The Paris Incident

At the sister’s recent nuptials The Paris Incident came up again and a number of people asked what happened. As funny as the incident was in retrospect telling the same story numerous times got old kind of quickly so for those who haven’t heard it. Here is the tale in its gory detail.

Note - No pigeons, French or otherwise, were harmed in the course of this post.

Paris was great but not without incident, it’s me after all and so no trip is drama free. We were in Paris for 2 days and so we went to the Eiffel tower on day one via a long walk from near the station down to Notre-dame then along the Seine. Very nice and the weather was beautiful. The queues were long (over an hour) so we just took some photos from the bottom but then we were accosted by beggars where upon, and quite randomly, G’s drink was stolen by a gypsy. I’m not making this up.

The next day we went to the Louvre which was fantastic, I really enjoyed it and we had an amazing meal in the Louvre Grand. We then (having walked to the Louvre via a different route) headed back to the hotel via the Seine intending to have dinner at one of the brasseries on the way.

Fate it seems had other ideas.

As we crossed the road near Rue St Martins a Pigeon, and there’s no nice way to put this, shat on me, another more accurate way to say it would be to say it shat all over me - on my head, t-shirt, chin, arm - I’m not kidding it was like I was aerially bombarded by every pigeon in Paris.

But wait there’s more…

Having cleaned up utilising the small number of tissues we had and then having to use my T-shirt to finish the job we were still very near the Seine and quite a way from the hotel. I had to walk - topless - through Paris in broad daylight. To make matters worse or in retrospect funnier our hotel was located in the centre of the Parisian gay district, G swears I got “checked out” a couple of times but I suspect she’s just trying to make me feel better.

So that was Paris. I may go back some day. Honest.