Two 'Petits' Weekends

So I’m sitting here about to watch Danse avec les Stars – French equivalent of Strictly, and though it was about time I did some blog writing! At the moment it’s showing the meteo (weather) and how cold it is going to be – meh!

Weekend Number One - Le Petit Prince

Nearly a month ago I decided to actually go to one of those things you see on posters whilst speed walking through the underground passages of the metro:

Free fireworks at La Grande Arche at La Defence,  the business district of Paris, all set to the story of Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry published in 1943. The story is about a little prince who lives on a little planet and decides to travel the universe. On his travels he meets different adults learning something from each of them, and you’ll have to read it if you want to know anymore :-)

It was pretty busy! I watched it from the ‘back’ of the arch. The idea was to watch it from the large Parade in front with the fireworks going off behind, but behind there was a good view and not so many people. There were also projections onto the arch, illustrating the story. I think the fireworks put the UK to shame, this was a free event, just to tell the story of Le Petit Prince, and the fireworks were so much better than the UK’s New Years ‘show’! 

The downside was getting home, obviously there was quite a lot of security being the business district and obviously having a large number of explosive fireworks nearby, so it took quite a while for them to reopen the metro afterwards, resulting in me wandering around aimlessly for about half an hour. But all in all, a great evening.

Weekend Number Two - Le Petit Nicolas

My second kid-related thing is slightly less kid-related and happened today. My plan was to go to the Salon du Chocolat, a chocolate exhibition held every year at the large exhibition centre at Porte de Versailles, but I went along pretty late and it was paaaacked so decided to go to the exhibition on at Hotel de Ville instead. This one was an exhibition of drawings by Sempé, a cartoonist also known for his illustrations in a children’s series called Le Petit Nicolas.

Sempé said that the Petit Nicolas series 'c'est d'abord une histoire d'amité' - it's primarily a story about friendship. And I found it quite funny that a lot of the pictures are to do with small kids smoking behind a fence! 

And my interesting fact that I found out about Sempé was that he originally signed his work ‘DRO’ because he didn’t think it was good enough, and he chose ‘DRO’ because it sounded like ‘to draw’ in English!