Sex & Paris City

“Is 8am too early for champagne?”

“It’s never too early for champagne…”

This exchange basically sets the tone for the Parisian trip that I won from a stylist challenge via eBay Fashion Brands. With my publicist and best friend Karena Sedgwick riding the Eurostar with me, we were both so excited arriving at the Gard de Nord station that we nearly wet ourselves.
Luckily, being a bit tipsy, we didn’t.  Having the whole trip booked and paid for by eBay, we eagerly grabbed a cab and headed to Mama Shelter, the hip and trendy Parisian hotel with a huge following and wicked reputation.

I cannot begin to describe how amazing Mama is.  It is like stepping into a world created by Tim Burton and Rankin…a collaboration of the weird, bizarre and wonderful.  The lifts have pink tinted glass and print writing either side, the hallways have large mirrors that get written on with daily updates like the weather, or who is djing downstairs.  The rooms are immense – black carpets covered in white print with famous lines or witty anecdotes, the light fixtures were covered with masks that you could remove and wear (which we obviously did as soon as we shut the room door) and of course the main fun came from the Apple Mac TV on the wall, which allowed us to watch free movies, DVDS, WiFi and take photos in the room with the Mama Shelter Cam.  Such as this:

Of course, it wasn’t until later we realised all the pics taken in the room are then streamed to the abundance of TVs downstairs in the bar, epic fail!  Some poor soul would be eating their dinner and having to stare at our drunken boat races.

Anyway, after unpacking, we went straight to the Notre Dame and had lunch outside this enormous beautiful building. Coffee hopping became the theme of the days, heading from one cafe to another to take in the sights and just chill the fuck out really. Working out the metro wasn’t too bad, although we would wander in a hungover state and miss about 20 metro stations before we managed to actually get on the train. Karena had yet to experience the true delights of Paris, so I made sure we crammed in Notre Dame on the Friday, Champs Elysee on the Saturday (shopping along the Champs on my actual birthday was like a dream come true!) and finally Eiffel Tower on the Sunday, just as the cherry on our French cake.

Aside from being annoying tourists during the day, the evenings were the most fun of all. With a dinner at the Mama pizzeria planned Friday and then Mama restaurant Saturday, we were well fed and well looked after. The pizzas were amazing and quite literally double the size of our heads…

…which is lucky because we needed to soak up the copious champagne we’d already been drinking.  I have never drunk so much champagne in my whole life.  Not that I’m complaining, except by Saturday it did get to a point where we couldn’t work out if we were hungover or still drunk.  Considering we popped open more champs at 11am on Saturday to celebrate my birthday morning, I can bet we were still drunk.

Saturday night we had steak at the Mama restaurant and I had literally died and gone to heaven.  It was the best steak I’ve ever had, without fail.  I can’t even discuss how awesome the staff are at Mama, every single employee there works together to deliver the ultimate experience.  It was faultless. And can I just say, the person making the cocktails needs a medal because it was the best set of cosmopolitans I’ve had in a long time. We can’t express how amazing the whole trip was and I would recommend Mama Shelter to anyone who wants to visit Paris in style.  Perfection. Also, I need to send a big thank you to eBay Fashion Brands and Ashley who organised the whole thing for us.  Perfect way to spend my 25th birthday!

Here are some of our annoying tourist snaps…

…and here our a few of the evening drunken shenanigans!!

We love you, Mama Shelter