Reims is very nice. A cracking gothic cathedral, lots of champagne, some beautiful streets and squares and some interesting public art.

I spent a few hours hidden in a cinema watching the latest Star Wars in a gorgeous old building which boasted of a screen of 14m, and must have had a ceiling height of 20m, topped off in an old style wreaths-and-angels type carvings. The huge room had about 20 of us in there for the 17h30 showing, and boy, was the film terrible.

After that, I wandered a bit trying to find the big champagne houses to save myself time in the morning, took a few snaps, and then settled on Les 3 Brasseurs for some dinner. They had a special menu of 2 flammekueches (one savoury and one sweet) and I tried to drink my way through as many of their home brewed beers as possible.

I’d settled on a table just inside the brasserie because it was getting a bit cold to spend the night on the terrace, and I hadn’t been there an hour when the skies opened and it tipped it down. I had a very amusing half an hour watching totally unprepared thin young pretty French people run around and duck for cover, then a bit later watched the staff go outside to recover the wreckage from the tables. It really did rain pretty damn hard: ashtrays were full to brimming and even pint glasses were half full.