The Paris Saga: Day III

Day three was our bike tour of Versailles. In short, it was really fun, but really cold, and we only had a few near-fatalities.

We woke up at 6:30, ate breakfast at 7:15, and took the subway to "Fat Tire Bike Tours". This subway line actually goes above ground, and we saw the entire Eiffel Tower for the first time as we crossed a bridge over the river. We were walled in by buildings, and then all of a sudden we were over water and there it was. Such a surprise, because honestly, I didn't even realize which direction we were going, and it hadn't occured to me that we'd be passing over the Seine.

Anyway, we'd given ourselves plenty of time to get to the tour on time, since we had no idea how long it would take, and we ended up getting there about a half-hour too early (the bike shop wasn't even open yet), so we walked around this little neighborhood. It was so cute - I don't even know the name of it, but the subway stop was called "Dupleix" so maybe that's it? Anyway, the streets were cobblestone, and all of the old, tall buildings faced this adorable little park at the center. And there was a huge church on one side. I'm mad at myself for not taking any pictures of it! Anyway, it was freezing, so we went inside the church and read the bulletin boards for a while before heading back to the shop. We were only inside the church for about 15 minutes, but just during that time, the entire neighborhood had woken up, and the little streets were full of mothers walking their kids to school. There's something so cute about little kids speaking French. Like, when we were in the subway, I overhead a little boy screaming, "arrete! arrete!!" at his younger sister, and in English, I would have considered him a brat, but in French, it was the cutest thing ever.

The shop was open when we got there, but we were still early and only the second and third people to arrive. A crazy Eastern-Canadian lady named Mary was raring to go in her bright yellow coat. Remember this face, because you'll need to recall it later for a story or two.



I paid a euro for ten minutes of internet, and by the time I was finished, the entire group had gathered, we were introduced to our tour guide "Graham" (I thought it was "Grant" for the first few hours...he was this 25 year old student from Dallas that wouldn't put a French inflection on a word to save his life. For example, he kept calling the Seine, the "Sane", Marie-Antoinette "Mary-Antoinette", etc) ... and we were off. My hands were frozen solid within the first five minutes. And they were a HARROWING five minutes, because we had to ride our bikes through the busy streets of Paris to a train station. It took at least two years off my life. And then, once we were at the train station, we had to carry our bikes downstairs to the platform. (I use "we" collectively here, because Graham saw the look on my face and carried mine for me.)




(Ignore me. It was severely cold. Also, you can see the Eiffel Tower in the background.)



When the train got there, we each had to lift our bikes in and bungee them to a pole for the 15 minute ride out to Versailles. Then, once we got there, we had to take our bikes up an ESCALATOR. This is where the near-fatalities I mentioned before come in, and it's also where you have to recall that photo of Mary-the-Eastern-Canadian if you want an accurate picture of what happened next. Jon and me and an Australian family of six were the last people to board the escalator, but before we could, there was a huge commotion about halfway up. Mary's bike's tire had turned and caught the wall (the only part of the machine that stays in place). Next thing we knew, she's falling over backward, being run over by her rogue bicycle, and causing a chain reaction of bikes and people to come cascading downwards. I don't know how, but some super-hero of a guy single-handedly caught the entire mess and held it from going any further, but poor Mary was on her back, upsidedown by this point, as the escalator went higher and higher. This guy yells up to Graham, "We've got a problem here!" and I've got to admit, I was imagining a bloody mess at the top as bodies got sucked under the grate...but it turns out that doesn't really happen....and though we couldn't see what happened once they got up there, we didn't hear much more commotion, so, still slightly horrified, we all shuffled our feet for a few moments before the Australian mom swallowed hard and said "Okay" out loud, picked up her bike, and took her turn. I was terrified, but I made it up safe and sound to find Mary loudly recanting her tale for all to hear. Now - I appreciate someone that can laugh something off, because she was obviously embarrassed, and in some pain even though nothing was broken...but can you give it a rest?? She brought it up EVERY moment she could! Biking along the streets of Versailles she would declare, "Maybe I should be at the back..I don't want to cause a pile-up!" Stopped for a break, she would say, "Careful if you're sitting next to me...I might fall into you!" It just became so uncomfortable, I just wanted to tell her STOP TALKING ABOUT IT, you're only making it worse. Anyway, I can't knock her too hard, because she DID ask me if I was okay when I had to stop and push on my eyeball.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. So, when we first got to Versailles, we biked to this fun market. Each day there's an indoor market, but the day we were there also happened to have an outdoor food market as well. We had a half an hour to buy stuff for the picnic we'd be having later (Graham announced that as a tour guide in France, he is, by law, required to carry a corkscrew and cups at all times, which earned hearty laughter from the lamer people in our group and an exuberant "oh ho ho! I don't need to be any more impaired, thank you very much!" from Mary). Jon and I got sandwiches and pastries from a pretty boulangerie around the corner.



