je suis desolee. je ne parle pas beaucoup de francais.
I'm sitting in a tiny hotel room in Paris right now, scrunched up on the floor next to my bed with my laptop balanced on my knees, because although there is a desk in the room, the only outlet is in the bathroom. If my battery was charged, I could sit on my bed. But my battery is not charged because I'm booted in Windows, and apparently my laptop doesn't go to sleep properly when I'm running Windows (I'm sure that's fixable--I just use Windows so rarely that I never noticed) so my battery is dead. Why am I using Windows? Because for whatever reason, my Macbook won't connect to the Hotel's wifi when I use Leopard. Even in Windows, I get cut off every five minutes or so and have to retype the password (even though I saved it). I'm fairly frustrated with technology right now.
I arrived in Paris on Saturday afternoon and will be leaving on Wednesday morning. Saturday and today (Sunday) were my days for sightseeing. Monday and Tuesday I'll be in meetings all day. Doesn't that sound important? Actually, I'm going to be talking about graphs for about 10 minutes tomorrow morning, and the rest of the time I'm supposed to sit quietly and absorb information. And during breaks, I'm supposed to network.
I think that I got sent on this trip because when I was hired for this job, my boss suggested that there might occasionally be travel involved, and so far there hasn't been. Maybe she felt sorry for me. So on Tuesday morning, I got an email from her asking if I wanted to go to Paris... on Friday. Psh, yes! But I like to plan for things like this, so I was kind of stressed out for the rest of the week, making arrangements and trying to memorize a few key phrases (the only one that I really have down is "I'm sorry, I don't speak much French" which is a serious understatement). Luckily, people have been pretty friendly, and every restaurant and shop that I've gone to has had at least one person who spoke enough English to help me.
Restaurants... if I'd had more time to plan, I probably would have thought more about what I wanted to get out of this trip, food-wise. Breakfast and lunch are easy, but France is not known for its vegetarian entrees, and hell if I'm going to eat at a vegetarian place called "Mother Earth" or "Dietetics" while i'm in Paris. So I decided that I could handle fish. Ann Marie recommended soupe de poissons, which sounds good but I've yet to see it on a menu. I'll keep looking. Last night I had salmon, a glass of wine, and chocolate mousse, which set me back 40 euros (about $60). Tonight, I went to a seafood restaurant that was quite nice. They brought over the menu handwritten on a whiteboard, which made it hard because I couldn't even read some of the words well enough to look them up in my phrasebook. So I asked the waiter to point out which ones were fish. Out of the entrees, there were only two. One of them he described as "yellow fish. really really small. like anchovies." The other dish, I thought he said was sea bass, which sounded larger to me, so I went with that. I think now that he was actually pronouncing it in French, "ceteaux," and I misheard him. They brought bread and butter to the table, along with a bowl of little things in shells. I don't know a name for them (the internet says they might have been baby scallops), because I've always made a point of avoiding shelled blobby things. But I ate them! They were small enough to swallow whole, thankfully, so I mostly tasted butter. I think I remember hearing that you're supposed to swallow them whole anyway. If so, can somebody enlighten me as to what the point is of eating them? After the little shelled things, my "sea bass" arrived, and turned out to be five small fried fish (sole, Google tells me). These were delicious, and reminded me of fried fish in Nicaragua. Do most people eat the head? I tried to avoid the brain region, but am not sure whether that's considered wasteful. After my baby fish, my salmon arrived. It was quite good, with sea salt on top, but otherwise no sauce other than lemon juice. This meal, including a glass of wine and a bottle of "still water" (do restaurants just not do tap water at all?) cost about the same as Saturday's dinner, and was much more enjoyable.
One design gripe before I go to bed. If my cellphone is going to make a bid to replace my watch, it had better be prepared to get the job done. I brought my phone with me thinking that I could use it as an alarm clock, and keep in my pocket to get me to meetings on time. But my phone can't find a signal here, and it never stops looking for a signal, which means a) the battery runs down very quickly, and b) I can't use it as an alarm clock, even if I kept it in the charger. There is no way to set the time manually. This seems idiotic. So I'm using my laptop as an alarm clock and my camera to tell time. Thanks, LG!
