Upside down beer label

Having some neighbors over for beer and barbecue tonight. We're taking a break from getting the place cleaned up and grabbed a couple of beers out of the cooler. The label on this one is on the bottle upside down.

Googled up another upside down Sam Adams label on Flickr.

Miami Beach

One night business trip to the Palms Hotel, Miami Beach.

Somehow ended up with a "charmed" trip. Bumped up to first class both ways on the flight and got a suite at the hotel!

On the nature trails

A park near our house includes some nice walking trails thru the woods. Gertie the greyhound loves these as a break from her normal walk around the neighborhood. We haven't been out on them since the spring rains made the area boggy. Today they were dry enough to go all the way back. Gertie is happily worn out.

One small tragedy from the last trip

Dropped my camera off at the repair shop for an estimate today.

Last Christmas I knew that I'd be on something of a "world tour" this year. At that time I was expecting to go to Amsterdam and maybe Sydney. Alice bought me a great little Canon SD 800 IS camera so I'd have it for the trips.

So far, I've carried the thing thru two trips to Amsterdam, once to Sydney, and two trips to Paris. I've always just dropped it in a jeans pocket without much concern.

On the last evening of my most recent trip I got off the Paris subway in Montmartre on my way to visit the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur. When I pulled the camera out and switched it on I found that the big LCD on the back was cracked and useless.

I had been using the camera a lot during the trip to that point and knew how many presses of which button got to a few specific settings. So I was able to get some shots of the outside of Sacré Cœur using just the optical viewfinder. However, the camera is all but useless without the LCD. The viewfinder doesn't show any information or menus.

A little bit bummed. Hopefully the repairs won't be too large a fraction of the price of a new camera. It really is a gem of a camera for travel.

Outsourced customer service experience

Nothing big or new or particularly surprising... but...

The hotel clerk in Paris somehow mangled the mag stripe my corporate AmEx card. When I got back home I called AmEx for a replacement card.

My first attempt got me to someone with a strong Indian accent and speech patterns. When I told her what I wanted her response was "I would be most happy to be fulfilling your request but right now our computer systems are updating. If you could call back in half an hour we could easily help you.".

I'm thinking "yeah, right. You don't have a script for this one and you know that if I call back even in 30 seconds it will be somebody else's problem.". So I said thanks and hung up.

Dialed again immediately and got thru to a different person who this time sounded like a native English speaker. Made my request, the card's in the mail, done in 30 seconds.

Sigh.

Paris, a few random thoughts

• I've now done this teaching gig five times since the beginning of the year. Paris was, by far, the most fun.
  

  I think that's largely from choosing to stay in the city and commute "out" to the office. Our offices are all out in the sticks where real estate is cheaper. Of the other locations, only in Amsterdam would it have been possible to do the reverse commute. The Amsterdam office is the only other one with easy access to cheap, fast transportation.
  

  The French desire to start the class later also helped. That meant I didn't have to be up and coherent as early so I felt able to stay out late.
  

  And finally, there's just so much to see in Paris! Even just being a "tourist" out on my own I never felt at a loss for finding somewhere interesting to go.




• I've been told that French people hate Americans and will be rude just for fun.
  

  I certainly didn't find that to be the case. I took three years of French in high school and college but that was all more than 30 years ago. It gave me enough to be more or less read a menu and to attempt to speak in their language. That attempt made all the difference. I think that being rude causes rudeness. American waiters don't, in general speak any foreign languages. Well, ok, in Texas they very well might speak Spanish. But tourists in other countries seem to demand that the locals must be able to speak and understand the tourists language. Or if not that, English.
  

  My last night in Paris, I stopped in to a sidewalk cafe at about 1am for a glass of red wine. After I had ordered some German (I think) tourists plopped themselves down and bellowed across the cafe "Ve vant some trinks". The waiter, who had just been able to understand my mangled French and English without any problem suddenly had immense difficulties understanding their needs. It was pretty comical. I got my wine in good time and had been sipping it for quite a while before their "trinks" arrived.




• Nothing in Paris happens in a hurry.
  

