This year's Christmas party was slightly different to the previous years, in the sense that we'll be traveling a bit further to get there and back, in none other than Paris, France! It was announced sometime back at work that the Xmas party would be abroad, but hadn't revealed where. I knew well in advance since I had to apply for a Schengen visa to get there, which went through smoothly and actually managed to get a full year, first time that's happened!

So Friday morning was a real early start to the day and up to St. Pancras by 7am in time for the Eurostar across to Paris. After meeting everyone and collecting our tickets, we grabbed some coffee, boarded the train and headed off over to Gare du Nord, Paris.

We were greeted in Paris was somewhat shit weather (pardon my French... haha), so after dropping our bags we all hung around in they lobby trying to formulate a late. We weren't able to check into our rooms just yet, but were able to lock our bags up for the afternoon. It would've been good to be able to head out towards the Eiffel Tower and hang around by the gardens and park leading up to it, but that certainly wasn't going to happen in the weather we were having!

After making some sort of plan, a few of us decided to catch the subway to Forum des Halles, an underground shopping mall, to see if much was happening there, be it some sort of Christmas market or even just finding a place to eat. It turned out to just be a mall like every other, so we all headed up to street level in search of food. While walking around, we managed to lose most of the group, so landed up being just me, Andrew and Shannon. We headed first across to the Pompidou Centre, which is both an art gallery as well as a cultural hub in Paris and contains over 50,000 works and temporary exhibitions and attracts about 6 million visitors a year. Interestingly, the landmark building, designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, wears its skeleton on the outside, with tubes and structures colour-coded to denote their function - blue for air conditioning, green for plumbing, yellow for electricity and red for elevators. Previous works by the designers include, among others, the Lloyd's building and Millennium Dome by Rogers, and the Shard by Piano.

We continued our walk through the streets, crossing over the river Seine, passing by the Court of Appeal of Paris and then after some walking and trying to find somewhere to eat, we happened to come across Le Village Ronsard which looked OK for food, and I settled on the idea of a steak and beer for lunch. The Belgium beers we ordered, Grimbergen abbey ale, worked out to be €9.50 each, so definitely not a place you'd go for all night drinking! However the steak was fantastic, so a good choice on restaurant I'd say!

On the way back from the restaurant to the hotel we decided to walk instead of taking the metro and headed down past the Porte Saint-Martin monument and onto Rue Saint-Denis which is one of the oldest streets in Paris. Its route was first laid out in the 1st century by the Romans, and then extended to the north in the Middle Ages. It's basically the equivalent to London's Soho, with a mix of funky and seedy. Glad we decided against the metro, rather cool to see the streets of Paris instead of another metro tunnel.

Once back at the hotel, we were then able to properly check in, shower, get ready and head downstairs to wait for everyone and the buses. We had two buses for the lot of us which took us down to Port de la Bourdonnais, just near the Eiffel Tower where we waited to board our cruise. It was still raining and miserable, so waiting in that miserable weather for our boat wasn't the most fun. Just as we were boarding we found out it was the wrong boat we had been waiting at all this time, our boat was actually one further up! Good times... all that standing in the rain for nothing. Oh well. Once on the boat and we eventually set off, all was fine and the wine started to flow. We initially headed up the river for a couple of hours, turned around and headed back, finishing up where we had started a good few hours, and bottles of wine, later. We landed up having steak for dinner, so steak twice in a day not bad going I guess :) As they say, when in France...

Once back on land we were herded back onto the buses and returned to the hotel. There had been talk of going to a club, but think that idea feel away in favour of Au Baroudeur Patient, the local bar adjacent to the hotel. Most of us decided on that option, with a few others going just down the road to the Belgium pub, and then joined up with us later on. We landed up staying there until closing time at which point we all got kicked out, at it was then that everyone decided the best option was to head upstairs to the hotel and call it a night! It had certainly been quite the day, so I don't think any of us missed going to the club - certainly made the right decision!

On Saturday morning we all met up at breakfast which was (pleasantly) surprising to not be a continental breakfast but rather a full on fry up. Just what we all wanted and needed from the night before. After a feed we checked out and had some time to kill before the train back, we thought we'd head down past a market and then up to Montmartre. Unfortunately the only market was a fairly lame food market which was a bit disappointing. But from there myself, Shannon and Andrew took a walk over to Montmartre, which is a hill in the north of Paris, famous for it's artistic influence and it's view over the city of Paris. We knew we were a bit limited with time so didn't venture up to the top, but got an idea of the area... for next time I'm back in Paris.

Then it was back to the station, through passport control and into the waiting lounge before the train back to London, and then home. Was definitely good to visit Paris again, hopefully the next visit will be less than 6 years apart.

Saturday evening was just an easy chilled out night at home, didn't particularly feel like venturing out any further than I needed to. Sunday started off with breakfast down at Tried & True, followed by a bit of High Street shopping browsing and then up into Chelsea and Sloane Square.

After a bit of time around the shops there we decided on the Gallery Mess Restaurant inside the Saatchi Gallery for lunch, which is a contemporary, minimalist all-day cafe in a narrow, vaulted space where the only bits of colour come from the wall art exhibited by young artists. A really good lunch, more like fine dining I guess, but still tasty. As Uns says, there's definitely a game of people watching in there and guessing whether that's the guy's wife or daughter sitting with him. Good old Chelsea!