Home from home....

We went to Lille in France last weekend. We'd planned it some time ago as the Telegraph newspaper* was doing an offer in conjunction with Eurostar for 2 return tickets for £90. We'd been on the Eurostar once before (to Paris) on an extension to our honeymoon and a very good service it is too. We chose Lille as we'd heard good things about it (historic town, good restaurants and bars, good shopping, cosmopolitan etc etc). We didn't know about the students.

Lille, as I found out from the brochure on the hotel reception desk, has a population of 220,000. It has universities and a student population of 100,000! We might as well have stayed at home. Particularly as the hotel was rubbish - overheated, on a noisy main road and the staff were the most miserable bunch of people I have ever seen outside of Belgium (possibly because we were close to Belgium).

On the plus side, we did have a wonderful seafood dinner at L'Ecume des Mers, a real old-school restaurant who were more than happy to accommodate Archie and let him plaster their walls and furniture with crab mousse and turbot flakes. Actually, he behaved like an absolute star and loved all the food which came his way. Unfortunately, dinner ran over his bedtime and he got a bit grumpy towards the end of the meal. Phil was holding him on his lap when dessert arrived and, as we were talking, we didn't notice anything amiss until we heard our neighboring diners laughing. We looked at them and then at Archie, who having plunged his hand up to his wrist in Tiramisu, was greedily sucking it off his fingers! So much for the ban on sugar until he gets a bit older. We all paid for it later, sitting up with a baby with a sore tummy at 3am while every moped in Lille screamed up and down outside our hotel.
The cafes in Lille were also nice and had a good selection of Belgian beers on offer. I dont think there has ever been a European trip where I haven't got a picture of Phil with a huge beer in front of him so here's some from this trip, along with some other photos of the weekend. This weekend it's Manchester, where we'll be meeting up with family and old friends who have also had offspring since we last saw them. I'm hoping it will be more of a rest than last weekend!










*Dear reader, please note that I have not recently come over all Thatcherite, although that would make Phil very happy indeed. The Telegraph was purchased solely to collect the vouchers for the offer.