Match day

Match day, but with kick-off not until 9.00 pm we had plenty of time to spend enjoying Paris and each other's company. So we started with a leisurely breakfast in the Bar du Marché, where Chris and I had been several times on our September visit. As it was a much brighter day, although cold, we decided on a walk across to the Right Bank and some explorations around the Rue de Rivoli.

Although some of our route retraced the walk Chris and I had done in September, the scenes looked very different now. As then, we started by crossing the river via the Pont Des Arts, which offers possibly my favourite view in Paris (above).

On the far side of the bridge we strolled through the courtyard of the Louvre but didn’t linger. We then followed the Rue de Rivoli to number 59 where a couple of us had read that an interesting collection of artists’ studios were housed in an authorised squat. We loved the bright exterior but the building itself was closed.

A helpful local overhead our conversation and told us it would open in ten minutes, at midday. But it was too cold to stand around, so we decided to go for a coffee in one of the side streets.

We took our time over the drinks, enjoying the relative warmth of the café and lots of conversation. By the time we’d finished drinking and chatting we’d managed to change our plans! So instead of retracing our steps we wandered through the area around Les Halles, taking a few photos of course.

We were in search of the various arcades, collectively called Passages, in this part of the city. We found one, the Galerie de Vivienne, looking very festive. There was an attractive teashop and patisserie serving light lunches, so we stopped there and enjoyed excellent truffled croques monsieur.

We searched out another passage, not nearly so attractive or interesting, then decided it was time to focus on the main purpose of our trip, the football. So we walked to the nearest Metro via the Place des Victoires with its statue of Louis XIV, dressed as a Roman emperor.

Only two out of the six of us had tickets for the match! Chris and I, along with our friends Peter and Joanne, needed to settle on somewhere else to watch the game. So we all took the Metro to the official fan zone not far from the stadium, to check it out. Unsurprisingly it was heaving and noisy, but we managed to find a corner in which to enjoy our beers, soak up the atmosphere and join in with a few songs!

But when it was time for a second round we discovered that bar had, temporarily, run dry. The two with match tickets, Pete and Barry, decided they should make a move and get to the stadium early. Meanwhile the rest of us had concluded we would rather watch the match in a more central and calmer bar! We took the Metro back to Odéon and found a great spot in the Pub Saint Germain where we had met for drinks yesterday. We had a bite to eat before kick-off, and were close to the bar for buying drinks and to a good TV screen.

Newcastle scored after 25 minutes and we all cheered of course. Luckily the PSG fans on the other side of the room didn't take offence. In the second half they had all the pressure, but we soaked it up brilliantly until eight minutes into added time when the referee (wrongly in our view!) awarded a penalty from which they scored. While 1-1 was perhaps a fair result given the performances, it felt like a defeat in some ways. But we are never down for long so rounded off the evening with one last beer before heading back to the hotel and to bed.