Taking Care of Business

Show's over, move along, nothing to see here. Back from Paris and I guess I'll be looking for work a lot more now. But first, let's talk about Paris. When Paul and I were "planning" this trip so long ago, we really only said "let's go to London, I know someone there and do whatever. Then we'll go to Wales, we know someone there and we'll do whatever. Oh, then we'll go see our brother in Glasgow, and do whatever." Pretty freeform holidaying really. So a while before we got here, Damien called us up and said that RyanAir had 50p flights to Paris, so he booked tickets for all 6 of us. You still have to pay airport taxes, but that worked out to £25 each ticket. Judging by the airports we went through, they're making some money from those taxes for sure. So it's a 1 1/2 hour flight to Paris which seemed strange since it was an international flight but felt more like a domestic flight. Queues didn't turn out to be a problem thanks to my brother's children. RyanAir also showed why it's a budget flight when we were leaving Glasgow Prestwick; the flight was delayed 30 minutes while an engineer was on board trying to fix a minor electrical problem, the navigational system! I guess it wasn't the worst thing that could happen and at least we were on the ground.

We got to Paris late in the afternoon after catching the airport coach and the Metro to finally reach our hotel, Residence Monceau Etoile which we booked cheap from Wotif.com. It's a nice place, but the rooms seemed to be stinking hot all the time and our shower was in the corner with only a shower curtain. This meant that whenever we took a shower, we ended up practically flooding the bathroom. Luckily we got fresh towels everyday, so we just mopped it all up using the extra towels we had.

The French experience was very good, nice place to visit and probably live. But not knowing how to speak French made things a little difficult. Annmarie was the closet thing to a translater we had and quite often was not with us when we needed some French lessons. This lead to a few funny misunderstandings. My first whole day in Paris was actually spent in the hotel since I'd picked up some bug from my niece Willow a couple of days before. I didn't feel like walking a lot so I stayed indoors and used my brothers laptop and The Rosetta Stone to learn as much French as I could. While I could say "A Red Car" reasonably well, there wasn't that much real conversation in the lessons so it was of little use. When the others got back, Paul and I decided to go out for dinner to a little French restaurant. We didn't really think too hard about it until we sat down, picked up the menu and didn't see a single word of English on the whole thing. Enter my vast knowledge of French (now I was the closet thing to an interpreter, God help us) I recognised "Meat" and "Fish" and Escargo. The back had Rouge and Blanc, which helped us seperate the Red wine from the White. A couple of other words that looked similar to their English counterparts also stuck out so after a while of furrowing our brows we felt a little more comfortable. The waiter that took our orders confirmed what we thought of the menu and made sure we didn't accidentally order some monkey brain puree with our veal so the ordering went as well as could be expected.

As the various parts of our meals were delivered (Paul ordered Prawns while I had the Veal with Pasta side, we shared a plate of snails ... quite nice, they're salty which was surprising) a new waiter was at our table. He brought Paul's drink then turned to me and started talking in French. I could only guess what he was saying; at first I thought he was asking if we were waiting for something to eat, so I struggled to remember the French name for the prawns (I said prawns and he gave me a puzzled look). I said the most useful phrase I know "Par le vous Anglais?" only to hear the response "Par le vous Francais?" and my heart sank, I was in way over my head. Somehow I thought he was asking about a drink for me, I think he asked what wine I want, I said "No, Evian". A glint of recognition from him, "Ah, Water!" pulling out the bottle of Evian I ordered, opened it and poured some into my glass while saying in a thick french accent "I am joking, I speak very good". Quite a cruel but funny joke that kept me amused for the rest of the trip.

The next couple of days before we left I was up and about, saw the Eiffel Tower and went to the top observation level. Unfortunately it was a little foggy in Paris that day so we couldn't see too far, not even to the Louvre. Damien thought he could make out La Défense in the mist, but definetly couldn't see La Grande Arche. The rest of the day was Hôtel des Invalides (where Napoléon's body is held), Arche de Triomphe, and Obélisque de Luxor. The last day was a little relaxing, we bought some excellent french pastries and ate them in a park, wandered around a little bit, had some excellent Doner Kebabs at some out of the way place (there was something we think was buckwheat. However they cooked it, it was delicious), back to pick up our bags, off to the airport and back here to Glasgow. It was very nice to visit there and I could easily go back, I'm even thinking of learning French (just so those waiters can't pull any more practical jokes on me anymore)