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ooooh la la!
Oooh La La!
On Friday we visited the famous Galleries Lafayette. Probably the first department store ever invented. Did you know the French invented the department store? It totally figures. Galleries Lafayette is a department store like no other. There is a whole floor dedicated to lingerie. Another to swim wear and on and on and on and on. I have never seen so many pretty things to buy all in one spot before. If money is the root of all evil then this is definitely a very broad path to destruction. If my credit card had been working I would have probably bankrupted myself. As it is I bought nearly $200 in bras and panties!!! I am on “holiday” as they say and I will never ever be able to buy such pretty things again. Red, peach, turquoise… I now have beautiful bits to show under my clothes on purpose!
We also had the privilege of attending a private fashion show. Not a real fashion show but a special one in English especially for tourists like us. A special thanks to blueberry moon for letting us in on this little secret before we even got here. All you have to do is email them and reserve your space and they will let you in a secret side entrance to a small room where real live breathing models sashay up and down the center of the room to vivacious music. I filmed a bunch of clips here (5meg quicktime) if you want to see more. I apologize for putting it to the most annoying song ever but I’m away from home and my dance music collection is pretty scraggly.
I’ve always wondered how the models keep on those clothes that look like they are just about to fall off in the pictures. Guess what, they don’t. Their clothes do fall right off and oooh la la you get to see a bit of France you never saw before. The girl in the long white gown actually had trouble keeping her dress on altogether. If she wasn’t showing something in the front, you could see her thong in the back. I think the dress was just a little too big for her. They put this fashion show every Friday so maybe it’s not so much of a priority to have things fitting exactly. It was fun for a non-sophisticate like me. My mom and I definitely got a kick out of it and sitting in a room with a specially reserved seat was very nice after feeling a bit crowded with the throngs of holiday shoppers in the main store.
Apparently there has been a bank holiday and a lot of people took Friday off to make it a long weekend. Every where we go we have found ourselves in the thick of it. While I don’t like crowds that much, the holiday does make things more festive. Small bands play music in squares, flags flap in the wind and this morning some air planes flew over leaving trails of patriotic smoke in red and blue and white behind them. May is a very big month in Paris!
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Letting Out My Inner French Girl
Letting Out My Inner French Girl
After our shopping extravaganza, we headed home with our tails between our legs. We went back to our hotel and laid out all our loot on our beds. Phew! There’s a lot of stuff. Some people are getting some pretty sweet gifts from Paris. Let me tell you. (Felix, if you’re reading this… I hooked you UP with some sexy lingerie.) The lingerie here goes on for miles and miles! I have never seen so many sexy things all in one place.
I also bought myself a few things from the cheaper shops on the street. They seem to be like those cheap import stores we have at home where you can buy an out of style dress for $15 except that it’s Paris and all the brands are foreign to me so nothing is out of style to me. The quality isn’t as nice as what’s in the Galleries Lafayette but it’s still fun.
I bought a flouncy brown skirt with tulle under it and a floppy bright orange sweater that hangs all funny at the bottom. I should have bought a more subdued color but the orange looked so much better on me than the olive green. Toby’s going to have a cow. He’s always telling me that a “classy lady” doesn’t stand out. I guess I’ve never really been all that “classy” because I love to stand out. I love red and orange and pink and if I can wear them all together it makes me even happier. So I bought a thin sweater in bright pink. (because nothing goes better with a bright orange than bright pink!) To top it all off I bought some new boots. NEW BOOTS! They weren’t cheap though. They are probably what alerted my credit card company to shut me down in the first place. But they are perfect. I do need to replace my spy boots afterall. Except they aren’t very spy like. They are more like school marm boots. But they are flat and I can duck and run and be very spy like in them.
I can also flounce in them. When in Paris dress as the Parisians right? So I put all my new Paris clothes on at once and flounced over to the Luxembourg Gardens. Maybe I shouldn’t have worn everything all at once because I didn’t really blend in at all. Maybe it was the orange. I don’t know. You can take the girl out of the trailer park but you can’t take the trailer park out of the girl. C’est la vie!
What is great about our new neighborhood is that it is very very close to the Luxembourg Gardins or “Jardin du Luxembourg” (The “x” is pronounced as an “s”. I’d spell the whole thing out phonetically if I could remember, but it’s very tricky for my tongue and I’ve lost it already.) The gardens are beautiful. There are so many passage ways, tree lined paths and little places to sit. Everywhere you look there are public chairs to sit on. Gaze at the lake, gather in the shade, line up along a path going no where… it’s all good! There is so much leisure time spent wisely here. I wonder if French people don’t watch television. Everyone seems to be out and about even when it’s a bit cold. I hear on a sunny day you can catch a puppet show in these gardens as well as sail a toy sail boat. If the sun comes up we plan on stopping there again.