Then, we rode to the chateau grounds, but we took the back entrance so that the castle was the LAST thing that we saw, not the first. I was glad we did it that way...since we were on bikes, we covered a lot more ground than we ever would have been able to had we been walking, and everything that we saw got exponentially grander, instead of seeing the best thing first, and then the smaller things afterwards. So we took off down a dirt road alongside a sheep pasture...






(Such pretty countryside, huh? I'm a little bothered by the tree growing out of my head, though..)

Here's a snapshot of Marie-Antoinette's hamlet.



And one of the smaller of the two chateaus.



This canal out back is shaped like a cross, and what you see in this picture is actually the shorter ends.




(It was so cold.)

We rode around each of the "arms" of the cross, and while we were completely opposite of the chateau, we stopped for lunch, laid down ponchos for blankets, and gorged ourselves while watching swans out on the water. And listening to the loser next to us try and impress Graham. He was seriously the biggest goober ever. He was the middle-aged equivalent of that one guy that I always hated in school, that always raced to be finished with the math problem first, and always self-importantly corrected the teacher when they'd made a mistake on the whiteboard. There was a person like that in every class, it seemed. This guy on our tour hung around Graham like a dog, always pushing to be near the front of the group, and racing to be the first to each destination. He followed the guide so closely that we saw on several occasions what appeared to be Graham attempting to scrape this guy off on pilars and walls and stuff. I would have. He was so lame. Anyway, here's a view of the chateau from the back, where we had our lunch.



I ate my first-ever mille-feuille for dessert, and it was wonderful. The wind started to pick up, so I took a cue from the Australian dad and put the plastic poncho on. Any little bit helped. You wouldn't believe how freezing cold it was. We cleaned up and took off for the entrance. We were on our own inside of the building. Our tour included a free audio guide, which was useless, so we just kind of wandered around, overwhelmed by all the stinky people.

Everyone kept talking about the "hall of mirrors this" and the "hall of mirrors that", so we were most excited about seeing that. But we went through the entire tour, got spat back out into the cold, and we hadn't even seen it!! How could we have missed it?? So we asked people that worked there to point us in the right direction, and we started all over again, confused as heck. Oh. Turns out, mirrors from hundreds of years ago don't really look like mirrors. That huge hall that we had walked down with brassy stuff on the walls? THAT was the Hall of Mirrors. So we saw it twice. Oh, and did I mention I was still wearing the poncho? Yeah..kids were pointing and laughing, but they were just punk kids, and I was still cold.




(I had no idea how huge this place would be until we got up to it. By today's standards, it was worth 300 billion dollars before it got wrecked and gutted during and after the revolution. We learned that the working class of Paris was being taxed up to EIGHTY PERCENT of everything they made, and that TWENTY-FIVE percent of all of France's revenue went straight into building this palace, so the kings could live there. Gross, huh??)





(The Hall of Mirrors)




(Another view of the Hall of Mirrors. Whoever finds the girl in the clear plastic poncho first, wins.)

