Thinking Man, you never looked so handsome.

On a blogging and email hiatus for a bit while I show my ma around the best cities in the whole world.  And YES, I am allowed to make such definitive statements despite having seen only about O.O1% of the world's cities.  Why?  Because this is a blogtatorship!  

And also, how could these cities NOT be some of the best?  Consider the evidence:

Cats in Paris!  And some nice buildings and sights and food.  And cats!!!  Handsome French ones with a vague resemblance to a certain phenomenal cat I know in Canada.

Climbed up Sacré Coeur in Montmartre with mom, which I've done a few times before with various combinations of important people, though never with someone quite so important as my mom, nor quite so willing to climb that brutal winding staircase for a thousand breathless minutes to get up there (after jumping the turnstile at the bottom - God will smote us!).  The view is fantastic, and the graffiti is almost as rewarding.  Thousands of declarations of love painted on with white-out, and several hundred prayers scrawled over the stone, mostly begging the Lord to spare innocent souls from the brutality of the French finishing exams at the end of high school.  

Another point of evidence: endless liquid dinners in Lille with two of my most favouritest men in the world.  Okay, maybe Lille wouldn't make an objective list of the World's Best Cities, but to me, personally?  It's a tie for Montreal.  

Baby ducklings in Bruges!  (Yes, it's Belgium, but my love for France is so huge that it dribbled a little over the borders...)

The photo below is taken from inside the Close at Bruges, where we were shushed several times by earnest-looking nuns.  Just as we were leaving, we noticed a joyful and well-hydrated wedding party push their way in.  The things nuns have to deal with these days!

 

All of this is just a TINY taste.  So far we've done Paris, Bruges, Bologne-sur-Mer (northern beaches, with England like a hazy rope of licorice on the horizon), and Lille.  Tomorrow I'm taking her to ground zero of this whole love affair: ROUEN.  Tingly fingers just thinking of it.