes as good as the restaurant looks!


Also found on Rue Christine. Nope. Can't remember the significance. So much for the History degree!


Figs in Paris? You can find them in the Passage Dauphine.

And can you believe these steps are in Paris too? They would look more at home on a Provence post.


They're part of the Cour de Rohan a private residential courtyard which also happens to be a public passageway off the Cours du Commerce Saint-André.

Parisians, and I suppose visitors, have the right to walk through the passage and it's a photographer and historian's paradise. I definitely need to go back and spend some more time there.


You can find this in the Cour de Rohan too. Bonus Berry points if you know what it's for.

I hope you enjoyed this walk through Paris as much as I did. I'm linking up with Design Mom's Love the Place you Live. It's not always easy living here but when you get the chance to see all this in a morning you can't really complain!

Oh, and after all that walking we certainly deserved a Paris Lunch. We ate at Le Petit Pontoise and it was one of the best meals I've had since we've lived here. How can I not love the place I live?

French Laundry 101

Turn this...
into this...

with this!

I'm not sure it will be much help with this though. Florence did not vanish she was busy decorating our sheets with a permanent marker. Sigh. Luckily it's an easily replaceable white sheet and not India's much loved handmade quilt which was also on the bed and avoided being turned into toddler artwork by millimeters. There would have been tears. I think it's time for what's left of this sheet to be put away for upcycling. In fact I might just have had an idea for a Halloween costume...

If you want to see Florence in more angelic times she's making a guest appearance over at Paris and Beyond this week.

Bon Weekend!

Two birthdays + forty eight cakes

Georgia & Savannah celebrated their ninth birthday this week. They're growing up but still not too old to ask for toys for their birthday or to take in treats to their classmates. Last year our sea shipment containing all our belongings from California had just arrived and I could barely see the kitchen for packing boxes, never mind attempt to create any kind of homemade treat. This year I was determined to make up for it and so, as requested, whipped up forty eight fairy cakes with 'soft' icing on the morning of their birthday for them to take into school.

I haven't done half as much baking as I used to since moving to France. My Kitchen Aid mixer, the secret of my baking success, did not come in that shipment and in any case it's hard to get motivated about baking when there's a patisserie on every corner! My first choice of recipe was quickly dismissed when I realised I had forgotten to buy any sugar and what was left in the house wasn't going to stretch to the two and a half cups required. Instead I used this muffin recipe an old favourite of ours, but left out the chocolate chips and used a bit less sugar as that was all I had. Miraculously the batter for twelve regular sized muffins stretched to make forty eight mini muffins so I didn't have to make a double batch!

The icing was made using our family's favourite method of adding liquid to powdered sugar (sucre glace à pâtisser in France). You can use water or milk, but I usually like to use freshly squeezed lemon juice to add a bit of flavour. This time I happened to have a box of limes that had caught my eye at the market but hadn't got around to using. The lime juice added a lovely zingy taste that made up for the lack of sugar in the cake! I always find it difficult to know just how much liquid to add to this kind of icing, so this time I paid attention so that I could share it here and create a reminder for myself. Six tablespoons of powdered sugar mixed with two tablespoons of lime juice and a drop of food colouring made just the right consistency. It really is a quick and easy way to ice a cake and when you have forty eight to ice quick and easy is what you want!

La Rentrée

Well, hello again! Did you miss me? It's nice to be back from a very refreshing break in real life and on the blog. We came back from our two weeks in Spain and dived straight into the first week of school. Two weeks on we are getting used to the new routine, new classes, new teachers, new friends, but with with the comforting feeling of it all being familiar and so much easier than this time last year when we had just arrived in France. A year ago today I was taking delivery of our sea shipment and our house was thrown into a chaos from which it still hasn't fully recovered. Witness three P.E. kits going A.W.O.L. for the first week of school!

Our time in Spain seems like a distant memory already, but a treasured one. We stayed not far from Sitjes in another house on top of a mountain.


It had a pool with a view that Georgia and Savannah spent every waking moment playing in. Florence was happier chilling out in her boat (pronounced "gook" rhymes with "book" an all purpose word for anything that starts with a B!).


A rare moment in front of the camera and in the pool for me!


Being an island girl, I prefer swimming in the sea and there was plenty of beach time too.




And, of course, those ice creams for breakfast!

We did make it into Barcelona a few times too for a bit of culture and I have a few more travel posts lined up for you after this self indulgent sharing of the holiday snaps! It's good to be back.

This Moment. Ice cream for breakfast

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. Joining in with Amanda and friends at SouleMama


Why not?

This Moment. Escape

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. Joining in with Amanda and friends at SouleMama


We're heading off into the sunshine today.
See you back here in two weeks.

Mini France

More Eiffel Tower pictures for you today. With a twist. No we haven't turned into a family of giants. This is the Eiffel Tower at France Miniature a sweet little park about half an hour west of Paris and just a short drive from our house.


The main feature is, like the title says, Mini France. A 3D map of France filled with models of all the top sights in France from the Eiffel Tower to the boats in St. Tropez harbour. This is Versailles. Still not that mini - can you see the girls peeking over the west wing?

A pretty village in the South West that I thought we could visit on our way down to Spain next week. Forgot to note which village though. Anyone recognize it?!


That's Mont St Michel over there on the right. I could go on, but the models are not the only thing to see at France Miniature. The main reason to go as far as India, Georgia and Savannah are concerned are Les Attractions. Fairground rides conveniently located just off the coast of 'Brittany' which give you great views over all of 'France' and more importantly are fun and included in the (quite high) entrance price.

We were there on an overcast Monday and although the park was pleasantly busy it wasn't at all crowded and the girls got to play on as many rides as they liked for as long as they wanted. Florence even took a long nap in the stroller, Keith dialled in to work for a meeting he couldn't get out of on his day off and I finished off my photography homework. A typical family day out!

Dubbed the washing machine by the girls this ride spun you round and round and they went on it about ten times.

The prize after a difficult climb up this bouncy climbing wall...


...was to slide down the tallest and steepest slide I have ever seen. Georgia did get a bit stuck and had to rescued by a kindly French teenager thankfully saving me from the humiliation of having to try and get up there myself!

A surprising detail that the girls had remembered from their visit last year is this poubelle that talks to you every time you drop a piece of rubbish in it!


Perhaps the best part, or most alarming depending on your point of view, is that you get to operate the rides yourself. I can't imagine that ever happening in the USA but the system worked, everyone stayed safe and it developed a nice camaraderie between visitors as kids waiting for the ride would help out complete strangers to keep the line moving.




The girls first visited 'Mini France' as they like to call it with my Mum when we were house hunting last year and they fell in love with the place. The atmosphere there takes me back to my childhood holidays in France when parks like this seemed to offer so much more excitement than tiny Jersey. It might not be as thrilling as Disneyland on the other side of Paris but in it's own way it's just as magical. Well worth a visit if you are in the area. Even the café serves decent food. Well it is France after all!

In other news, I am thrilled to have been invited to be a guest blogger at Farm Fresh to You's blog. Hop on over there to see my review of the Capay Tomato Festival and lots of other gorgeous farm stories.