Cushion and Caking in Paris

Je suis a Paris! It was quite unplanned so have found myself enjoying a week in the beautiful city of Paris.
I'm here with Stuart for a music festival, Rock en Seine. It is the second time we've been to this festival. We booked it again at the last minute because the line up was too good to miss.

So having taken a break from Glasgow based cushion and cake-ing, I'm enjoying some French sunshine and culture. Aside from the festival, we've had plenty of time to take in lots of lovely things. I'm really familiar with Paris so we're not doing anything touristy really. 
Yesterday we had a great afternoon wandering round the French flea markets, Marche aux Puces in the north or the city.

The delights on offer here were superb. I can't say I saw many bargains however, in fact the antiques here were rather expensive, so I had to make do with a little wooden letter 'P' from a typographer's set. 

The patch where i got my 'P' was pretty cool and had little boxes of the most random things from coloured glass beads to metal name badges for bicycles. 

The furniture on sale at the Marche aux Puces was great and I found myself particularly attracted to metal garden furniture. Some of these you could see had been painted numerous times and had layers of paint flaking off. 

I quite like this look but I don't think I'd be able to resist stripping off the paint and giving it a nice new paint job. The furniture was a bit more 'shabby' than I'm personally comfortable with.

Resisting the tourist attractions of Paris leaves more time to discover real Paris, the Paris where people actually go about their daily lives.

However, away from the crowds, there's still lots of loveliness to see, beautiful colours everywhere.

OK so I said earlier we're not doing the touristy thing, but I wanted to go on a trip to Versailles and visit the Chateau. I have been to Versailles before but I was a teenager so it doesn't count ;-) I'm going back for a proper look at real decadence and to enjoy a bit of decadence of my own, I'm going to eat nice things and drink tea in the Laduree Tea Room and take pictures of how pretty it is. But for now, I'm off to the festival.