London Calling

Joyeux Noel

Just another post from your friendly multi-lingual bloggers...

Last Thursday we treated ourselves during this holiday season by taking Thursday off and Eurostarring it down to Lille. We'd heard that it had the best Christmas market in Europe, how can you pass that up?

We arrived in Lille at 10:30 after a lovely first class train ride - the Hennigans ride in style! Skies were overcast but we were undettered as the Christmas spirit runneth over. After a wander around to orient ourselves we went straight for the big obvious central Christmas market...and wandered...and wandered...and wandered. Now Lille ain't a big place so it was a case of covering the same ground repeatedly looking in vain for the "best Christmas market in Europe". Finally we found it! All 30 stalls of it. Needless to say this did not speak well for the rest of Europe's Christmas markets. Despite the underwhelming nature of the market we enjoyed the short time we spent in it. The mulled wine was delicious (according to the K-dawg), the raclette was a nice surprise and well worth it, and the rest of the swag stalls provided some amusing sights - especially the Canadian stalls selling Montreal Canadiens jerseys, red flannel shirts and maple syrup.

Mercifully Lille is a pretty little city of 220,000 people. The Citadelle, which the Pentagon is based on, is surrounded by a huge park and a lovely place to wander around for a while. We weren't able to go into the actual grounds as there are still over 1,000 soldiers based there, rumour is they haven't come out since 1943 (ha! - that one never gets old). We were able to wander into the soldier's entrance and get a nice picture of the ornate main gate.

On our way back into the heart of the city we passed the Lille zoo and spent about 30 minutes watching the monkeys from a hill overlooking their pen. Funny little creatures and oh so cute.

We spent the next several hours checking out all that Lille had to offer. The neat shops and restaurants of the cobbled and winding roads of the Old Town, a look into the past at the Hospice Comtessa, the Vielle Bourse (though there were no chess matches going on), and who could miss the biggest book store in continental Europe.

We finished up our trip with a ride on the Ferris Wheel set-up specially for the Christmas season, it provided lovely views over Lille at night - although it did take a little while to choke down the nervousness as the thing creaked all the way round.

So the reco is - go to Lille, but don't worry about hitting the "best Christmas market in Europe".

posted by Brian and Kirsten Hennigan @ Tuesday, December 23, 2008