On our way out to meet the group, I waited in line for 15 minutes for my right to use a toilet with NO SEAT (as if my legs weren't already tired from biking) and NO TOILET PAPER...(none in the entire bathroom, and don't even ask me about it).

We took a different train and a different route back to the shop, bought a couple of T-shirts, and picked up some free magnets before heading back to the hotel, where we made reservations for the next night to see the show at the Moulin Rouge, changed our clothes, and went to eat at a really nice restaurant up the street called Chez Clement.



Jon ordered duck confit, and I got some random assortment of pastry-encrusted goat cheese with honey (mmmm..), smoked salmon with cucumber, cute little seafood raviolis, and a lentil salad. The lentils came in a jar and it was kind of weird, but really good.

Then, back at the hotel, we discovered how wind-burned our faces were, and how swollen our hands were....and I was asleep in about 2 seconds.

TO BE CONTINUED...

The Paris Saga: Day II

The second day, we woke up at 6:30am, showered and got ready, then went downstairs for breakfast. Since we were technically there for Jon's conference, we were given meal vouchers for each of the days, and the food was AMAZING. Mmm. Fruit and "creme fraiche" (a delicious topping somewhere between whipped cream and sour cream), yummy crepe-like pancakes, all sorts of cheeses and breads, scrambled eggs, bacon, sauteed mushrooms, yogurts, and of course, your typical muffins and pastries and cereals. Except they were FRENCH muffins and pastries and cereals. In Paris. Which makes them at least ten times better. Anyway, every day, I made myself what became known as a "Jessie Sandwich" with a hard roll, bacon, and mushrooms. Followed closely by some of the yummy pancakes, joined shortly thereafter by some fresh fruit and creme, and topped off with the best yogurt EVER. And a "pain chocolat" or two.


(Me strategically placing the mushrooms in my Jessie Sandwich.)

This was our walking day. It was also one of the coldest days in history. We started at the hotel, walked to the Arc de Triomphe, and continued down the Champs-Elysees. Turns out, though, that NOTHING is open in France before 10:00, and our noses were so frozen that we couldn't even think about dilly-dallying for an hour for the shops to open. So we booked it all the way down to Place de la Concorde - this 20-acre area filled with fountains and an awesome, 250-ton obelisk that was brought in from Egypt way back in the day. In one piece.





(A view of the Champs-Elysees from Place de la Concorde, looking back at the Arc de Triomphe.)

Continuing in a straight line put us in the Tuilerie gardens, which seemed to go on forever (it was FREEZING), before we arrived at the Louvre.


(I'm so mad that this picture is so blurry. But our batteries kept dying and it's a wonder that I got any picture at all. I'm not kidding you, it was from the cold. We kept pulling the batteries out and warming them in our hands, then they would work for a single picture, then the camera would die again.)

Here's one from inside the pyramid entrance.


Okay, so, first I have to apologize to my art-major sister, Annie, who would probably spend at least 2 or 3 days at the Louvre if she was in Paris as long as I was...but we were the lame tourists that went to see the good stuff. And we were in and out in about two hours. And even then...I felt like the life had been sucked out of me. I know I'm running the risk of sounding uncultured, but just let me explain. There were sooo many people, and we were sooooo tired already, and the museum is crazy-huge, and there were so many flights of stairs... Anyway, here are the highlights.


(Venus de Milo)


(Just so happy to be there)


(Winged Victory --This was my favorite thing that we saw there.)


(She's behind glass in the middle of a huge room, full of a thousand people, being held back a safe distance of about fifteen feet by velvet ropes)


(Michaelangelo)


(Cupid and Psyche...I keep typing "Psycho" on accident and it makes me laugh)

We spent a good half-hour searching for the Code of Hammurabi, only to find that it had been moved to the exhibit we hadn't paid for.