  Having dinner at a cafe or restaurant takes two hours. It just does. The pace is slower. Nobody is in a rush to get served, get their food, and leave. The restaurant isn't in a hurry to turn the table and get someone else in. Everyone lingers over a pre-meal aperitif and an after dinner coffee. You can sit in a sidewalk cafe and nurse a drink and talk for hours. Once you adapt to the pace, it's great! Until you adapt to it, it's crazy-making. I'm used to the "protocol" of American restaurants where you're grudgingly allowed to sit at the table only if you're generating enough revenue for the restaurant.
  

• Paris is more crowded and busy than I expected.
  

  People may not be in a hurry in general but there are a lot of them. The trains at normal commute times were packed to the gills. And there were hundreds of people passing thru the square near the hotel even quite late at night. But everyone was unfailingly polite. Nobody pushed or was rude on the trains. The drivers seemed to mostly take lane markers in traffic circles as a suggestion but then all wove together. I hardly ever heard a horn honk. And bicycles, skaters, motorbikes all zipped down the narrow streets with no problems. The most surprising thing was that drivers actually yielded to pedestrians in crosswalks even when the pedestrians were crossing against the signals.

Catching up... Saturday, last day in Paris, part 2

After charging my batteries with a little lie down and giving the camera battery about 90 minutes I hopped on a Metro bound for the Montmartre district.

After seven days of riding Metro trains, this was the only time I came out of the subway station and was completely turned around. I came out thinking I knew where I was going and struck out in the "right" direction. Turned out to be 180 degrees off. After some wandering about and map consulting I got to what I was looking for, the cable rail line up the hill. And found it "closed indefinitely due to a technical problem". So I got to climb the stairs up to the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur. In multiple stages with rest breaks along the way. I spent maybe an hour wandering around inside the Basilica. Stunning place.

After that dinner at a randomly selected restaurant in Montmartre, a Metro ride back to near the hotel, and a final glass of wine in a sidewalk cafe at about 1am.

Catching up... Saturday, last day in Paris

I had the entire day Saturday in Paris and I was determined to go until my feet completely gave out.

I started the day by walking towards the Rodin Museum. On the way I passed the Hotel des Invalides and Musée de l'Armée (Army Museum). I wandered around the outside of those and into the gift shop. They had a nice coffee table book of Paris from the air, low level aerial photos. I almost bought it but really didn't want to lug it around all day.

The Musée Rodin was great! Most of the sculptures are outdoors. I first saw his work (other than "The Thinker" which everyone knows) at one of the Smithsonians in Washington D.C., maybe 20 years ago. His enormous "Gates of Hell" sculpture will give you nightmares if you look at it too long. Standing next to "Bourgeois de Calais", I suddenly felt like they were alive, like street performers striking a pose.

From near the Musée Rodin grabbed a Metro north a couple of stops to the Place de la Concorde. If I've kept it all sorted out correctly, the commentary from the tour boat said that the guillotines were set up here during the French Revolution.

After a wander around the Place de la Concorde, another short Metro ride to the Louvre. I had been in the square in the center of the Louvre and seen the glass pyramids on my previous trip to Paris so this time I went directly in to the museum from the Metro station. I decided that not only was there no way to see a significant fraction of the Louvre there wasn't even any way I'd see the highlights. So I just picked a gallery entrance more or less at random from the museum map. I went thru the ancient Egyptian exhibit, a little of the exhibit from the rest of the ancient Middle East and ended in a gallery of sculptures by French artists. That's where my camera battery gave out. I took that as a sign that I should take a break and caught the Metro back to my hotel.

Catching up... from Friday afternoon in Paris: Les Bateaux Mouches

Les Bateaux Mouches

The more successful part of my Friday afternoon and evening was a tour boat ride on the Seine. There are tons of these. Some are dinner cruises and some, like I took, are just tourist rides with taped commentary in multiple languages. Like a Gray Line on the river.

Les Bateaux Mouches start from the right bank of the Seine between Pont de l'Alma and Pont des Invalides. From there they go upriver to Ile de la Cité and Ile St. Louis, loop around the islands back downriver to the scaled down replica of the Statue of Liberty, and finally back upriver to the starting spot.

That took me past a lot of monuments, museums, and churches and only cost 9 euros.

