The Trip To Paris

yesterday morning, I woke up early. Too early--like 5:30am. I was too excited to sleep. We still had a bit of work to do to get our rooms ready for the inspection. And when I say "we" had work to do, what I mean is "Elena" had work to do. One of the advantages to being horrible at domestic activities is that people would rather do the job themselves than to delegate to me.

So after a couple more hours of cleaning, we got the room into tip-top shape and at the 9:30 inspection, we got back our entire security deposit of €200. Yay! Now we just had to await Claudine who was meeting us later that morning. Claudine came and the three of us had lunch together, then off to the train station. We got our tickets and sat in our seats on the upper deck of car 18 way down at the end. The tickets were only €80--€40 each. That's a total of about US$140. Not bad. Of course, once on board, the 50cl Vittel water was €2,40 and a 33cl Kronenbourg was €3,60 for a grand total of €6 or about US$10. I was happy during the trip

Once at the Gare de Lyon, we had to take two metro trains to our place. Unfortunately, Elena packed for all circumstances. I had to carry her 2 luggages--each lead-lined bag, weighed down with a few extra bricks for good measure, weighed a ton. And they turned my hands red and raw. Elena carried my 2 bags, the laptop, and the wheeled luggage. We navigated the snaking tunnels from one train to the next, first at Gare de Lyon, then at Saint-Lazare, and finally, we made up the stairs at Place de Clichy which wasn't too far from our eventual home. A couple minutes after, we met Christian, the owner of the flat. He showed us how to get in--you need 2 secret codes and a goofy key whose cross section is more like a T than a |.

We cooled off a bit, and then, it was time to head over to meet Elena's good friend Philippe.