Brunch reservation was 10 minutes away and S hasn’t arrived yet either. Not one to stand outside a café idly, I took a short stroll along rue Bichat and see what may be hidden on this street, in a neighbourhood that I don’t know very well. Not that I got very far though; I didn’t even get to peek into the windows of Helmut Newcake, the only other address I know a bit further along this street.

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With a blink of an eye, we’re nearly half-way through the year. It feels like it should be summer already, but the weather is not showing signs of this sort, preferring to swing to and fro between a real scorcher of a day and a horribly wet one. Elsewhere, heavy rain had flooded numerous central European cities and towns, and those in the French Riviera were greeted by tornadoes! Sort of make me glad that we’re only dealing with either sunshine or rain in Paris.

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3 Jun: The beauty of buildings in Paris often lies in lines and symmetry, but that doesn’t necessarily means something square or rectangular. Instead, they radiate in accordance to the layout of the streets. Paris doesn’t do organised repetitive blocks, which inevitably means a large number of apartments come with irregular shapes and could render them quite tricky to decorate on the interior or to maximise whatever little space there is in an apartment. Small hotels would have an even tougher time trying to fit, say, an ensuite bathroom in…

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Paris, at its heart, is a walking city. It is not very big, approximately 105km² in size (for comparison, London is about 1500km²), and there are many lovely small streets and hidden gardens to explore by foot.

Now that the weather has been rather pleasant again after a very long winter, the amounts of time I’ve been spending walking across parks have also increased significantly. I’m also very lucky that Jardin du Luxembourg sits between home and work, so it’s not as if I’m taking massive detours!

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