Drinking in the City of the Olympics
After I left school, I went to Paris and for the first time, I was left largely to my own devices. I exaggerated my age and found small amounts of work in a language school; and in the evening, I went to the cheapest restaurants I could find, often in the company of my fellow teachers.
Many of these were the so-called ‘bouillons,’ or soup kitchens, where a starter cost a franc (10p) and a main-course maybe three times as much. These ‘bouillons’ have been revived in recent years. They are still cheap, but nothing like as cheap as they were then.
