I am at Charles de Gaulle Airport, waiting for them to call my flight for boarding. The Air France lounge offers free Internet access so I am updqting my page as best as I can zith this very unfamiliar keyboard arrangement. I walked around again this morning and took yet more pictures, but I will not be able to edit or upload them until I get home, which, if all goes well, will be in about 14 hours.

More then, perhaps…au revoir for now!

Last Tango…err, Walk…in Paris

This morning, I didn’t have to get up in time to make an 8am meeting; instead, I only had to get to the airport in time for a 1:30pm flight. So I slept a little later than I’d been able to, and still had time to have breakfast away from the hotel (and save some money — breakfast at my hotel cost over $20…no wonder they had smoked salmon freely available!).

I wandered around for a few minutes, then randomly chose a bistro and had a croissant, coffee, and juice. The only glass I had was the juice glass, which was only half-full, but they also brought me a big pitcher of water. I thought, perhaps, that they’d put concentrate in the glass and were expecting me to mix it, but when I tasted the juice, it didn’t seem particularly strong. I guess that’s just going to be a mystery of French culture I won’t solve on this trip.

I didn’t have anything to read, and I was on a side street without much pedestrian traffic, so there wasn’t much to look at out the window, so I didn’t linger; I continued to wander around. And a few blocks later, I finally found some real Paris — a neighborhood with bakeries, greengrocers, and the like.

Up till this time, all I’d seen around my hotel was “tourist” Paris — the big department stores, some stores (like one called Paris Look) which explicitly catered to bus groups, and plenty of restaurants and entertainments. On my previous trips, my hotels had been in more residential areas, and so I’d been immersed in the real Paris; this time, I felt isolated.

I celebrated by buying an orange from the closest greengrocer and eating it while I continued walking, then had some pain au chocolat from the next baker I saw. Both were excellent. I even visited another bistro and had another expresso — while it was good, I have to admit that I would have liked to have found an American-style coffee shops and had a big cup of coffee.

And then I kept walking, and found myself at the edge of Montmartre, not far from the tour I’d taken on Sunday morning. The economy must be very good in Paris, because the restaurants all had signs like this:

and some of the prices seemed a bit high:

10 euros for a Coke…that’s over $9. One might almost think they didn’t expect to sell much food and drink — but all of the restaurants on that street had similar signs, so I guess they must make ends meet somehow. The street was the Rue Pigalle, for what that’s worth.

Since I didn’t want anything that was on offer on Rue Pigalle, I walked back to the hotel, packed, and wheeled my luggage back to Rue Scribe to get the bus to the airport. But as I left the hotel, the tread on one of the wheels partially fell off; I was able to fix it,though, so I didn’t have to drag my suitcase half a kilometer — and it didn’t even start raining until I was at the bus shelter.

Then onto the bus to the airport and duty-free shop, then the Air France lounge for my first experience with an AZERTY keyboard, and onto the plane, where I’m typing these words. Soon, I get to experience the new SFO International terminal’s arrivals hall, see what precautions US Customs is taking about the foot and mouth epidemic (France seemed to go in for signs, but nothing else — there was a sign at the terminal advising people to walk on the specially-treated carpet, but as far as I could tell, there was no specially-treated carpet anywhere), and be driven home, where I’ll upload this entry.

Then all I’ll have to do is keep my eyes propped open until bedtime tonight. And worse yet, open them and go to work tomorrow, where I already have a few conference calls scheduled.

I’m ready for vacation…hmmm, Paris might be nice….

And now I’m home!

Boy, it’s nice to be back in familiar territory. Nobody else is here yet, but it won’t be long. I can’t wait!

When I was a kid, our elementary school library had a book of puzzles, one of which is pictured above. The book claimed that if you look quickly at the picture, you’ll read it as “Paris in the spring” — if you did, take a closer look (and let me know that it worked!).

Well, it’s spring, and I’m in Paris — but the weather is not the stuff of legend — or maybe it is, but not the kind of legend I like telling.

My flight to Charles de Gaulle airport left late and arrived late (like almost every flight I take these days, now that I think of it), but was basically pleasant — even though we were only in the air for 40 minutes, they managed to feed us our choice of sandwiches, unlike US airlines, which have given up on food for flights of under 2 hours or flights which don’t take off or land when they think people should be hungry. The delay was due to weather, which should have made me think — but it didn’t, so I decided to save the company some money and take the RoissyBus into town (48 francs, about $7, instead of 250-300 francs for a taxi); I knew my hotel was only a few hundred meters from the end of the bus ride and I didn’t expect to have any trouble finding it.