So, my sister is really going to disown me...we went on a trek to find the French paintings, but no one warned us ahead of time that they were on the ninetieth floor of the museum. We just kept following the signs up a ridiculous amount of stairs, until we finally reached what we were SURE must have been the top, only to discover AT LEAST two more flights. So, we gave up, and went back down the way we'd come. We were so unmotivated after the disappearance of Hammurabi's Code.

And on our way out of the maze we'd found ourselves in, we discovered that the only escalator that could take us where we needed to go was out of service. So, unfortunately, Jon got smashed in ANOTHER elevator, only this time it wasn't the doors, it was two huge Scandinavian women that didn't realize their combined bulk. We got in first, followed by about six other people, then these two ladies came running through the hallway and blocked the doors from closing,and forced the group into a corner as they squeezed in. Someone pushed the button for the lobby.....and we waited. ....and waited. And waited....and the doors wouldn't close. So we waited. And someone looked to make sure the button was illuminated, and we all looked at each other, wondering who was going to be the first to let these large late-comers know that they had exceeded the maximum weight capacity, and that we weren't going anywhere until they got off. By this time a huge crowd has gathered, waiting for the next ride down, and it was soooo awkward waiting for these ladies to work it out in their minds that they needed to leave, or else no one was getting to the lobby. But finally they gave up and stepped off, and Jon hit the "door close" button as fast as lightning. And we were on our way.

Coming out the museum, the plan was to head across the bridge to Notre-Dame.


(Pont Neuf, supposably the world's oldest bridge, or the oldest bridge in Paris...one of the two)

But on our way, one of the best things that happened on our entire trip happened. We were walking along with a purpose, when we hear someone call out behind us "Wait! You drop this?" So we turn back and this lady trots up to us, holding out a gold men's ring. So we go "umm..no, it's not ours" and she's like (I don't know what her accent was, it wasn't French though) "Okay, but you keep it, my gift to you". And Jon's like "no, you found it, you keep it" and she's like "no, I cannot wear jewelry, it hurts my skin". So just to appease her, Jon takes the ring and puts it on, she shook our hands, and we turned and took a few steps away. But she calls out to us again, and approaches us, and goes "Very good luck for you. Good luck for you, good luck for me?" ...(we're just as confused as you are at this point). "Umm...what?" "Yes, good luck for you, good luck for me? I give ring, you give something for food?" (Now we're even more confused, because this lady did NOT look homeless, she was actually wearing kind of nice clothes and a cute hat and scarf). So Jon's like "you need food? We have food in our backpack". So he pulls his bag off and unzips it, pulls out a granola bar, and hands it to her. She held the thing away from her a bit, with it resting on her palm, and just stared at it in confusion for a few moments, before looking up at us and saying "no....you have money?" So my hero, Jon, goes "oh, nope, no money, just food", and takes the ring off his finger, hands it to her, PLUCKS the granola bar out of her hands, and walks away.

So, anyway, we ended up at Notre-Dame (I just googled our route and it was FOUR-POINT-ONE miles from our hotel to this point), wandered around inside...


...took a picture of my favorite gargoyle ever...


...and wandered around to the back, to see the buttresses that everyone's always talking about.


And on the side, there was a really cute tree with pink blossoms.


It was way too cold to stand in the hour-long line to go up the towers, and way too cold for Berthillon ice cream (the world's oldest ice cream, or the best ice cream, or the oldest ice cream in Paris, or something), so we promised ourselves we'd go back a different day, and gladly paid the 3 euros for the metro ride back to the Arc de Triomphe. This time around, the shops on the Champs-Elysees were open, so we walked halfway down again, then back up the other side. By this point, we noticed a huge crowd forming alongside the sides of the streets, so we decided to take a seat on a bench to see what all the fuss was about. I'm going to be completely honest, we waited for a good fifteen minutes before finally asking someone what we were waiting for. It just so happened that we were accidentally at the beginning of the Champs-Elysees JUST as the Olympic Torch was about to make it's way around the corner. So that's what all the flags and chanting were all about. Here's a little video clip of the actual event. A couple of things: First, this is the torch escort just as it's about to round the corner onto the Champs-Elysees. Second, my camera cut out (stupid batteries) just before the torch made it's way onto the actual Champs-Elysees. Third, things got REALLY crazy right after the camera cut out. Seriously. And fourth, you can't actually see the torch in this video. At all. That being said, if you'd still like to watch the video, you may.



