Bonjour!
On Friday I went on my first holiday in FOUR years. Yep that’s right, 4 years! And only my second ever holiday overseas – I still have yet to go on a plane!
As you can imagine Thursday was pretty hectic, as I frantically tried to finish all of my work before leaving. I did not succeed, and at 2.30am on Friday morning I decided that we weren’t going anymore and retired to bed, feeling sad and majorly disappointed with myself. Two hours later I sat up in bed and declared “We’re GOING!” and jumped up to finish off the most important piece of work at light speed before packing, showering, and blow drying in record time. Joe’s lovely Dad came and picked up Scratch at 7am and dropped us at the train station – thank you Mike! 
And so we were on our way! At 7.20am we were at Leicester train station ready to board the train to London St Pancras.
I’m so glad we went in the end – I was exhausted and went to bed as soon as we arrived, and much of the first evening was spent asleep (after forcing down the most revolting bottle of wine from the hotel!) but we ended up having a great weekend!
I was amazed at how ‘French’ everything was – I wasn’t really expecting there to be accordion players in the street, women wearing berets or people cycling around on bicycles with baguettes in baskets, but there were!! I spent a lot of my time pointing at things exclaiming “that’s SO french!”
There was tons of beautiful architecture that we just came upon by accident when walking around! Every corner we turned revealed another beautiful building.
On our first full day we visited the Palais Des Beaux Arts; I especially wanted to see this beautiful piece by Monet, which I studied at college, and it was stunning in real life.
The museum itself was breathtaking too! We spent almost three hours in there.
On the second day we explored the old part of town, which was beautiful! There were lovely little cobbled streets filled with patisseries, little cafes and cute shops, and it was a gorgeous day. We visited an old nuns hospital, which had a beautiful and fragrant little herb garden, and we also made it our mission to find every church in the city! I think there were about 8 of them in total, and each one was stunning in it’s own way.
It was a lovely weekend, and so good to get away, at last! On the last night we drank pints of beer at ‘Le Napoleon’, and finished the night with a platter of cheese, bread and pate at the hotel bar, washed down with a Kir Royal for me and a Lagavulin for Joe.
Four days was more than enough though – whilst Lille is beautiful, we ran out of things to do quite quickly, so I ended up reading two books over the weekend! Luckily we found an Oxfam shop which had an ‘English Books’ section!
Scroll down to view a gallery of the rest of my holiday snaps!
Leah xx
