Slideshow of Kieron and Breon's Euro-Vacation
Here are more, as a slideshow (click here for ALL of them).
If you're new, read this post first! For my professional profile (at LinkedIn) click here.
Here are more, as a slideshow (click here for ALL of them).
To catch you up on the past few days:
We took the train from Paris to Berlin:Breon (tonight at 8pm) will be on a panel discussing the new translation of The Tin Drum for German national radio.
We arrived and are staying at a mansion on a lake called the Wannsee. It's on the far southwest corner of Berlin (it's the last stop on the rail line for Berlin).
Above is the view from my Dad's room, and him at the desk in his room (15 foot high ceilings)
This is the view from my room.
I'm on the train from Paris to Berlin, and have about twenty minutes to type up this entry before we change trains at our next stop (Frankfort). In the train, half the seats face "forward" and half face "backward". Right now, ours are facing backward.
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6/28/09 Paris 1pm, Cafe "Grill 14" on the Boulevard Lefebre
The Holy Grail
Breon and I have spent hours scouring the streets of Paris, seeking the holy grail of sweet-smelling water for Lynda. The requirements make it next-to-impossible to find. It must be:
Today I walked to a nearby church (Notre Dame1) and caught the last few minutes of the noon Mass before they kicked out everyone (about twenty-five people).
The park next to the church had nice benches and a whole slew of Parisians biding their time. As the African woman next to me napped, I read my magazine ("The New Oxford Review").
Some observations in the "people watching" category:
Labels: Church, Pictures, Society, Technology, Vacation
We arrived in Paris about 10am Tuesday, having flown about 8 hours from the Cincinnati airport (which is not only *not* in Cincinnati, it's not even in OHIO). As you can see from this photo at the Gate in cinci, it's easy to tell the difference between "native" Parisians and immigrant Parisians:
After checking into our hotel, we ate lunch at an (apparently famous) restaurant called "Le Dome"; just across the street from our Hotel. Dragging ourselves back to our room, we collapsed for an eight-hour nap.
Waking up about 10pm, we had a late dinner a few blocks away. We decided *not* to eat at the "Indiana".
Back to the hotel and back to bed for a good night's sleep.
Day three, and jet lag has been conquered! We go down to the hotel lobby for an all-you-can-eat breakfast; paid for as part of the price of the room.
Breon, having been told by a book dealer that morning that he "assumes you are in Paris for the book fair starting today"; decides we'd better go find it (at Place St. Sulpice, which is a group of permanent booths around a beautiful fountain in front of a huge church about four blocks from our hotel). We walk there and Breon systematically scours each booth for books while I sit in a nearby cafe catching up on my internet duties (facebook comments, mostly).
On the way there we see a Smartcar advertising the Sims3. I can't resist a picture (every time I take one, I feel like an offending tourist/rube...so I take much fewer than I otherwise would).
One thing I notice about Paris is that everyone is dressed just a bit nicer than I would expect a typical American to be dressed. It's very unusual to see someone in a T-Shirt and jeans (which is what I wore to Le Dome on the first night...imagine my charin when I looked around at everyone else in jackets and the waiters in black ties!). This guy was just doing some painting:
One cool thing is that you can somehow "share" bicycles. I was wondering what was going on when I saw a bunch of people riding what looked like very well-maintained bikes. I figure, after seeing the line-up of bikes pictured below, that it's one of those deals where you pay for the equivalent of *one* bike, and then you can always have one out. When you check one in, then you can take a different one later, or just leave it.
Labels: Advertising, Pictures, Society, Transportation, Vacation
Welcome, dear reader, to the beginning of my travelogue for my trip to France and Germany with my Dad (Breon). Here is the gist of the next ten days:

That international attention towards the poorer countries may give rise to more concrete help, in particular to relieve them of the crushing burden of foreign debt.

All kittens have been given away...as a matter of fact, we gave away SEVEN kittens. Now, you may recall that Alice only had a litter of five. So we had to come up with TWO extra to give away. We are officially kitten brokers now, I guess.
I just did the final cleaning of a virus from my PC that has been plaguing me for a month. It was particularly devious since is was not actually located on my PC, but had made subtle changes on my wireless router which were hampering me.
Here's my lesson (this should be an easy one, but lessons seem only able to be learned by experience): ALWAYS CHANGE THE DEFAULT PASSWORD. My router still had the username "admin" and the password "password". This allowed the virus to logon to the router, and change the DNS setting so that every time my computer (or any computer in the house, for that matter) logged onto the internet, it was routed to some shabby DNS server in Eastern Europe.
That server was not allowing me to connect to my anti-virus website, anti-spyware website, or to the windows update website!
Labels: Animals, Technology, Virus
To a good family, I present you with the last available from a litter of five, currently called "Bear":