All these people were chasing the escort and screaming and booing and throwing Molotov cocktails. That's another thing you can't see in the video, because it probably didn't happen (the cocktails). But it really was scary right as the torch bearer rounded the corner. People came running by, and for about fifteen very scary seconds, I thought that Jon and I had been separated, and that I was lost, until I looked behind me and he was standing on the bench a few feet away.

Oh, and like five minutes after all the hullabaloo, this float came driving past. Mind you - the ONLY float that there was. It was the most random thing ever.


On our way back to our hotel, we stopped at our favorite sandwich and pastry place and got an amazing dinner of baguette/ham/gruyere sandwiches, desserts, and sodas to take back to our room and eat. This apple tart was the best thing I ate the entire trip.


We took a nap, then went to the market for water, chocolate, and cookies. Back at our hotel, we plotted our next day using the metro map. I should mention that by the end of the second day, I still hadn't seen the whole Eiffel Tower yet - just the very tip of it from behind rows of buildings.

And... to finish of this extremely long day (the most tiring of the entire trip), Jon made me laugh with the following dialogue.

Jon, while drinking unflavored water: "I should have gotten the orange-peach flavor."
Me, disgusted, because I hate flavored water: "Ew. I wouldn't drink it."
Jon: "I know, I would have gotten YOU a regular water, and I'd be drinking orange-peach, and we'd BOTH be happy, instead of one of us being happy and the other being mizzzerable."

TO BE CONTINUED...

The Paris Saga: Day I

I don’t even remember how early we woke up on Saturday morning to leave, but it must have been around 4:30 or 5ish in the morning. We could have slept in, though, because the pilots and stewardesses all came bustling into the gate over an hour after we were supposed to leave. Good thing we had a two hour layover in Atlanta, otherwise we might have missed our connection. Anyway, the pilot was kind enough to make an announcement over the intercom to catch us all up to speed about why they were so late. It went a little something like this:

“Uhhh, folks, if you could settle into your seats as soon as possible, it would be greatly appreciated…sorry we’re late taking off this morning…our uhh, flight from Atlanta last night took a little longer than we’d expected, so it wasn’t until about midnight last night that we finally got to our hotel uhh….so, we’re running on the minimum required amount of sleep, but uhh, if you all get settled in to your seats, we’ll try to get you there just as fast as we can”.

Excuse me? You can keep that information to yourself, thanks. Anyway, we made it to Atlanta with enough time to make our connection. Our plane to Paris was newer, and had these touch screens in the backs of each of the seats, so that you could pick what movie you wanted to watch (out of about 30 choices), or what music to listen to (you could create playlists of songs…Arcade Fire was even on the menu!), or recent TV shows, and worst of all, games you could play. So while I was trying to fall asleep while watching Juno, my seat was continually being stabbed by Mr Muscly Fingers sitting behind me. I’m positive that he was playing Bejeweled. Jon had the same problem. And it went on for HOURS. I did manage to get a few hours of sleep, though, and I woke up in time to see us flying over the coast of France. The sun was just rising, and the cloudtops were all pink and pretty.

It was another hour or so before we landed in Paris, and it was a really misty morning (exaggerated by the fact that I forgot to put my glasses on before we landed). Anyway, we got our bags and took a bus to our hotel. It’s actually a really nice place, supposedly a four star, but the service was kind of crappy. I’ll get to that in a minute. Anyway, we dropped off our bags at the concierge, because it was too early to check in, and we walked up the street to the Arc de Triomphe (only about ten minutes or so).




