Adventures in Paris: Part Un (Arty Graffiti + French Loo Stories)

Hello Everyone!

I hope you are all doing well, and to those of you who are off to London Fashion Week, I am very jealous, but have a lovely time! As you all probably know if you've read my last couple posts, I recently went to Paris for a week with my school, and had the most amazing time ever, it was pretty phenomenal. I thought I'd show you some pictures of my time there and talk you over the days we had there. I'd just like to say a massive thankyou to Leah who took these pictures with her fab camera, and since she and beti are coming with me to London this Summer as my birthday prezzie, I'm pretty sure you'll get some fab pictures then too! But anyway, I yack too much when I'm excited to show you things, so enjoy some gorgeous pictures of Paris in Winter. (Sorry in advance for this post being photo heavy, but I hope you like it)

One night we went up on the tour montmartre which is an office building that uses different levels for different things, It's kind of like the Shard that we have in London, but this one is all black, and stands out a lot amongst the classic french buildings that you see later on in this post. I really liked seeing Paris at night because when you see romantic movies that are set in Paris there is ALWAYS a night scene, and I just thought it was a cheesy cliche at first, but when I actually saw the city at night, I realised that the hype was worth it. I'm a sucker for views, and this was definitely one I will always remember!

We were up there till about 9:00pm, and every night on the dot, the eiffel tower goes crazy with lights, it looks like it's a huge christmas tree. It also has a huge beacon at the top that circles the tower as if it's a lighthouse looking for lost souls (someone told me that whilst I was there so I thought I'd put it in because it's totally a good quote). Everywhere lights up, and it's just so gorgeous, the parisians are obviously keen on their lighting up. We went for a night tour on the bus around some of the sights and they were all lit up, I don't think a lot of people were focusing on it, but for me, I found it so special, I definitely ticked something off my bucket list that night! 

We went to centre pompidou one day and it was full of all sorts of cute little shops where you could buy cards, and paintings, anything that would be a sort of 'souvenir'. It also had some mainstream shops like Starbucks and Vans, but we went there really early in the morning so most of the shops were either closed or not selling certain stock yet. Me and my friend Harad took this opportunity to look around some of the local pharmacies (which we actually did for the whole holiday until we found the best offers on bioderma) and we found a lot of french brands, and surprisingly, I didn't know french people were so keen on hand cream?! It was everywhere we looked! Also, lip balms too, it's obvious my french girls love their hydration! There was a lot of great graffiti and my lovely friend Leah made sure she photographed some, I particularly love the man on the side of the building, he's tres funky in my eyes.

there was an art exhibit inside the Centre Pompidou but I didn't go inside since I was more into the art outside, the more urban side of it. We also made sure we stopped by the starbucks for a coffee (I had a vanilla latte I think, Harad ordered so god knows what I drank) I really liked all the graffiti, but there were loads of weird pick pockets who made me feel totally uncomfortable, so I stayed away from that bit haha.

I thought I'd put this picture up because I think the fact that all the french buildings and people in hats behind me is pretty cool, and plus I really liked my outfit that day, I felt throughout the trip I fit in with the parisian fashion because basically all I wore was block colours and blue. I also had a beanie which everyone was very obsessed with (see bottom left near coffee mug because I'm so indie I had to get the cup in). I plaited my hair every night so my hair would have some sort of volume/niceness whilst the wind was battling through it. I don't really know what to say apart from, hat hair.

Also, one of the days we were there our teachers took us shopping on the champs elysees. The champs elysees is basically the times square of France, it's this huge stretch of shops that leads you up to the Arc de triomphe, it takes about fifteen minutes plus the traffic to walk up to it though, and me and my friends were more keen to check out the shops than to go see the Arc since we'd already seen it up close by driving around it. 

We went to almost all of the pharmacies and the girly shops, whilst the boys went into the St. Germain shop, to be honest I would've liked to go in but I found everything very big and scary there, so I stayed away. There was also an Abercrombie and Fitch shop where all the girls were lining up so they could take pictures with  the models, and boys scare me anyway let alone when they are as pretty as the Abercrombie models are, so timid little Anna diverted everyone so she could avoid taking pictures. We went into the disney store which had a gorgeous little Eiffel tower on the top of one of their displays, and Leah made sure she got it on camera. We went into about two Disney stores in total, and I was loving them until the new Disney Channel tv shows came on in the background, I hated them so much I had to get out of there, they were all very friendly though, and they probably thought we were really weird because a bunch of 14/15/16 year olds were running around the store, but oh well they're french we're never gonna see them again *crosses her fingers*...

After our day of shopping we were really bursting to go the loo, and with about fifteen minutes until we had to meet up with everyone so we ran into every single mall looking for one and we couldn't find any, so then we ran into the local Haagen Daazs and bought a pain au chocolat so they wouldn't think we were just using them for the toilets (even though we were) and then all was going well until a random man just walked into the toilets. Apparently it's normal to have Unisex public bathrooms in France? I'm not used to men coming into the loos but yeah.. I suppose if it's ok with Paris it's ok with me. 

This is the first part of the post, and tomorrow I'll talk about the sightseeing and less of the shopping haha. 

P.S my friends Hannah and Beti were very keen to get their names in on my blog. So.. Hannah likes eggs, and Beti is just beti, there you go I tried. Thanks Guys. X