For the next couple of months Egg But will be switching back to a kind of foody travel blog as Andy and I have finally set off on the big tip we have been planning for so long. We’ve been on the road now for 13 days and are currently in a beautiful snowy St Petersburg meaning stage one of ‘Big Trip’ is complete, so it’s definitely time for a post before we head off on the 86 hour train ride from Moscow to Irkutsk on the Trans-Siberian.

We’ve really been having a great time, and so much has happened though I’m not sure where to start. I guess it’s best to just start from where we began, in Paris and some pretty exciting news.

We spent the first couple of days in Paris with our friend Bruna wandering around aimlessly and drinking incredibly expensive beer. With an exchange rate of practically 1 to 1 the average price of a drink was about £6! And that was just for a half! Ouch. This was more than made up for though with the amazing magical atmosphere of Paris at Christmas. The Champs-Elysees had a Christmas market running the length of it and the trees that line the road were lit with beautiful white lights that seemed to drip down through the trees.

We went to quite a nice Alerian Restaurant, Le Bec Fin which I’d definitely recommend. We had tagines which were fairly simple, but very tasty and quite reasonable. We’d gone early, but by the time we left it was pretty full, mostly locals too and lots of the tables had been reserved, so I’d definitely book if you’re thinking about going.

One thing I love bout Paris is the variety and quality of food shops. Practically every other shop was either boulangerie, patisserie or some kind of amazing delicatessen. Food is clearly so much more a part of their culture. You can probably find more amazing food shops on one street in Paris than you could in the whole of some towns in the UK. So jealous.

We said goodbye to Bruna on the second night and packed up our bags and set off, I thought, to the hostel we’d be staying in for the next couple of nights. I began to get a little confused as we seemed to be heading in completely the wrong direction and when Andy told me the place was just round the corner we were surrounded by lots of very impressive grand buildings. Then we were stood in the square in front of the Pantheon and he told me to put my bags down… something was definitely going on… Andy proposed and I said Yes! As you can imagine I was pretty happy and spent the next ten minutes jumping up and down around the square. So rather than book us into a hostel Andy had actually booked us into Hotel des Grand Hommes which was an amazing surprise. The hotel was beautiful, and we had a lovely evening. Big grin.

The area around the Pantheon was actually the best we found for good bars, many of which also did cheap tapas type snacks and there were quite a few decent restaurants too. I’m on a bit of a soup mission on this trip, trying to sample as many different types, if possible the most typical of the area so while we were there I had my first bowl, which obviously had to be onion soup.

Without a doubt it was the most amazing onion soup I’ve ever had. It came topped with some kind of melted cheese, possibly gruyere also had lovely chunky croutons in it. Mmm mmm mmm. So tasty. It’s going straight on the menu of my soup shop that I’m going to open when I have a win on the bingo.

So that was Paris. Amazing, romantic and lots of great food. Yep definitely Paris.

For New Years we went to Berlin with our friends John and Viv. We’d met them in Paris and then got an 8 hour train across to Berlin. The train journey was great. Really relaxing. We’d packed ourselves a lovely picnic with celebratory Champagne and cheese from Fromagerie du Pantheon and had a great time just drinking, chatting and playing dominoes.

For the count-down we went to the Brandeburg gate, which was ok, but a bit manic. With only one way in and huge crowds of people, a terrible sound system and really not very much going on apart from being shoved around in the crowd. Actually yeah I hated it. Don’t go. Berlin in general was fun though. The streets were full of people throwing fireworks around, which after having all the safety stuff drilled into us so much was pretty scary at first, but we soon got used to ducking out of the way and enjoyed the madness of watching people light fireworks and hold them in their hands spraying sparks into the streets. Some of the bombs people were letting off were HUGE. We saw this one in the on the pavement, glad we weren’t around when this went off!

On New Years Day we went to meet my friends Rob and Pauline that I know form art college who now live over in Berlin. It was really great to see them again, we spent a lovely afternoon/evening with them including visiting some of their favourite Berlin bars. I had my second lot of soup at Strand-bad Mitte , this time traditional German potato soup, which is very different to our normal leek and potato, it was quite thin, but very tasty. I think it’s more normal to have it with some kind of sausage pieces floating around in it, but it was very good without. Recipe please Pauline!

I’ll leave it it that for now, hopefully I should get chance to post a bit more of a catch up before we leave tomorrow. There’s still 3 more countries for me to write about. Can’t quite believe we’ve been to 5 different places already! And still a long way to go. Yay!