We found this cute little boulangerie/patisserie on the way there, which ended up being our favorite place to eat.




You wouldn’t believe how good this place smelled. Anyway, here are a couple of close ups of the Arc.




So on one side of the Arc is the street we just walked up…


(You can see the Grande Arch in the distance)
And on the other side is the Champs-Elysees. We walked over to where it begins, but were too tired to think about shopping at all, so we headed back to the hotel. They told us that our room was ready this time, so we brought our bags upstairs only to discover…our room wasn’t ready. Not even close. No one had been in to clean it – the covers were all thrown off the bed. (Though, I guess, not as bad as the time Jon climbed into a hotel bed in Miami on one of his work trips, and discovered copius amounts of USED Kleenex wadded up in between the sheets.) Anyway, so Jon goes inside to call the service desk…and the buttons on our phone didn’t work. What! So I sat down in the hallway with our bags while he went downstairs to let them know. We waited around a few minutes for the maid to come, and she forced us to wait in the room while she cleaned it, instead of in the hallway. I’m sure she was just being nice..but it was awkward…we kept having to move out of her way as she bustled around. Once she finished, we set our alarm for two hours so we could take a nap (Jon didn’t get any sleep whatsoever on the flight, which put him at 26 solid hours of being awake by this point), but we accidentally slept for three hours, which meant that I didn’t let us shower before we went on a tour of the neighborhood. Keep in mind that it has now been at least an entire day without a shower. That’s why I’m so greezy in all the pictures from this day. And it was sooooo cold!! We ate at this cute little panini place that was about a 6 foot by 6 foot square of sidewalk, marked by plastic, tent-like walls. We split a panini, I got hot chocolate, and Jon got an Orangina. Then we split a banana-nutella crepe, which I was, obviously, very excited about.


We spent a little while at the mall that was directly facing our hotel, reading cute children’s books in French, and just milling around, but mostly everything was closed up since it was Sunday.

Three notable things happened on our way back across the street to our hotel.

FIRST: It snowed. I TOLD you it was freezing!
SECOND: We saw a man having a seizure. I’ve drawn a little diagram to illustrate how it inconvenienced us.



(Maybe a little hard to read, but you get the idea. We walked a few steps into the crosswalk, stopped abruptly, then headed to the other side of the street. Someone was already helping him, anyway.)

And THIRD: About eight cop vans, all full of policemen, pulled up to our hotel, and there were policemen at every entrance. All with assault weapons. In fact, we saw heavily armed policemen ALL OVER the city for the next couple of days, and couldn’t for the life of us figure out what was going on…until…..later we found out (VERY first-hand) that it had to do with the Olympic torch. More on that on a different day.

But that was the end of day one. Actually..it was more like two days. But you get the idea. We took a much needed shower, and slept like logs.


TO BE CONTINUED…

Made It

Well…we’re back. I’m going to be posting day-by-day summaries of our visit to Paris, but in the meantime, here are a few highlights from our trip to whet your appetite.

1) We saw the World’s Ugliest Pigeon at the base of the Eiffel Tower.



2) We impersonated the art in our hotel’s hallways.


3) We witnessed a man having a seizure (sorry, no picture to illustrate this one).

4) We saw Notre-Dame...


...but more importantly, we saw a NUN eating lunch in front of Notre-Dame.

5) We very nearly made it to the top of the Eiffel Tower together.


6) And last on this list, but not least, we were lucky enough to experience The Best Comb-Over of All Time.