And finding the hotel was easy, and it was only a ten-minute walk — but by the time I got there, I was drenched, because a weather system caught up with us, and it was pouring down rain. I managed to register (it’s not easy when you can’t read the form because your glasses are wet, and when you drip all over the form when you try to sign it) and went up to the room to dry off. A few minutes later, I felt far better, and the rain had stopped, so I went out to look around and have a bite of lunch (the sandwich on the plane wasn’t very filling, but it was better than peanuts). I also splurged and spent 35 francs ($5) on an umbrella, since the day was rather gloomy.

It was late enough in the day by this point that I didn’t think it was worth going to any museums, but I definitely wanted to be out rather than spending the afternoon in my hotel room, so I decided to do a favor for a friend and take a picture of the hotel he’ll be staying at in June, the Hotel de Trois Colleges near the Pantheon. Actually, I took six pictures, but I won’t post any of them here — but I did take a picture of the Pantheon as long as I was in the neighborhood.

Ever since my first trip to Paris, a few years ago, I’ve liked wandering around the city — it’s just a wonderful city to walk through. Everywhere you turn, there’s another typically Parisian scene, like this one on the Rue Lagrange (in the 6th, just a few blocks from Notre Dame).

By this time, it was drizzling again — which seems to have been very typical this year. The Seine is very wide and high (not to mention brown and fast-flowing); it’s so full, in fact, that there’s no sidewalk by the sightseeing boats.

And at other places, you can see that the river has taken out the paths which are normally a pleasant place to walk.

Buildings near the river’s edge are in trouble, too.

I wanted to visit the Musee de la Deportation, which commemorates the Jews (and others) who were sent from France to concentration camps, mostly to be killed by the Nazis. The museum is just across the street from Notre Dame, descending from street level down to river level, but the flooding meant that it was off limits.

By this time, I was just across from Ile St. Louis, which houses one of the best ice cream makers in the world, Bertillion; I wanted to eat before having my ice cream, so I set off in search of a restaurant (not a difficult task in Paris!). I intended to follow Tim Bray’s rule — find a busy restaurant on a busy corner and the odds are with you — but I didn’t see anything I wanted to eat at the first few places, so I kept walking. And then the rain started. My umbrella kept me dry, or so I thought — but then the wind blew my pants up against my legs and I realized that I was soaked from the knees down. So I dashed into the next restaurant I saw and got the last table in the place.

The food was good, and they happened to sell Bertillion ice cream and sorbet, so I was happy and well-filled by the time the rain diminished enough to leave. I walked to the nearest Metro station and hopped a train towards my hotel. But I got off a stop too early and wandered around some more, first through Galleries Lafayette (entering that store 15 minutes before closing is a frustrating experience, but I guess it saved me money!), and then somewhat randomly around the area. In the process, I found an area with many kosher restaurants, but, of course, they were closed because it was still Shabbat. After a while, though, I decided I was ready to go back to the hotel and take off my wet clothes, so I took out my GPS and discovered that it’s very hard to see view of enough of the sky in Paris to get a position — but eventually, I figured out what direction I had to go in to find my hotel, and here I am.

I haven’t had the courage to check the weather forecast for tomorrow. Whatever it is, I’ll be out in it!

Foot-and-Mouth

On Thursday, I wrote about how Israelis didn’t seem to be letting the “situation” affect their lives too much and wondered how that reaction compared to what foot-and-mouth was doing to the English. I’d have to say that foot-and-mouth is having a much more significant effect — for example, the road into IBM had straw on it — straw with antibiotics, to kill any germs that might be on tires on cars driving in and out of the property (IBM Hursley is in a rural area). And there was a scare a week ago, where it looked as though foot-and-mouth had been detected nearby; if that had happened, no one would have been allowed in or out of the area, and IBM Hursley might have had to close down for a while.

There were also ads in the newspaper and on the radio telling people that the countryside was not completely closed for visiting, and giving a phone number to call for details — but many activities have been cancelled.

At the airport, every shop selling food had a sign informing customers that it was now illegal to take milk, meat, milk products, or meat products out of the country (even to eat on one’s flight), and that some countries (including the US) were banning the import of British milk chocolate.

In France, there were a few signs asking people who’d been on a farm to report to Customs to have their shoes disinfected and to stay off of farms in France, but there wasn’t any strong effort made to check, or even to make sure that incoming passengers read the signs — certainly, the person who glanced at my passport didn’t say anything to me (literally! Nor did he stamp my passport, but that’s fine; I already have a French stamp and I’m running out of room anyway), and I doubt I was alone in being ignored.

But when I looked at the 8pm French news, I could tell that foot-and-mouth was the lead story here, too. I just couldn’t tell if they were talking about the outbreak in England or cases on the Continent.