Catching up... from Friday afternoon in Paris

Ball kids at Roland Garros

I am somewhat of a tennis fan. I used to play at tennis, I never got good enough to say I actually could play tennis, just play at it. One of my Christmas gifts a few years back was tickets to the U. S. Open tennis tournament in New York City. I didn't realize until after I arrived that this was the second week of the French Open. It would have been way cool to go.

Friday afternoon, after I dismissed class, I took the number 10 line out to Roland Garros stadium with the hopes of a grounds pass, something we did at the U.S. Open, a ticket that gets you the run of the place, access to the outer courts and practice courts but no seat in the large stadium. Sadly I found that they didn't have such a thing. If I had been paying attention before I left I could have gone out Sunday night, the day I arrived. Up thru that night they had "evening visitor" tickets. Like the U. S. Tennis Center's grounds pass but only after 5pm and only the first week of the tournament.

I walked all around the periphery of the Roland Garros complex. The only spot I could see anything other than the back side of stuff was this view of the practice courts with the off duty ball kids banging the ball around.

I didn't even manage to buy a t-shirt. Even the gift shop is inside the complex.

Catching up... from Thursday night in Paris

Street in St. Michel area

This area near Notre Dame is full of students and is a favorite for meeting up prior to hitting the bars or restaurants. This little pedestrian street was chock full of restaurants and cafes.

Catching up... from Tuesday night in Paris

View down the Champs Elysee

On Tuesday night I climbed the stairs to the top of the Arc de Triomphe. Again, very cool views from here. I wandered around taking pics in every possible direction. I was about to start the climb down when I noticed that everyone was gathered facing the Eiffel Tower. At the top of each hour from 9pm to midnight for a few minutes they fire off flashing lights on the tower. Like thousands of flashes going off. Very cool. I took some pics but they're pretty fuzzy due to low light and lack of a tripod.

Monsieur Le Professeur is off duty

At about 1pm Paris time today I dismissed my class of software consultants.

This was an interesting class. Of eight students, four were from the Paris area, two were from Spain (Madrid and Barcelona), and two were from Italy (both Milan I think). The out-of-town folks were a lot of fun, we did meals together and some sightseeing.

I've done this class on four continents now. North and South America, Europe, and Australia. I've gotten accustomed to the students "stretching" any break I give them. Ten minutes breaks become 15 or 20 minute breaks. But I have to say that the French are the worst. Class was originally scheduled to begin at 9am. They complained that it was too early. So I agreed to start at 9:30. Little did I know that 9:30 "Paris time" is actually 10:00. They might arrive at the building at close to 9:30 but then there had to be time for a leisurely coffee, conversation and for some a smoke. The Spaniards and the Italians would be in the room and ready at 9:30. The French would show up at 10:00 or just after.

Breaks and lunch were the same way. No matter what I told them for breaks it would be at least twice that long with a minimum of 45 minutes.

Oh, well. Not a big deal. We got thru most of the material that was slated for the week. I haven't flipped thru my evaluation forms to see if they liked the class or not. But no matter, it's done.

The Eiffel Tower

These are from Sunday, my arrival day in Paris.

My hotel is about a 10 minute walk from the tower. Sunday wasn't the best choice for going up to the top. About a 20-minute wait to get tickets, a few more minutes to get the elevator to the second level, and then a good 30 minutes at the second level waiting for the elevator to the third level. With some time at the top and some waiting for the down elevators it was a good two hours total. Views from up there are amazing, though.

Waiting to go...

In the airport waiting to leave for Paris. This my second visit, the first was less than a month ago. When I chose my cell phone provider I wasn't expecting to be such a globetrotter (fifth international trip since the first of the year). My phone is not GSM which means it's a paperweight once I leave the U.S.

Giant propeller on road

On the way to the airport I passed some sort of enormous propeller being transported. I saw two trucks pulled over to the side of the road. Each truck was carrying one blade of the thing. The blades must have been over 50 feet long. I tried to grab a picture as I passed but startup time on the phone camera sucks and I was past before the camera was ready.

Boing Boing had this a couple of days ago. LOL indeed.

All moved in

After a year in the house, getting the shelves done meant unpacking the last of the boxes. About 12 boxes of books and stuff now has a place.