All in all, it was everything I ever imagined it would be. It was wonderful and beautiful and exhausting. We had an amazing time, and there’s no way I could sum everything that we did and saw and ate all in one post. But each night we were there, no matter how tired I was, I forced myself to write down notes of what we did that day, so you’ll be hearing all about it soon…

The Main Event

I made the mistake of trying to fall asleep with my head on Jon’s lap last night while he was watching UFC. Every time they go from throwing punches to grappling on the floor, his body starts to slowly contort. It’s the weirdest thing. He gets so into the matches that when his guy is in trouble, HE gets all tense and squirmy. Kind of like jerking your hands up when you’re trying to make Mario jump. Or putting your foot on an invisible break when you’re in the passenger seat…I do that one all the time. Anyway, my favorite UFC fighter is George St Pierre. He’s an ugly cuss, and I’m not sure if he’s any good, but calling him “GSP” makes me happy.

So we’ve been reading tons about monuments and history, and planning out our itinerary…so far it includes a “leisurely bike tour” in Versailles (I’m pretty excited about it), and about everything else we think we could possibly cram in. You name it. Oh, and plus, we found out that Jon’s convention requires less time than we originally thought, so that’s good news. Oh, and plus, there’s supposedly the world’s oldest ice cream, or something, right across from Notre-Dame, so I’m definitely looking forward to it. Oh, and my cousin Jenny mentioned the Catacombs, which piqued my interest, so I read a ton of material about them, and in my own words, here’s a summary of events.

Okay, so way back in the day, when the Romans were turning Paris from a little village into one of the world’s largest cities, they needed lots of limestone for building material. So where did they get it? They just scooped it out from underneath the city. They mined and mined and mined these enormous tunnels under Paris until the city started to implode, and then they quit doing it that way. Duh. Anyway, they were left with this city sitting on top off hundreds of miles’ worth of tunnels. I guess even to this day, they have issues with buildings falling through. I found that on the internet, and everything on the internet is true.

Anyway, another problem related to a growing city – lots and lots of dead people. Some cemeteries had up to THIRTY generations of people buried underneath. And when they ran out of room, they started stacking the graves, and when they ran out of room, they built the walls up and started mass graves, and when those got full, the cemetery walls would swell and tons of rotting corpses would come spilling out into the open. Ew. So when people around the cemeteries started getting sick, finally enough was enough. They started moving all these bodies into the creepy tunnels the Romans had dug while building the city. DUN dun dunnn! There are over SIX MILLION bodies in there, and apparently you can pay five euros to head down and walk along one small portion of the entire thing. Jon really wants to do it, but it sounds pretty intense. Anyway, I’m not even sure if they’ll be open while we’re there, because on the website is says they’re closed between November 2007 and April 2008, and who knows when in April they open back up? We’ll have to see about it when we get there.

Jon’s been trying to work something out so that he can receive emergency phone calls from work, and so that if anyone from home needs to get in touch with us, they can. Anyway, all he could come up with after multiple calls to his wireless provider was to pay an arm and a leg for the European equivalent of a Go-Phone once we get there. So THEN he calls back with some other question, and mentions it to this lady, and she’s all “um, we’ll just send you a phone that’s compatible on the European network, and all your calls on your regular phone will just be forwarded to that phone, and you pay just over a dollar per minute.” Okay, are you kidding me? And it’s a free service, too, all we had to pay for was shipping. And it came the next day, which is today, and I haven’t seen it yet, but Jon says it’s actually really nice. So anyway, for just over a dollar per minute, you can reach us in Paris on Jon’s regular cell number. What?! How is that possible? And how is it possible that no one mentioned it earlier?

Anyway, we’ve got tons to do tonight and tomorrow to get ready (I’ve hardly even begun packing), so hopefully it all comes together in time! Not just packing, but I want to clean the entire apartment beforehand (I HATE coming home from a trip to a dirty house. It’s one of those rare things that got that from my mom. I wish I inherited more from her…but I didn’t).

So, consider this my last post before I leave. I may or may not be fluent in French when I get back….

Things That Made me Laugh Today

Three Lolcats...

Why do these bring me such joy?? I'll post something a little more informative before I leave on my trip, I promise. Well, maybe I shouldn't promise. I promise I'll try, how's that. And if I don't get around to it, then rest assured I'll have some stories when I get back.