Paris!

Ran and I made it to Paris for a quick weekend, having Friday, May 8th off for another French holiday. The beauty of that one was that I still don't know what it was for?? We took a one hour flight on Easyjet from Toulouse. It looks like they have $60 Euro roundtrips available...of course we paid about $130 roundtrip but we purchased them a week before leaving. We found a hotel that was just a few blocks from the Eiffel Tower. It was nuttin fancy but a good location, right near the Metro (Duplex) station.

We really were just focused on the Eiffel Tower and doing a bus tour of the city one day and then the Lourve most of the second day.

When we first arrived there in the inner city it was a lawless, shameless, madhouse!!


The first night we were there we were both tired from all the walking and air travel. We went to dinner that night thinking we may just call it an early evening. Randi's exact words were to me..."I can't walk anymore". Then during dinner we had a couple glasses of wine (actually vodka for me) and she says "let's just go look at the Eiffel Tower again" (it was right around the corner from where we were). Then when we got there we thought maybe we would take the elevator up but there was still a 45 minute wait for the elevator ride up. Then Ran says "let's just do the 1st section" (350 steps). Then we got to the first section, took a look around for five minutes and she says "where are the stairs for the second section" She's really something :) ...I wanted to say "wait, let me have a couple more vodkas first". So another 350 stairs we did...it was slightly exhausting but definitely worth it...great fun.


After that we found our second wind! So we went down, bought a bottle of wine and drank it on one of the large expanses of lawn nearby the Tower, with many other people. It was a beautiful night too. As you can see from the pic below, both the Eiffel Tower and us had "achieved illumination!" :) Randi looks so cute there too.


We felt like we did quite a bit and saw a lot for the two days we were there...but there is soooo much more to see and do there. We think are some of the first folks to discover this.

"Recalculating..."

Thought I should talk a little about the street signage and the driving practices here. It's not important but it's f'in ridiculous.

The signs for the streets are listed in French and Spanish but typically the actual street name is only found on the side of a building. What is shown in a more visible manner are signs telling you what towns or well-known loactions that street will lead to. So when you enter an intersection and/or roundabout my GPS is saying what road to take, in it's very monotone English voice but the actual road name is not displayed largely anywhere in the intersection. In the picture below, the actual street name is that small white sign, on the building,just to the left of the red traffic light...that doesn't help much. Instead these larger white signs give more of a general direction for all these different locations within Toulouse that I can head to. It's actually not too bad of an idea, if the street name was included on a larger sign.



Because of this we have seemed to have missed a lot of turns while we've been here. Our imitation of our GPS is it saying "recalculating". She seems just as frustrated doing all the recalculations as us. I half expect her to someday say "make a right, wait, not that one but... wait, ah, where's the street name!...this sucks!!!... recalculating"

Then the highway driving habits observed on our journey home from Provence seemed as though some emergency was occuring...like a medival fortress was on fire or the Capitole of Toulouse was under attack. Lot of bobbing an weaving, jockeying for very limited space. I've resisted using any universal hand gestures. Instead I mumble old English slang, still heard to this day I'm sure, when heading down the Kennedy into the great city of Chicago.