The weather has been amazing (sunny and I think it got near 70 today), and I have blistered feet from lots of enjoyable walking. I've been taking some pictures, and I'll post more about the rest of the trip when I get back.
I arrived in Paris on Saturday afternoon and will be leaving on Wednesday morning. Saturday and today (Sunday) were my days for sightseeing. Monday and Tuesday I'll be in meetings all day. Doesn't that sound important? Actually, I'm going to be talking about graphs for about 10 minutes tomorrow morning, and the rest of the time I'm supposed to sit quietly and absorb information. And during breaks, I'm supposed to network.
I think that I got sent on this trip because when I was hired for this job, my boss suggested that there might occasionally be travel involved, and so far there hasn't been. Maybe she felt sorry for me. So on Tuesday morning, I got an email from her asking if I wanted to go to Paris... on Friday. Psh, yes! But I like to plan for things like this, so I was kind of stressed out for the rest of the week, making arrangements and trying to memorize a few key phrases (the only one that I really have down is "I'm sorry, I don't speak much French" which is a serious understatement). Luckily, people have been pretty friendly, and every restaurant and shop that I've gone to has had at least one person who spoke enough English to help me.
Restaurants... if I'd had more time to plan, I probably would have thought more about what I wanted to get out of this trip, food-wise. Breakfast and lunch are easy, but France is not known for its vegetarian entrees, and hell if I'm going to eat at a vegetarian place called "Mother Earth" or "Dietetics" while i'm in Paris. So I decided that I could handle fish. Ann Marie recommended soupe de poissons, which sounds good but I've yet to see it on a menu. I'll keep looking. Last night I had salmon, a glass of wine, and chocolate mousse, which set me back 40 euros (about $60). Tonight, I went to a seafood restaurant that was quite nice. They brought over the menu handwritten on a whiteboard, which made it hard because I couldn't even read some of the words well enough to look them up in my phrasebook. So I asked the waiter to point out which ones were fish. Out of the entrees, there were only two. One of them he described as "yellow fish. really really small. like anchovies." The other dish, I thought he said was sea bass, which sounded larger to me, so I went with that. I think now that he was actually pronouncing it in French, "ceteaux," and I misheard him. They brought bread and butter to the table, along with a bowl of little things in shells. I don't know a name for them (the internet says they might have been baby scallops), because I've always made a point of avoiding shelled blobby things. But I ate them! They were small enough to swallow whole, thankfully, so I mostly tasted butter. I think I remember hearing that you're supposed to swallow them whole anyway. If so, can somebody enlighten me as to what the point is of eating them? After the little shelled things, my "sea bass" arrived, and turned out to be five small fried fish (sole, Google tells me). These were delicious, and reminded me of fried fish in Nicaragua. Do most people eat the head? I tried to avoid the brain region, but am not sure whether that's considered wasteful. After my baby fish, my salmon arrived. It was quite good, with sea salt on top, but otherwise no sauce other than lemon juice. This meal, including a glass of wine and a bottle of "still water" (do restaurants just not do tap water at all?) cost about the same as Saturday's dinner, and was much more enjoyable.
One design gripe before I go to bed. If my cellphone is going to make a bid to replace my watch, it had better be prepared to get the job done. I brought my phone with me thinking that I could use it as an alarm clock, and keep in my pocket to get me to meetings on time. But my phone can't find a signal here, and it never stops looking for a signal, which means a) the battery runs down very quickly, and b) I can't use it as an alarm clock, even if I kept it in the charger. There is no way to set the time manually. This seems idiotic. So I'm using my laptop as an alarm clock and my camera to tell time. Thanks, LG!
The weather has been amazing (sunny and I think it got near 70 today), and I have blistered feet from lots of enjoyable walking. I've been taking some pictures, and I'll post more about the rest of the trip when I get back.
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