Paris is almost 300km virtually directly south of Bruges, which is pretty-much the route that the train takes.
I arrived in Paris at just after 2pm and made my way to the accommodation: a studio apartment near the Louvre and the Notre Dame Cathedral - not too shabby at all.
The name "Paris" is derived from its early inhabitants, the Celtic tribe known as the Parisii, which is believed to come from the Celtic Gallic word "parisio" meaning "the working people", or "the craftsmen" . During the Roman era (1st to 4th century CE), the city was called Lutetia (more fully, Lutetia Parisiorum, "Lutetia of the Parisii"), but during the reign of Julian the Apostate (360–3), the city was renamed Paris.
Paris has many nicknames, like "The City of Love", but perhaps its most famous is "La Ville-Lumière" ("The City of Light"), a name it owes first to its fame as a centre of education and ideas during the Age of Enlightenment . The sobriquet's "light" took on a more literal sense when Paris became one of the first European cities to adopt gas street lighting : in 1817 the Passage des Panoramas was Paris' first gas-lit thoroughfare.
While I had to take 3 trains to get here today, Kim had 3 planes - from Brisbane to Singapore, from Singapore to Dubai, and finally from Dubai to Paris. Her flight arrived at just after 8pm, and I was at the airport in time to meet her as she came through immigration - how wonderful and lovely to finally see her again (other than through Skype on the computer).
Our activities over the next few days will be largely weather-dependent, but I'm sure we'll make the best of whatever comes our way.
We have about 3 weeks together. We are spending 3 days in Paris, then taking the Eurostar train under the English Channel directly to London where we have another 3 days before heading back west to Marshfield (just outside Bath) where we are staying with Craig and Jenny again while attending the Universal Medicine retreat at nearby Frome. We then have 10 days to tour the UK by car (which will be nice after all of the trains) before Kim departs from Glasgow; after that, I have nine more days to make it back to London from where I head home, arriving back in early June.