Friday 3rd September

On Friday we decided to hit the Left Bank. We headed first for the Racing Rugby Boutique, which is very impressive for a club shop. Quite a location too, on the tree-lined Boulevard Saint-Germain. We then took a stroll across the river towards the Place Vendome, a part of town I hadn’t seen before. I felt a bit out of place munching on my pain au chocolat amongst the Ritz and the Cartier, Bvlgari, and Swarovski shops.

I then had to go to the Alliance Francaise, where my French classes begin on Monday, in order to take a test to determine which class I should be put in. The woman marked in right in front of me. She peered at me above her glasses and said, “You have quite an imagination”, referring to the passage about ‘Last Weekend’ I wrote. While I was doing this Fino went and read the paper in a cafe. However, the owner of this place threw him out after he bought just a coke!

We also found the creperie where the school’s Paris trip spent the evening in February when we won the cup. Fino recalled the story where they all raised the roof in this little creperie when they heard the news.

I had training that evening just like the night before. However, none of the mini-buses that would take us across town would start! We all set off for home, some of us happier about the free evening than others. No sooner had we left the training ground for home did one of these ‘others’, a particularly keen lad, decide that we would make the journey by train. Our hearts sank, an odd attitude you might think. But this was to be an epic journey for our destination is not easily accessible. In stifling evening mugginess we took the blue line then changed onto the purple line then changed onto some line which, by this point, I didn’t even have the energy to notice. I just followed the others as they galloped through each connecting station. We turned up 2 minutes into training, I feeling a little worse for wear.

Got home quite late, not late enough to forgo a couple of steak haches and gnocchi though. And also to revel in France’s 1-0 loss to Belarus.

Looking forward to the second and final warm-up match on Sunday – today, actually. It’s against Massy which is another Paris suburb, just up the road from me and where my 197 bus ends up. We’ll see how it goes.